Out of Gas

by Randy Dyess

  “Let’s cancel everything on our calendars and get together over the next few days to start hashing out a high level plan on moving the systems and retraining current staff. I’m also going to review the current open job postings we have out and see if we can cut new projects and staff to lower our overall costs. See if there is anything I can do to delay the move some and give us more time to train the others in something else.”

  “Hard to think about having to spend the next 24-30 months basically working myself out of a job,” Mark said. “I’ve spent a lot of years at this place and I enjoy being the head of operations.“

  “You shouldn’t worry about not having a job. Your knowledge around here is essential to smooth operations. No one else knows a fraction of what you do when it comes to our systems and how data is spread around. They would be crazy to get rid of you. Although I think you may have to change positions like everyone else,” Owen said as he looked at Mark. “I wonder if we should make you the lead systems architect, some job which uses your knowledge and keeps you at a high enough level to justify your current salary. It shouldn’t be that hard to convince Damian to create the position for you.”

  “Thanks, I would appreciate that. What about you? Do you think you would stick around after this is all over?”

  “Probably, I’m too young to retire yet and too old to jump around to other jobs. As you said earlier the IT field seems to have a big bias when it comes to anyone over fifty. They just do not want us around as someone younger knows the latest and greatest even though they do not have the experience to implement anything correctly. I will probably find myself on a plane all the time jumping back and forth between here and wherever we out-source to. At least the airline lets VPs book business class if the trip is over six hours in length. Just about anywhere we would out-source to would be longer than six hours.”

  “Always a bright side to things if you look for it,” Mark said.

  Both men thought of the nightmare the next thirty months would be on the morale of their coworkers. As they entered Owen’s office, Mark shut the door and asked him, “Do you know why they are thinking of making this move? I thought we put this to rest a few years ago when we showed them it did not really help with costs.”

  “I’m not supposed to say anything, but you know last week when they cancelled a few hundred flights and blamed the cancellations on a computer bug?” said Owen. He went on, “The reason we never figured out what they were talking about was because a fuel shortage turned out to be the reason for the cancellations. Our supplier did not have enough fuel to give us and we had to cancel flights to overcome the shortage. I think everyone is worried a global fuel shortage is building and our fuel costs are about to blow through the roof. They will probably raise ticket prices, but you can only do that so much before high ticket cripples revenues. They haven’t told me everything. I think they are trying to do anything they can do in order to bring down other costs so they can continue to make a profit. Hard to touch the unions, but since the back-office employees are not unions, we are fair game.”

  “Why didn’t they say that?” Mark wondered.

  “Think about it. If you say we have a computer bug, everyone has experienced the results of a bug before. They don’t really think much about it, as a computer bug is just a part of living with computers. The only real fallout from saying the problem was a computer bug is the stockholders would think the IT staff are idiots and we can’t program our systems correctly. If you say, ‘Hey, the world is short of fuel because of the Middle-East situation or a global fuel shortage’, then everyone panics and the stock prices plummet. Remember, it is all about the stock price to most of those guys in the corner offices.”

  “I guess so, but it does worry me we have actually experienced a fuel shortage and everyone thinks the problem is going to keep recurring. I have already been through one bankruptcy with this airline and with what it did to my stocks; I really do not want to think about going through another.”

  “I know, worries me as well,” said Owen. “I only have about ten more years before I can cash out of everything and retire. The stock options I received when I came over here with Damian put the icing on the cake. They gave me hope my retirement will be more than eating a TV dinner and yelling at the latest news on TV. I am looking forward to dumping all of this mess on someone else’s lap.”

  “OK,” Mark said as he walked out the door. He continued thinking as he walked to his office, “Fuel shortage. I wonder if this has happened before or if this just something which has happened only once. But if it is a one-time problem, why try to blame the problem on something else? This cover-up sounds to me like they knew a problem was coming and had everything worked out beforehand. There has to be something more going on if they want to disrupt the company enough to move the entire IT department off-shore.”

  Mark thought about the problem a little more, but since today was Mark’s turn to be home at a decent hour he left the office earlier than normal. Mark and Kelly took turns being home before 6PM a few nights a week. They wanted to act like normal parents who had to corral the kids from their various events and make sure they were fed. Mark took one night a week, Kelly took another. One night Kelly’s parents came over and one night Mark’s parents came over. The grandparents also took turns watching the girls after school. On Friday nights, both Mark and Kelly came home as early as possible to spend a small amount of time with the kids. Even then, Mark and Kelly would often not get home from work before 6PM on Friday nights. Both of them thought this was early since the other nights they usually got home with just enough time to see the kids before they went to sleep. Being between the ages of five and seven, Dakota and Cheyenne usually went to bed around 8PM each night. Most night this was too early for Mark and Kelly to get home. Getting home so late meant that the majority of the girls’ activities before, during, and after school fell upon the grandparents to handle. In fact, during summer the kids spent more time with their grandparents than they did at home. Since they did not have to get up and go to school each day, it was often easier for them to sleep over at their grandparent’s house.

