Welcome Aboard The Black Pig - Shipping & Freight Blog

Somali Pirates Need A Lesson In Economics

Just how stupid are you people?

In the vain hope that one of the ignorant, arrogant, misguided little turds who kidnapped an innocent Kentish couple this week on a sailing trip in, admittedly troubled, waters ever get to read this, here are some simple observances from your pirate captain (ret’d).

When you nick a ruddy great ship like the Ariana, the Greek owned, Maltese flagged grain carrier with 35,000 tonnes of soya beans aboard you have some chance of getting the $3.5 million that you asked for in return for her release and safe passage.

There are insurance companies, who we all roundly despise normally, who may be forced to cough up.

Or some blokes might not get the new villa’s this year in order to save face because they forgot, or more likely, chose not to pay the premium.

When you lifted the Chandlers from their marine bathtub on a day out from the Garden of England you pinched a couple with moderate means, in a worthless scow who come from a country where we send boys to war dressed in plastic hats driving cheap and nasty minibuses across deadly landmines.

A government that lies about the level and value of their protection quite brazenly and chooses to ignore anything it doesn’t like.

Put it this way, if you nicked these guys (G. Brown and homies) most of us would pay a ransom for you to keep them.

So that ridiculous phone call to Reuters, when you demanded $7 million for the pair’s safe return because “NATO had destroyed a lot of your equipment” and killed a lot of your mates – well- it ain’t happening.

With any luck we’ll soon have a government with a bit of bottle and guess what? Some of our friends may be paying you a visit.

There is a degree of sympathy for the people of Somalia.

We know there is poverty and hardship and if we had a decent Government they might be trying to assist you a bit more.

But abducting two ordinary folk trying to have an adventure before the man in the dark suit turns up – sorry lads you’ve overstepped the mark.

Not only ain’t you getting the dough you just made a whole bunch of new enemies - and we’ve got very long memories.

More Nonsense Speak from the Masters of Duplicity

Writing up the comings and goings of the freight industry worldwide can, it must be said, become a little tedious.

Not least this happens because some of the press releases and statements that emanate from the hierarchy of shipping companies of every hue can be seen to be, well quite frankly, downright ruddy boring.

These things are never helped by the fact that whoever issues these little gems always wants to put a positive spin on things and, let’s be frank, get their names in the papers.

To give you a taste of this here is the tale of a major overseas company whose progress we at the Handy Shipping Guide follow closely. Our main reason for doing so is that they are an effective barometer for the state of their particular corner of the industry in their little (actually very big) part of the world.

The latest financial statement came out for this lot recently and our job (as we see it, correct me if I’m wrong) is to transpose the salient facts into a simplified form for anyone out there interested enough to read it.

So I read it, well actually I didn’t, my eyes did that running over the page thing but the neurons were a kip because none of the stuff arrived up above.

Often the case; I’d been sitting here eleven hours straight so please excuse me if the grey matter was reminiscent of a sea fog rather than a the cut throat razor of a mind I’m famous for (sic).

In England we have a cure for the problem.

Cup of tea.

Sorted.

Re-read offending report.

Nope. Zilch, nothing, nowt, nada.

So was this a sharp piece of writing, a concise picture of a massive conglomerate? Or a self indulgent, cover your tracks, spew forth words till they get bored type of report?

See what you think. In four paragraphs there were written the following phrases, sometimes several times and often in chimera like combinations.

“impairment charges on goodwill intangible assets significant sequential improvement revolver reserve contingent convertible deferral debt pay downs asset-backed securitization facility commitment fee revolver capacity existing revolver reserve outstanding USF % notes and its contingent convertible notes”

I’m not making this up.

“Revolver capacity” ?

“Existing revolver reserve outstanding” ?

That sounds suspiciously like “How many bullets does it take” and “How many slugs left in there” to me.

Maybe in an hour or so there will be a story there after all.

I thought by this stage that it probably wasn’t me so I took a quick look round the market to see what anybody (if anybody) else in the same trade had made of it.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a habit.

