Big Rig by by Louise Hawes

Author:by Louise Hawes [Hawes, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holiday House
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

We’re scheduled to drop off the cowboy boots at a giant Western Wear store outside Winston-Salem and get into Chapel Hill about three o’clock, just in time for sweet tea and honeysuckle biscuits on Serena’s porch. But first, we have to wait while the store’s automated warehouse system unloads and stacks our pallets. Daddy’s inside getting some paperwork signed while I watch through the tiny window in the waiting room as a team of busy mechanical robots runs between our truck and the warehouse shelves. The bots look like giant bees storing honey, their treadmill bottoms moving back and forth as a small crane on top empties and stacks, empties and stacks. Empties…and then an AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) pushes too hard or loses its grip or who knows what, and a bunch of pallets go flying off a top shelf.

It’s like dominoes falling. The whole row of tall metal shelves collapses, and one after another, pallets and boxes fall to the floor, raining on top of each other, scattering tissue paper and cowboy boots everywhere. Pointy alligator-skin toes, snakeskin, and calfskin heels poke out of the mess of paper and leather and cardboard tops and bottoms. Because machines don’t know when to stop, one bot follows the first, and pretty soon there are three of them dumping their pallets into thin air, where the fallen shelf used to be. By the dozens, then by the hundreds, there are boots, boots everywhere.

“Hey.” Daddy comes to sit beside me, clipboard in hand. But I’m out of my chair, my face pressed against the tiny oval window in the warehouse door.

I crook my pointer finger at him like I’ve got a pretty big secret brewing, and then I back away from the window so he can see. In about two seconds, he’s laughing out loud.

I can hardly keep the happy-smug out of my voice. “So,” I ask, “is this the shiny, high-tech future that’s going to make you and me obso—obso…?”

“Obsolete.” My father straightens out the tongue twister for me, then gets a phone book so I don’t have to stand on tiptoe to see through the window. Side by side, we watch the mess swell like a wave that’s now covering the whole warehouse floor. Back and forth go those busy-bee loader bots, their skinny claws clutching and releasing, clutching and releasing.

The piles grow, the boots crumple together, and Daddy and I laugh ’til the tears come. And the relief. Because it isn’t just funny, it’s also very good news: automated warehouses don’t always run smoothly. And if AGVs can’t be counted on, how can robo-trucks? Computers can’t read traffic and other drivers; they can’t navigate in a snowstorm, change a blown-out tire, or back into a narrow shipping bay. They can’t help at the scene of an accident or deliver babies or figure out how to deal with downtown traffic.

So now, as two humanoids from the warehouse crew rush onto the scene and the boot-hurling robots screech high-pitched, grinding noises as they’re turned off, I’m pretty sure the future of trucking isn’t as bleak as I thought.

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