  By the time Mark got home, he had decided not to say anything to Kelly about the fuel issue. A one-time lie by the company was not enough to forecast a trend. He was still undecided if this was an actual problem or just a normal part of doing business. He didn’t want to create panic if this was equal to the local gas station not getting their gas on time. He also decided that he would not say anything about the off-shore mandate. He had gone through this before, a mandate to consider off-shoring everything followed by months of hard work and morale problems with the fear that everyone would lose their jobs. In the end, a few pieces of the operation would go overseas. Very few people would lose their jobs, although they would be reassigned to different areas of the company. The staff would get their old jobs back once the off-shore company failed to keep its promises and the work came back in-house. In the end, most of the off-shore cheerleaders would give up and cancel their off-shore contracts and bring the whole thing back home. The company would save almost no money as the work overseas often had to be redone locally before it could be used by the existing systems.

  What Mark decided on his way home was to do some research to understand more about the fuel situation. He wanted to know if there was a global fuel shortage, then why he didn’t hear anything about the shortage on the news he watched throughout the day. Was there a global fuel shortage large enough to start affecting the flight schedule? Was the ongoing recession part of the fuel shortage? What were they not telling us, why were they not telling and did he need to be worried about his family’s financial future? Like many Americans he grew up watching the major news stations after work each day and had always been told that American news was the best in the world. You could believe everything that was reported and if it wasn’t reported by the major services then it wasn’t worth reporting. The fact that his favorite news anchor was completely honest had been
drummed in his head more times than once. He always thought the news services spent millions of dollars investigating reports around the world to keep everyone up to date on all major events. It seemed hey were missing a major piece of news if one of the world’s largest airlines was cancelling flights and lying about the actual reason. Mark selflessly hoped he would find nothing was going on. He did want either a SEC investigation or a bankruptcy causing his stocks to get hammered. He didn’t want to stop his dream of retiring as soon as the first grandkid was born. He was more worried about his dream ending than the affects a global fuel shortage would have on people around the word.

  Mark fed the girls pizza and watched as both girls went off to various corners of the house to do whatever normal kids did after dinner. Mark knew they were like most kids and spent their evenings watching TV or playing computer games. Mark cleaned up the pizza mess and then went to his home office to do his own homework. He wanted to figure out what, if anything was going on.

  What he found in his initial cursory search made things worse. Mark compared the various major news sites and soon found out those news sites slanted the headlines to fit into a particular set of beliefs they held. The same news story would be told by many different news sites. Each site had their own set of beliefs and would usually write the news to lead you to believe what they wanted to say. The same piece of new could either state the end of the world was near or the piece of news was the best thing that ever happened. He could not find one major news organization which reported the news in an unbiased way so the reader could make up their own mind about the issue. Mark discovered most of the “news” he was taught to watch and believe was written to fit into the beliefs of one political parties or another. It did not take much digging to find the actual reports or stories the article was based on. Mark read a few of the underlying reports and could tell many sites made up their own conclusions or heavily edited their reports to make them say what they wanted them to say. If the reader took the time to go through the whole original data and then compare them to what the major news site had written; they would notice the news media often reported opposite of what the underlying report said.

  “Well, dad,” Mark thought. “It looks like you were probably the last generation to have real, unbiased news reports. My generation is being fed news and headlines that fit agendas and sponsorships more than it does to serve the public’s best interest.” After getting disgusted with the major American news sites, Mark turned to international news sources to see if they were any better. He found a handful of foreign news sites which actually reported major news of the world. They did not just report the latest Hollywood gossip or some piece of half-truth which served a corporate sponsor or the political party the chairmen of the board sided with. He put these sites into his favorites so he could return to them each day to see what he was missing from the American sites. Mark tried a handful of respected financial news sites in order to get a handle on the economy and how a major fuel shortage would affect the global economies. What he found was similar to the standard news sites. The problem was he did not have enough financial knowledge to decide which stories were unbiased reports and which stories had been sensationalized to get viewers. He decided he needed to increase his knowledge of financial jargon. He needed the knowledge to decide if the reporters were making valid points or just trying to get more air time to justify their salaries or sell their latest book.

  Hoping to find somewhere that explained things in way he could understand, he turned to the alternative web sites. What he found there was a mass of web sites discussing everything from the Earth striking back at humans to super-secret groups who are plotting to control the world. He came across terms, agendas, and groups most Americans would have never heard of: Peak Oil, U.N. Agenda 21, the Bilderberg group, and Skull and Bones. He even learned about the Rothschild’s plan to permanently keep the world at war to make billions off of war supplies and then make billions off of the reconstruction efforts. Many of the sites he found he discounted as being controlled by “crazy” people. He did review a few of the sites in detail and bookmarked them to come back to at a later time during his research.