We like to think at the old HSG that we don’t follow trends but we look at things fresh and don’t put any spin on it, even when it’s something close to our hearts (read the Southend dredging story and see if you can tell I love fishing – by the way this is MY blog so make sure you’re actually going to build that Port boys before you screw up all those valuable breeding grounds – I can say what I like right here!).

Anyway, the accounts by our kindred spirits of the watery fourth estate about the company in questions own report might have as well been darts thrown at a board.

Some said “We’re doomed” others “Everything here is just peachy” and still more “Well it’s not great but things are looking up” (sounds like a three bears soundtrack), in other words no-one else could understand it either, or rather they understood the gist of it but the analysis was rather dependent on whether Camelot had rung to say come and collect the cheque, or the police were just on their way out with our fellow scribe’s computer in a plastic bag.

So don’t bother to find out what yours truly thought about it.

You won’t spot it on the front, or any other page.

If the company in question thought they could divert the gimlet eyed sleuths of the press from the reality of their financial situation – guess what? In my case they succeeded.

I haven’t a clue what the state of their company is, I am prepared to bet however that if they were finding it a problem where to put all their extra cash at least their quarterly reports would be comprehensible.

Packing and Shipping, Mind You Do It Properly (but not like M & S)

Way back in the mist of time, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Bills of Lading were written in a neat copperplate hand in the blood of a galley slave, there were rules about packing goods for shipment.

Time passed and the cardinal rule that as things progress they get cheaper and nastier (or more likely dearer and nastier)  went out of the nearest piece of fenestration and only the sad and lonely salty sea dogs remembered them.

In those days, if it wasn’t packed in a case or at least a crate, you couldn’t insure it for export.

Or rather you could until summat went awry and then you couldn’t get paid out.

“Insufficient packing” quoth the underwriters manservant, and that, as the Northern milliner would say, were t’hat.

When the big metal boxes kicked the dinosaurs out and themselves spanned the earth, a more reasonable age ensued and things have moved on apace since then. Nowadays you can pack your goods in all manner of wondrous things to coddle and defend them from the elements, to prevent spillage and seepage, to stop the contents from squashing, squishing and squeezing out from their neat little parcels.

First T/Chests, then boxes and cartons became the vogue, next was polystyrene, superb against shocks but not so clever when it ended up in the Sargasso Sea after blowing in all the way from Deptford or Illinois. Little plastic bags cunningly filled with air secured against shockwaves, Expandable builders foam kept even fine glassware secure from breakage as we moved toward a packing Nirvana. But now, sad to say, things have moved on a little too far. Take a look at what turned up this week, courtesy of Marks and Spencer.

Now I don’t know about you, but I think that’s overkill.

For those of you with a statistical bent here are the facts.

The empty box, measures 33 x 22 x 13 centimetres.

The mascara (for it is he) measures 10 x 1.5 x 1.5 centimetres.

In simple terms this means M & S have put one item into a box capable of holding 419 of said item.

That’s the shipping equivalent of loading a twenty foot box with a carton 50 x 40 x 40 centimetres.

That’s 20 x 13 x 13 inches to any as old as me but not so savvy when you start counting in tens.

There it is again look.

And yes, that is a pound coin to demonstrate the size (or lack of it).

But perhaps the Captain doth protest too much. This thing arrived (inside a plastic bag to boot) in perfect order.

The one thing we didn’t lose when we switched from the sturdy wooden crates of old, was the warehouseman’s (stevedore, docker - pick a term) ability to break anything due for shipment when in the mood.

Having spent over half my working life in and around shipping warehouses I have never ceased to be amazed by the unceasing and relentless talent that a man in a sweaty work suit can possess when he, unwittingly or not, sets himself to “handle” cargo of any description.

Here in tribute then, is a short video to that paragon of package placers (already credited earlier in this series) the ultimate destroyer of other peoples property – The Baggage Handler…………. 

Mr Rhod Gilbert in the very best of form.

The Language of Commercial Shipping and Trucking (Yawn)

And actually, come to think about it, just about every other profession.

I was putting together a piece this morning for the Handy Shipping Guide, a process which, as usual, involves a lot of fishing around, checking sources etc. and I came across a blog that caught my eye. Now as blogs go this was a little similar to this one, an excuse for a tired journo to let off a bit of steam, to write in a slightly more colourful manner than one is allowed to when scribing the “front page” stuff.

The piece itself was on the current state of the US trucking industry and as I was drawing the threads together and reading this guys two pennorth, I realised that, once again, I was having to translate the thing in my head. This bloke doesn’t write in English. He writes in American, and not just American but a sub culture language, American trucking. In fact, to be precise, he writes in US trucking with a North Eastern American dialect.

If any of you don’t follow that statement then, unlike me, you don’t have to spend a lot of time on the net. In the course of our work here we have to study information coming in from around the globe seven days a week. Whether you study the US haulage market, Indian rail freight or Chinese imports you start exactly as with any foreign language only it’s a lot simpler.

If you wash up abroad in your travels then you listen out for details in a language you can identify and then try to make out the whole meaning. What I’m talking about is like that, only a lot easier. You understand the bulk of the words but there are bits that simply mean nothing, so you have to consider the context.

Take the word “drayage”. You’ll find it all over US truck sites but not in any English Dictionary (well not in my big Collins anyway). As there are about a million words in there and Mr Collins must have taken three lifetimes or employed a lot of his kids for a very long time to put this mighty tome together, you can more or less assume that most English speakers have never heard it uttered in anger. Dray – yes, from the Norse, Draga, also a vehicle or sledge for heavy loads (ah ha!) or bizarrely, a squirrels nest.

Before my American readers sign off in disgust I should make it clear that I’m not looking down my nose at their use of language (I shall save for another time the fact that “Color” actually has a U in it and that you are an “I” short in aluminium) no, it’s just we not only all speak differently but that this trait transfers over to the written word and language in general.

A US trucker reading the blog piece this morning would have probably followed it swiftly to conclusion understanding every line. Muggins here had to read each syllable through to the end then go back and translate. Here’s an example of what was written – “Drivers can’t be ticketed if they’re driving to a depot with a snow scraper” Now in this case any UK resident would understand all the words but most would say “snow scraper?” The blog is written in New Jersey, they’ve passed a very common sense law saying if you get nicked with a pile of snow on your rig, car whatever, then you get a fine. They get a lot of snow in NJ.

Now any English speaker knows what a ticket is, don’t they? Well no. Because anything we type in these little boxes goes all over the world there may well be an Inuit tucked away somewhere who knows all about snow but nowt about tickets.Equally the Thai Pirates mother in law had to be shown a handful of the cold, white stuff when on a visit to the UK as she’d never seen it back home.

Having read the above mentioned piece it turns out that a snow scraper is basically a set of football (sorry soccer) posts that you drive under to wipe the snow off your motor to stop the accumulated precipitation blowing back and wiping out granny in the Nissan Primera driving behind you.

A very sound and sensible idea by the way (brushing off the snow, not wiping out granny). Must be very sophisticated posts, $18,000 a set according to my source blogger.

Anyway whilst translating the above I realised that all industries tend to develop their own, sometimes exotic language which is hard to follow if you’re an outsider. The reason for this is tricky and complex. The ultimate example is the trappy PR/Sales type executive who spouts utter nonsense with an air of arrogant conviction. This language strangely seems uniquely transatlantic and I put this down to a sort of verbal one upmanship. Wherever your salesman hails from if he gets caught out by a word or phrase he can’t follow, he licks his wounded pride and simply catches out the next guy with it.

This new modern garbage is matched by a form of words used by the older professions which have somehow now become respectable due to the original insular nature of the profession involved (hence drayage) or simply by long term use what was a “buzzword” used in one particular trade becomes the norm.

