She met a trucker at the "other company" fuel point who carried her to the outskirts of Philly where there was a distro point still open. From there, with the knowledge of the distro point manager, she caught another ride to another point. And so on. She had someone who knew who she was, where she was going and when she was supposed to arrive at each point.
She wasn't, really, a hitchhiker. She was a commodity being moved for the good of the companies. And while the companies were cutthroat, normally the exact opposite of "random voluntary associations" they also understood scratching back. When a favor was needed, it would be called. They trusted the other company, especially in these conditions, to be good for it.
She reached Cincinnatti and went to work.
By the way, there was a certain ignoring of paperwork in those days. Green cards were not necessary. Social security numbers were not necessary. Pay, by the same token, was spotty. Really long-thinking companies like oil companies tried to keep their people fed and mostly succeeded.
But it was still maximally fucked up.
The point to all this is that you can have massive unemployment and still have a labor shortage. Even if things are sort of bumping along, sort of, maybe, the "disruption" means that bodies, parts and everything else that is needed to keep any business going is scattered in the wrong places.
What saved the U.S. was a lot of people at fairly low levels working very hard to keep things going using any means necessary to do so. Like moving a skilled worker around via trucks that had strict regulations against picking up hitchhikers.
What nearly killed us were people in positions of power who wanted things to work the same way as pre-Plague.
There were articles and news reports on various "irregularities." Okay, that was a minor one and mostly overlooked even though she didn't file taxes for the whole of 2019. (Thank God for the Amnesty Bill is all I'll say.) Hell, she didn't officially work for Exxon for most of 2019 . . . Oops, did I say that out loud?
J
(Wife edit. Thanks a lot. If you think you're getting any for the rest of the year, think again!)
(Hell, most of 2020 you worked for the feds! Back off.)
(And it was a nightmare.)
But the worst "irregularities" were "price fixing."
Sigh. The government could do price fixing but not companies. Especially not oil companies.
Sigh.
Look, things were total suckage. People were still dying. There were very few truly functional banks. Nobody could figure out if we were dealing with run-away inflation or runaway deflation.
So a bunch of managers getting together and saying "We need to call a truce" just made sense. Don't compete. Associate for the common good. Wait until things cool down to go back to stabbing each other in the back as hard as we can.
They had a far better idea of what valid prices were than Warrick. They knew their costs, they knew their inventories (and when the on-hand inventory was out, it was going to be a while getting more oil on a national level. There was no chance of getting out of the Middle East, I can tell you that. Not sure of deploying troops to cover the pumping and transfer. Which we got around to eventually.) They consulted, they planned, they projected, they shook hands and they set their prices.
And they got hammered.
Oh. My. God. The news media led the charge. The evil oil companies were screwing the American People. Profits were soaring as prices were fixed by an unnamed cabal.
So Warrick nationalized the oil companies and arrested the "conspirators."
And that worked real well.
At that point she was nationalizing so many industries, many of which were effectively defunct, that she didn't have government employees to run them. Sure, she could just say "all of you are government employees" but who bells the cat?
Okay, take the oil companies.
Running an oil company is, at almost every single level, a very complex business. Receptionists are about the only people who don't require hours and weeks of training before you can let them do anything on their own. One wrong turn of the wrench in a refinery can mean a big boom. Figuring out how to get just the right inventory to Peoria, Kansas, means having figured out which ten thousand gallons of fuel from which tanker at what point in its voyage is going to go there months in advance. Not exactly, but functionally.
What does "you are nationalized" mean?
Well, in the case of Exxon (oops, sorry) it meant choosing a crony to become the CEO with all the perks, pay and privileges. Said crony being, effectively, a tofu-eater. Notably, the person put in charge of Exxon had, upon a time, been a senior member of Greenpeace. And an "environmental lawyer."
Metaphors on that one are tough. I guess putting Osama Bin Laden in charge of the Defense Department works.
The crony brought in more cronies who brought in more cronies. Their job was to make the oil company less evil not make sure it ran efficiently. Profits were no longer their objective; "serving the world" was their objective.
Some of the "service" that was required of the company during the brief reign of what were and are called "the fucktards" were odd to say the least. Okay, so they had to be even more environmentally conscious than they already were. I'm not an oil guy, that would be someone I know and she's not a guy, (Thanks) but there's this thing called "the law of diminishing returns."
Look, refineries were already about as clean as they were going to get. Spills were a major response issue. Emissions were pretty low, all things considered.
Getting the emissions lower required engineering that was horrendously expensive and, at the time, unavailable. The refineries were having a hard enough time just continuing to function. Installing more and better emission systems simply was not an option. Who was going to make them? They don't grow on trees! They grow in China on trees!
But they had to get lower. And gas has to get cheaper. Oh, and you need to start contributing to various funds. Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund. And pay these huge numbers of grasshoppers exorbitant salaries so that they can get back to their grasshopper lifestyle even though they're not actually contributing anything but bitching to the company.
And contribute to the presidential election campaign, by the way. I mean, I'm the CEO. I can cut a check if I want to.
First of all, there weren't profits for the first two years of the Time. There was also no infrastructure renewal, damned little maintenance and there was barely money to pay the workers. The oil companies had been providing fuel to major farm corporations in return for food that was then distributed down to, well, the level of a lady working in a refueling plant.
That was illicit collusion and had to stop.
Because most of the tofu-eaters didn't understand the oil business, or any of the many other businesses they were put in charge of, they were often flat ignored. They did so love meetings, especially meetings with obsequious and chastened oil company executives bowing and scraping and giving long PowerPoint presentations. They were taken to refineries and shown all the new "environmental improvement systems," many of which were cobbled together from spare pipe and flashy lights, and generally led around by the nose in the hope that grown-ups might get back in charge.
And in cases where they weren't ignored, or things fell apart anyway, the government then had to pick up the slack and actually try to run things. That worked about as well as any communist-run organization. And there were cases where workers rioted or quit despite the employment conditions or went on strike and had to be told "get back to work, slaves!"