  Mark kept looking at various sites until he heard Kelly come home around 8pm and he called it quits for the night. He told himself he would start following up on the information he found by learning more about global economics. He would also learn more about the people who represented the public at all levels of the political systems. He also told himself that tomorrow at work he would see if he could figure out the fuel shortage problem and see if it had happened before. Had Plains either lied about the actual problem or covered the problem up in some other manner? He did not want to believe the worse about Plains, but he had a really bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Was the company where he had spent his entire working adult life not the same one he had started with?

  But for now he would turn off the laptop and go join Kelly for their traditional glass of wine before bedtime.

  Chapter 2

  The next day at work Mark closed his office door and logged into the financial system. He poked around a bit before he found what he needed; the fuel invoices for the past few years. Everything looked like it should have up until about eighteen months ago when the invoices started showing a slight reduction in amount due. Looking into the details of the invoices, he determined the amount of fuel being delivered would be less than the amount delivered before the time frame he reviewed. Less fuel being delivered each month was not a case for a global fuel shortage. It was not until he saw that in the last eighteen months, the amount of fuel being delivered fell short of the amount ordered by increasing percentages that Mark worried. Mark kept digging around and found that although they found new sources of fuel, the new sources would not always fill in the gaps. The amount of fuel shortage between what had been delivered and the amount the airline needed to operate widened each month. There were at least eleven occasions in the past eighteen months the extra suppliers were unable to supply the fuel needed by the airline to work at normal levels.

  After noting the months that showed a fuel shortage, Mark started reviewing news services to see if he could figure out how they covered up the fuel shortage. In six of the eleven months, Plains had been able to cancel flights and blame weather for the reason. It made sense as the months covered winter and the spring time storm season. Mark wondered if weather had anything to do with the cancellations or if Plains just made up the weather excuses to keep the fuel shortage situation hidden. Three months out of the eighteen had a mechanical recall of a part of their fleet. This kept a percentage of their fleet grounded while being checked over by the mechanics. A short pilots’ strike grounded at least a third of their fleet six months ago. These three events accounted for the eleven months Mark had found in his research. Except for this month, Plains had a set of naturally occurring and manmade reasons for the cancellations. Whether the weather disruptions or the mechanical groundlings were actual events or Plains’ management fabricated them as cover, Mark couldn’t tell through the financial systems or the news. He would have to break in and read archived emails from the executives and he was not willing to do this at this stage in the game. What bothered Mark the most from his invoice research was the fuel shortage had gotten larger and more and more planes had to be grounded each month. He wondered how they would continue to be able to create false events to explain an ever-increasing amount of flights being cancelled each month.

  That night Mark found a book he needed to start learning the basics of financial indicators and what they meant to the stock market. It was a basic book but it did a good enough job of explaining the major indicators the economic world seemed to care about. While it would not be enough information for Mark to “play” the stock market. The book would give Mark enough knowledge to see if what he was reading on the web sites and hearing in the news was accurate. Mark learned what the critical economic indicators were and why they were so important to the financial
community. Over the next few weeks, he studied the book and compared what it said about the major economic indicators against the news reports. He reviewed other indicators the news channels discussed. He started realizing even though a particular indicator may have been discussed on the news many financial people would ignore it for one reason or another. Some of the explanations given by the books’ authors and the news reporters for why they didn’t discuss one indicator or another he didn’t accept for his situation. The reasons given did not fit Mark’s specific need for indicators to give a good picture of the overall health of the economy. He did not need just a snapshot of the economy that stock investors wanted. Wall Street often discounted many indicators because they would be based on data everyone considered old. Anything more than last month’s data would be considered old news by the street. Several good indicators were shunted aside even though the trending of those indicators would help the public understand the global economy and what may happen soon.

  Mark also accepted the fact that because Wall Street liked or disliked something did not mean it was good or bad in the long run for the global economy. Wall Street seemed to him to be all about the moment and the next quarterly report. They did not seem to care much about the overall financial health of the world and its long-term survivability. Mark also learned during his research that while the news used the DOW as the prime indicator of the stock market, it was not the prime indicator of the economy. The DOW did often follow the overall leanings of the stock market. He learned it was possible for the economy to be doing well while the DOW would fall or the overall economy would suffer, but the DOW went up. While the DOW was made up of a cross section of companies, those companies did not always show the true health of the global economy. Wall Street tended to ignore the small businesses of America, which employed more people than the large corporations did. The health of those companies was not part of the fluctuations of the DOW. To Mark, investors reacted too quickly to the current headline news and did not do the research needed to figure out the overall consequences of the current headlines. Too many people now had access to the real-time information of a company and often did a “knee-jerk” reaction to something splashed over the headlines. The way the stock market reacted today did not show the patterns of yesterday