Humour · fictional vignettes · № 003 — LOGISTICS · PHILOSOPHY
The Tanker Driver's Handbook of Patience.
Apapa will teach you stillness, whether you asked for it or not. Notes from the queue.
WORDS: CRUDE AWAKENING EDITORIAL · ARTWORK: GENERATED EDITORIAL ILLUSTRATION
The first thing a tanker driver learns is that the truck is not in a hurry, and therefore neither are you. Thirty-three thousand litres of diesel has its own relationship with time. It sloshes. It settles. It does not care about your estimated time of arrival, and after a while, neither do you.
The queue at Apapa is not a traffic jam. It is an institution, with its own etiquette, economy and oral history. Vendors materialise between the trucks selling everything from bread to phone chargers to, on one memorable occasion, a quite good oil painting of a tanker. Friendships are formed across cab windows that last longer than some marriages. The queue is where logistics becomes anthropology.
Chapter four of the handbook concerns the radio. The radio is both companion and tormentor, because the traffic report is always wrong and yet must always be listened to. 'The bridge is moving well,' says the radio. The bridge is not moving well. The bridge has not moved well since 2019. But hope, like diesel, is a fuel.
You cannot hurry thirty-three thousand litres. You can only accompany them.
There is a meditation practised by senior drivers, never written down, passed cab to cab: watch the sun move across the dashboard. When it reaches the passenger seat, you will have moved perhaps four hundred metres. This is not failure. This is the pace of the product. The diesel will arrive exactly when it arrives, and it will arrive in perfect condition, because you did not hurry it.
The unloading, when it finally comes, is a ceremony. Hoses are connected with the gravity of a docking spacecraft. The dipstick is consulted like an oracle. Paperwork is signed in triplicate, and each signature is a small benediction. Then the tanker leaves, lighter, and the driver — here is the strange part — misses the load a little.
We salute them. Every delivery milestone in our system, every 'arrived at gate' notification, represents a person who sat in the sun with thirty-three thousand litres of flammable patience and brought it home. The handbook has no final chapter. The road continues. The bridge is moving well.