On the August long weekend, I watched countless hours of CNN reporting on the US debt crisis and the rest of the time reading former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s new autobiography. I don’t know why. I know I wasn’t on the golf course, hiking with the dog, or enjoying barbecues, because I was laid up under the weather.

I turned on the TV and there was Wolf Blitzer telling me the world as I knew it might come to an end on Wednesday. I was intrigued enough to watch and somehow got hooked.

I began to doubt that America would truly go bankrupt and the world, and Truck News was going to be around on Wednesday, but I couldn’t stop watching.

During a commercial I picked up a discarded book from the coffee table, which turned out to be Tony’s autobiography. The next thing I knew it was Monday night. Wolf told me the crisis wasn’t really a crisis because it was a self-imposed crisis.
Wolf interviewed Tea Party people while I switched back to my Tony Blair book. Tony is at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Tea Party guys, but he was also talking about numbers containing an unknown number of zeros, and solving problems that sometimes weren’t problems at all.

Tony has a chapter dealing with the fuel crisis in Britain. I was surprised to learn it took him 48 hours to figure out that fuel was transported by truck from the refineries to the “Petrol” stations on a daily basis.

He had been under the impression that each Petrol station had a never-ending supply of fuel on-hand and protesters couldn’t block all the stations. Of course they could and did block the trucks from leaving the fuel refineries.

Here’s a quote from Tony, “The trouble is at the time when I needed to know this, I didn’t, and neither did anyone else in a position of authority so when we heard of some protests at two refineries the enormity didn’t sink in.”

The end of that chapter was predictable. Once he recognized he had manufactured a problem that didn’t have to be, he just told the oil companies to sack any driver who didn’t plow through and guess what, the oil companies did and the drivers did. I don’t mean to suggest Prime Ministers and senators are buffoons. You have to have some smarts to reach those positions.

Anyway, that’s the story of my lost weekend. I know I can never have it back but I believe it will build my character. Everyone has to step off into the deep end at some point in order to better appreciate what one has and who one is. I am the publisher of Truck News and I’m good with that.