For some reason, at least a couple times in the past couple of weeks I have had to deal with what I consider to be a poopy situation. Namely, there were problems with the toilets in two different houses, for what appear to be two very different reasons. One of the toilets was connected to the local sewage system and appears to have its own issues with difficulties in flushing due to its own pump problems, and who knows what has been flushed inside of it. The other situation is one where a group of toilets flow into a septic system that had not been cleaned (at least until the day I write this) in a couple of decades, leading to roughly 1000 gallons or so of the remnants of solid waste filling the septic system, which would not have been entirely obvious except for something going sideways in a particular toilet for reasons still unknown, at least until all the space had been filled, which was not quite the case.

At least some of my readers have made it clear that they think I talk about poop too much, but rest assured that this particular post is only tangentially related to that subject. What is poop, after all, but the way that waste gets moved through our body, where we are supposed to take up what is nutritious and worthwhile in the food and past what is not useful and beneficial out of our bodies as fertilizer for the outside world. A great many people (myself included, it must be admitted), take a great deal of interest in understanding what it is that comes out of us through the process of things being moved through various organs. We look at the color of our urine as well as the shape, color, and consistency of our bowel movements, and draw conclusions about the state of our health thereby. When things don’t move as they should, we ponder whether we are suffering from some sort of problem like diverticulitis, or wonder whether others are at the end of life where organs in general are starting to fail, or ponder what is it that our body takes up and what it does not. If we may not feel it appropriate to talk about these subjects with others, many of us at least will probably admit to thinking about such issues and what they have to say about our own health as well as the nutrition levels in our food supply and so on.

I cannot remember at this point what got me interested in logistics, the rather unglamorous study of moving stuff from one place to another. My father and paternal grandfather were both bus drivers, laboring on the farm, where hay bales were moved around to feed dairy and beef cattle as well to move kids to and from school two or three times a day (depending on whether they had a noon-time tech run or not). I have known quite a few truck drivers and looked into shipping and freight rail and sought to understand how goods and materials are moved all over the world from where they are found and made to where they are needed, which is a fascinating study that deeply repays one’s time spent in research in uncovering how the world works (or doesn’t). I have long looked at the places where my packages went on the way to and from warehouses and my address, pondering the places where they stop and are coded and move from one truck to another, thinking about these locations and their importance to not only me but to others whose goods are traveling along the same roads to the same areas.

Sometimes, though, things go wrong and the free flow of goods that we depend on on a regular basis is interrupted for some reason. In just a few days, the contract expires between the longshoremen who work on the Atlantic and Gulf ports of the United States and the ports that employ them. These ports include New York City, Tampa, Miami, Charleston, Norfolk, New Orleans, Houston/Galveston, and a wide variety of other ports, making up a huge percentage of foods and drinks imported into the United States from abroad. There are even concerns that a simultaneous strike in the port of Montreal as well as sympathy strikes on the West Coast (which has a separate and already agreed to contract) will make it hard to find substitute ports for goods that will be turned away from the affected ports. The effects of such a blockage of trade on the availability and price of many products, especially in an atmosphere of scarcity concerns and inflation, may readily be imagined but may be difficult to calculate fully until things return to normal, whenever that happens. It would be nice if we could simply move stuff from one place to another where it is needed and wanted, but things are not always that simple, alas.