This is particularly noticeable in shipping terms, which by their nature are trans global. So “Bill of Lading” evocative of standing on the quay as a clipper ship sails majestically on the morning tide, then slipping back down the frosty street for a pint of warm ale and a pipe of good shag in a welcoming tavern (sorry, went into Thomas Hardy mode there) becomes “Waybill” which brings to mind waiting at a formica counter for a quadruple rag bag of multi layered, multi coloured NCR paper of which the last two pages (your copies) are unreadable.

Shipping in fact has taken language to a whole new level.

Not content with bastardising existing words and phrases our transport forebears decided at some point to invent lots of terms and then turn them into acronyms. And so was born the set of Incoterms which now stretch into the realms of the fantastic, obscure expressions nobody outside of a hundred mile radius ever uses, like the myriad species of lake trout that are, well, trout with spots in different places.

Of course this hybridisation of language has gone on since man first started grunting.........

So to help you read this piece here is a glossary of terms used, just in case I puzzled anyone with anything.

Truck – Lorry – Rig         Trucker - Driver - Chauffeur          Bloke – Chap – Fellow    Haulage – Trucking – Shipping              Drayage (work it out, we’ve done that one)                 Nissan Primera – Toy Car          Nowt – Nothing – Nada       PR – B/S    Sales Executive – Unemployed Politician  Trappy – Gobby – Verbose       Garbage – Stuff and Nonsense         Norse – Geezer with Horned Helmet         Geezer – See Bloke   Buzzword – B/S             Formica – Melamine – Shiny Plastic  Thomas Hardy – Possibly worst ever English novelist      Two Pennorth – Very badly misspelt Tuppenceworth – Twenty Cents worth          Misspelt - Misspelled – Just Plain Wrong    

Acronym – Spending countless hours trying to turn a fairly meaningless phrase into a form of words beginning with both vowels and consonants, which, when the initial letters are all put together form a word which nobody but the author will ever like or remember the meaning of without looking up the full term on the internet using the aforesaid acronym.

Hey! Let’s Be Careful Out There .

OK. Not an original opening, I’ll give the credit to Sergeant Phil Esterhaus (alias actor Michael Conrad 1925 -83) but that’s the message today to all and sundry.

 

Running a web based company means one thing.

One spends a hell of a lot too much time on the web.

Might sound obvious but what it tends to do is make you notice little things, patterns that come up over and over until you just have to sit up and take notice, like the big seventh wave when the wind and the tide are right, even someone as thick and unobservant as the Captain eventually starts to notice these things.

And so it was today.

For the past couple of months this thing must have been ticking little marks into my psyche, scratching those little five bars gates with a rusty nail onto the cell walls of my tiny brain.

Today I noticed them, and I realised that I was looking at a reality which is something we tend to gloss over or ignore because we just don’t want to remember it or have it brought to our attention.

Truck accidents, that’s the thing.

Here in Britain we have a perennial complaint about foreign registered lorries being involved in nasty occurrences with the natives. This tends to deflect us from noticing the overall number of crashes which larger vehicles are involved in.

Now you’ll have to excuse me whilst I run over some very obvious facts.

Firstly you don’t want to be in a smash involving a truck. They tend to be big, brash affairs, like a gay parade without the style, pink ribbons and the sympathetic side. The sheer size and weight of at least one of the vehicles involved tends to lead to hysteria, lots of damage and, unfortunately and all too often injury and even premature death.

Now I know this isn’t the cheeriest of subjects but what set me off was just the sheer number of smashes that pop up when you check out the news on the internet.

Today five of the top ten Googled truck stories were fatal crashes involving rigs, not pick ups, not vans (that would make it 7 out of 10) but trucks, or lorries as we call them.

As you probably know by now I could witter on about how dangerous it is out there or illustrate this piece with death and destruction shots but that would be to sensationalise a serious problem. Unfortunately my scribbling this piece isn’t going to solve much either. There are however things we could all do to make that tiny bit of difference – and we all know what tiny bits add up to don’t we?

