A Fieldwork Profile of Yellow is a 12 chapter book that examines Yellow Freight. This insider look studies a flat plane apparatus, internal dock designs, tools, culture, and directives. Yellow Corporation chose to enter the strange. The company rolled out a new business plan and immediately one of its largest terminals out west became a loser within the Yellow system. This is the story of the destruction of Yellow within its last stages.
Introduction & final entry
I'm not new to the experience of watching a corporation fold. Even before I joined the Yellow tribe, I learned that gates can close. People and things can quickly disperse. Time will pass, memories will surely fade.
This book began as mere fragments of a larger vision. I had been taking notes for awhile. Yellow was already in trouble, then with the introduction of Yellow’s new “roll-out” business plan, the sudden changes were beyond alarming. The company had entered the ridiculous and was choosing to stay there. Some workers here were very hip to the LTL game. They knew the Tracy 813 jungle. For these types of workers, the blatant atrophy of the place was obvious. Also, awkward looking pieces were moving into place. Responsible cube had been compromised. At that stage, I had an obligation to keep the notes accurate, and to keep them going since uncertainty was all over the terminal. I never forgot how the carpet was pulled out from underneath us while working at Consolidated Freightways. A few decades had passed but the imprint of that experience had never waned. In fact, it prompted me to take notes at Roadway and Yellow. The activity of note taking was both reactionary and reflexive. As they stacked up I knew I could glean value from them eventually even if they seemed to look like piles of semi-coherent ramblings. Even as incomplete ideas of design or experience, I continued to maintain them. In the back of my mind I knew that this place could quickly end, Warn Act or not. And for myself, trust had left the building a long time ago. A sudden close could be sooner, it could come later. Yellow might have some hidden gas in the tank. But no matter when the tumbleweeds come, all of the scenery here would become wisps of smoke. My gut suggested that I had some time, but not much. I based that not on the intuitive, but on the massive problem of cube, a problem rolled out and introduced as the new future of Yellow Corporation. As dockworkers, we were reminded over and over again that this strange cube building endeavor was the future. This was a vision that soon would be phased in across the board, and not relegated to a selection of barns. A wave was coming. Yellow was changing. Yellow was trying to keep pace with the future. It was a new vision. It was a new order. It was a new design. It was a new business requirement. And in this new yellowfied future, everybody had to do their part especially if we kept getting behind as a terminal.
But we had a strange self-constructed yellowfied problem, one that was being stressed during graveyard hours. And some of us had unyielding positions. We weren't buying it. We did what we were told, but we stuck to what we were taught. We were built on strict freight fundamentals. We were also experienced. We knew our stuff and we knew how to stuff trailers. We also knew the inherent value of cube and its meaning to the business at hand. But now, Yellow had chosen to dummy up the place. It was Yellow's choice, somewhere people had designed it thus. And as workers we were helpless to do anything about it. For some of us, all of it was completely unsound. Its shape utterly grotesque. Its mass a bad business momentum. This strange problem was getting stressed, and this strange problem was causing stress on our ability to maintain responsible outbound cube. And none of it was getting remedied. Instead, Yellow was cycling in more inexperienced bodies to do the same dummy up bullshit night after night. It was an LTL contradiction in real time and real space. The days at Yellow Freight had to be a low number.
The Yellow crypt finally closed. The smoke of bankruptcy was everywhere. All the assets would soon get soaked up. Yellow would get picked clean. For myself, to suggest there would be any table scraps left on that carcass would be pure naivety. Dockworkers and drivers were talking about getting a piece of the pie, but I was expecting nothing. Yellow was behind me and my focus was straight ahead. It was time to start thinking about how to step into this project. With virtually no energy to draw upon I wasn't excited about starting it, but it had to get done. Once enough personal steam was built, I began writing some of the easier material. I found a few good writing spaces and kept a personal log to help stay focused. With a bare bones word processor, I gradually began to move ideas around. After a few months, strange ideas arrived. As the project expanded I could see it moving far beyond a multi-layered treatise. A book was emerging and some of the contents were not anticipated. This thing was going to require a spell. Eventually I would have to put the brakes on the entire work.
It soon became evident that this project needed to remain completely private from beginning to end. Even if I could see the value of sharing ideas with others, I couldn’t draw anyone into this while under construction. I also saw the value to keep it away from mainstream media or the usual self publishing outlets. I would keep to some simple personal by-laws. The observable had to be deadly accurate. I also needed to take all of the venom out of each chapter, or as much as I could. In the end, the book had to be cold. So, I would write the book, then build a simple web site around it. I'd fix it free within the internet, then walk away from it.
The problem of length was a haunt that wasn't going away. With old chapters needing refinement, and with new chapters emerging out of nowhere, I had to make a decision. What kind of book length was I really looking at? I was presented with three different choices:
The first choice/direction was obvious. The whole work had to be tight even if it was overly wrought with a tired repetitiveness. It needed to be free of schematics, of more and more dock lay-outs, and all of the flat space materials of design. Without throwing a lasso on it, the book could morph into an unnecessary operating manual, something that would take the work completely off point. Also, I was in no mood to draw on anything I had written previously, whether any of those ideas were applicable or not. I might reference them, but I couldn't draw on them. Yellow Freight was the subject so the book needed to focus on Yellow ground. It had to get wrapped in under two hundred pages with no more than a dozen chapters. I wanted a lean snake of a book.
The second choice/direction had a weird potential. Two chapters could mushroom and get out of control if I wasn't careful. I could see a full range of ideas that could draw me in, then pull me away. The book might take on a different style and settle somewhere in the 300-350 page range. In my mind, this direction didn't seem to work. The project was already rickety.
The third choice/direction was just a demolition derby of a work. I had a mass of notes to draw upon. And there was plenty of value there. The change to door frequency and the generation of new flat planes over and over again suggested something. Every change created a new card. Every poor decision within this so-called business plan was something new to consider. Every new card was packed with meaning, especially if the cards were erroneous. One big west coast facility was throwing paint against the wall and calling it a business plan. Some workers believed (believed mind you) that the alterations were so bad that they had to be calculated. Yellow not only invited a business ogre, but it created one. And there was no shortage of material to examine. However, I had my own ogre of a project to consider. I could see the development of a 500 or 600 page lumbering giant. This direction was tugging on me a little, but not a lot.
By September 2024 the book was done. It was also time to close my log. I remember leaning back on Labor Day and telling myself that it could stand as is. So, a hard copy was printed out and notarized. There have been some revisions and edits to it since then, but not much.
Help was clearly needed on many levels, but the mission was to privately create it then quietly set it somewhere within the internet/web record. I had no desire to sell it nor to market it. Though I had noted it on a few boards and sent it as an attachment within a few waves of emails (mostly to academia), as a 12 chapter collection I consider it an underground work, an obscure book with purpose. Keeping it less than 200 pages then setting it aside was correct. I can let it ferment for a while. I'll always stand by it.
Within my own mind, the work continues to fade away. Interest in both book and subject falls away with every passing day. Soon, the work won’t pull on me at all. It’s already shelved as another timepiece, a stand alone observation, a glance at an ugly past. It's also not worth looking at anymore. My only obligation as author is to keep the final version of the work fixed and available. A web hosting company will be paid annually to keep it afloat and to ensure that the whole work remains free, undiluted, and easy to access for years to come.
Time to respectfully clock out,
Daniel A. Pino, author and former employee of Yellow Freight