Always The Worst Possible Outcome

Most of these writings of mine have some kind of theme or particular point. This one does not. It is just two stories about one of my long ago clients.

The client was a trucking company. They were a very large long haul trucker. Given their size, they were self insured for property damage claims to their own trucks and for the products they hauled for their customers.

I was at the office that handled the claims for my client one day in December. In Indiana. It was cold, icy and snowy. The manager of the unit picked up the phone and took a call from one of their drivers. The driver was fine but had been in a major wreck. He had been hauling a load of new cars from Detroit to a dealer in Ohio. He was passing through Fort Wayne, Indiana going downhill (probably too fast) hit the ice and flipped the truck upside down. No injury to him but literally smashed the cars, all 8 of them. The manager asked the driver what kind of cars he was hauling. As you can probably guess, not small cars, not small pickups, not even mid size cars. He was of course hauling brand new Cadillacs. Total loss. Always the worst possible outcome.

Same client. Same winter. Two months later. Now February. Lots of snow and ice. I was at the corporate office in Kokomo, Indiana. Their office was in an old flat roof converted warehouse. Three stories tall. There was so much ice on the roof (several inches frozen solid) that the roof had begun to creak pretty badly. Given the age of the building, everyone was concerned about a collapse. So they sent two maintenance workers to the roof to clear off the ice. No instructions though, just get the ice off the roof. They did. Roof stopped creaking.

…..Two months later, spring in Indiana and it is raining buckets. I am at the same office and water is pouring through what must have been 100 small holes in the roof. Care to guess how they cleared the ice? Pick axes of course. Right through the ice and holes in the roof. Always the worst possible outcome.