First off, if you drive a rig remember the “well they better get out the way” argument is, if nothing else, a little insensitive not to say naive. Your job is to

a) make sure your unit is as safe in every way as it possibly can be and -

b) that you drive in a considerate manner at all times, when your wife has stopped speaking to you, when you’re running late etc.

Bear in mind that an accident may leave you OK and the other guy stiff, scarred or paralysed, but you’re going to have that devil on your back till the day you die, that twisting feeling in your gut when you wake that you could have done more to prevent it.

If you’re a non truck road user then you know what’s coming. Those little stickers on the back “If you can’t see my mirrors…etc.”, well they are actually true.

He can’t see you.

Not at all.

You are invisible.

If you do something too quick and he’s looking ahead at the moment you try to pull past, say goodnight Vienna. Bleat all you want that he was in the wrong, you may have to tell your old lady using the Ouija board though.

Not truck related but here’s an incident that happened to me just a day or so ago. I had to take my old Renault NN for its MOT. For our foreign readers, that’s an annual certificate all cars in the UK have to get from a garage listed as suitable by the Ministry of Transport. Lorries get an even tougher test at a Ministry Depot.

Now the old girl’s 85 years old so she lacks a few of the refinements of the modern vehicle, but as they were never in the original design, she’s exempt.

The examiners loved the old biddy (as usual) and she coasted through the bits of the test that apply to her brakes, emissions etc.

The test centre’s only a mile or so from home so I pulled out into the main road and all traffic stopped to let the car out (usual behaviour, every bloke over 25 wants to take a look and have a laugh) and I chugged on up the road.

Stopped behind an artic at the lights, moved up a bit the next time they changed then through the double light at 15 mph across the major A road, up to 23mph or so (she runs out of steam at 40 with a following wind) 400 yards straight on down, third left, and up into the driveway still clutching the new MOT certificate in hand.

Now she’s an ex Paris taxi with doors only on the right (mustn’t get the fares killed by a horse as they get out) and a drivers compartment built for Yoda and at over 6 foot it takes me a minute to crook one leg over the steering wheel and slide my arse out.

It was whilst in this inelegant stance that I first noticed a pudgy red face looming up the path behind me. Now when you own an old bus like the NN you get used to lots of questions from interested parties so it was a bit of a shock when the lardy bird facing me as I fell from the car, started shouting.

This is as I remember it how the conversation went.

“Do you know you’ve got no lights?”

“Yep”.

“And no indicators?”

“Yep”

“And no brake lights?”

“Yep. I’ve also got no seat belts if that’s of any interest”.

“Well you shouldn’t be on the road. That car’s illegal”.

At this point I opened the MOT certificate and held it up before her.

“The Ministry of Transport madam plainly disagree with you, as you can see I’ve just had the annual examination and, as usual we passed with flying colours”

Unfortunately I was prevented from enjoying the exchange further at this point as the dragon lady who guards the family protruded from a downstairs window and hurled a stream of invective guaranteed to repel the Chinese army from the gates.

As the unfortunate woman recoiled and retreated back to her car I politely pointed out that if she were spawned in 1924 she might expect a modicum of respect from younger members of society if all her functions were a little restricted.

Obviously this menopausal harridan had a point, but we were not on a motorway, she had obviously barrelled up behind me after I left the garage, without really paying attention and had to brake sharply, despite the fact I must have been stationery for at least 30 seconds before her arrival.

Thing is, any half wit would recognise that a vehicle so patently ancient was never going to accelerate off in a squeal of rubber, nor stop dead with a blaze of neon.

The Renault has a rear window the size of a bar of soap and about 3% rear visibility, the right turn indicator is a rubber glove on a stick poked through the window.

If you are a sane and sensible driver you would take note and make allowances for the old girls foibles, just make sure you do it for the truck driver as well.

It may well be you that counts the cost if you don’t, or worse still it may be your friends and family.

And if you’re in the truck try to think of yourself as the benevolent grandfather and the motorists, motorbikers and (save me Lord) cyclists as dumb kids who, if you don’t look out for them, are just going to hurt themselves, maybe for the last time ever.

Let’s make it no Google headlines next week.