Uncommon Carriers Quotes

“rutilant”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“No wind wings. It’s symphony”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“vocabulary was still a mixture of truckspeak and idiosyncrasy,”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“demurrage”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“desuetude,”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“The”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“The central figure in such an odyssey is not an engineer, a conductor, a dispatcher, or a trainmaster— the multiple, replaceable, and redundant human beings—but the coal train itself, which, power and payload, end to end, will be integral all the way from mine to destination, no matter who is in or around it, or whose tracks it is running on.”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“ones and zeroes”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“which outthinks the people who employ”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“require a more complex application of human thought, but in the development of the UPS air hub the intellectual role of the workers “out in the sort” underwent a process of “de-skilling.” “When they made the hub, they de-skilled a lot of positions,” a UPS manager explained to me. “Label-side up. That’s pretty much the extent of the training for these folks.”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“applies the live human factor, making a couple of crucial but not irreversible decisions:”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“as it carries automation off the scale of comprehension.”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“obelisk”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“that the smell seems painted on the air.”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“Every day is a holiday, every meal a banquet. Got it made. Just don’t know it.” Another mantra. Another Marlboro.”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“autochthonous”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“Post Panamax)”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“V.L.C.C.s—the very large crude carriers”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“Owl & Company will present you with graphic and numerical printouts showing in hours, minutes, and seconds your headings and degrees, your rudder degrees, your engine r.p.m.s, your forward and backward speeds, your transverse velocities, your turn rates, the action of your thrusters, the knots of wind you were working in, where you went, what you did, and everything you hit or missed.”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“peripatetic”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“helmsman.”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“roughly five times a year a bulk freighter leaves a port somewhere in the world and is never heard from again.”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“celestial navigation,”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“concatenation”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“So, a little desperate and surprisingly inspired, I bought a cap. Not just any cap. I picked one with a bright-gold visor, a gold button at the top, a crown of navy blue, an American flag on the left temple, and—on the forehead emblem—a spread-winged eagle over a rising sun and a red-and-green tractor-trailer and the white letters “America— Spirit of Freedom.” On the back, over my cerebellum, was a starred banner in blue, white, red, green, and gold that said “Carnesville, GA Petro.” I put on that hat and disappeared. The glances died like flies. I could sit anywhere, from Carnesville to Tacoma. In Candler, North Carolina, while Ainsworth was outside fuelling the truck, I sat inside in my freedom hat saying “Biscuits and gravy” to a waitress. She went “Oooooo wheeeee” and I thought my cover wasn’t working, but a trucker passing her had slipped his hand between the cheeks of her buttocks, and she did not stop writing.”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers

“the editor-in-chief of Screw Machine Engineering, a magazine whose name a hyphen would have improved. In”
― John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers