Machine Gravity
“Gravity is working against me and gravity wants to bring me down.” -John Mayer
As I’ve mentioned before, I run a small diesel repair and breakdown service in Southwestern Pennsylvania. This is the third post in a series about self-employment in the trades. In an earlier post, Grant presented data on trends and characteristics of people who are self-employed in the trades. In my last post, I shared how bureaucratic corruption forced my father out of Ryder after 24 years, and how I left Pepsi to join him in starting our business. At first, our business felt like an act of rebellion against the Machine. We were no longer trapped in endless safety meetings or buried in mindless paperwork. However, over time, I’ve come to realize a hard truth: there is no real escape from the Machine. Its gravitational pull is so strong, that even working outside its formal structures doesn’t provide quite enough exit velocity. I’ve experienced this in a number of ways.
Corporate billings/accounting
Without an intrusive HR department, my father and I enjoy some small freedoms—like having a beer while welding or smoking a cigar in the shop. These simple pleasures do bring some humanity back into our lives. However, whatever gains we make are quickly wiped out by the daily grind of dealing with corporate stooges.
We run a skeleton crew, and besides servicing trucks, we also handle service calls, order parts, manage inventory, and take care of billing and payments. Meanwhile, the large companies we work for—who have entire departments dedicated to these tasks—are often unable to keep their own numbers straight. We regularly receive late payments, overpayments and incorrect payments. As much as I dislike AI, I sometimes find myself hoping the robots will take over these jobs.
Last year, one of these companies had a large overdue balance with us. They accidentally made a payment that put them slightly over the amount owed. Since we regularly work for them, we figured the easiest solution was to credit their account and reduce future payments by that same amount. But after two months of back-and-forth with their incompetent accounting department, we ended up having to refund the payment, reverse all charges, and wait (very slowly) for them to send a new check for the correct original amount. And, all the while, continue servicing their equipment.
I’m sure whoever handles these issues on their end has no problem asking a small company to return $7,000 two months after the fact simply because their accounting department doesn’t understand how credits work but you’d think they’d be more embarrassed. No worries—we’ll fix your trucks and do your accounting, I guess.
In addition to incompetence, corporate systems are designed to reorient everything for their own benefit. When we get a service call from a large company, they open an RO (repair order) in their system. Once we complete the job, we send over an invoice, which gets attached to that RO. After the final amount is entered into their system, there’s no changing it. Even if the customer takes over a month to pay and we want to add a late fee, it’s nearly impossible to collect any additional charges due to how their system is designed.
But this setup only works in their favor. On several occasions, we’ve been contacted months after completing a job and asked to remove some labor time because their system estimated we took too long. It doesn’t matter that we might’ve had to heat and hammer out frozen anchor pins on a brake job or spend hours tracing a broken wire. The system doesn’t care about the real difficulties involved. All it sees is that our labor hours were higher than average for that type of job.
While I never refund any money, it’s insulting to be asked for a price adjustment months later by someone who has no idea what the job actually entailed. When was the last time you could negotiate with a large company over the price of something? The price is the price—except when it’s not, apparently.
In all these instances and ones like them, you can feel the weight of the Machine squeezing you into its own mold. All things exist for its sake. You thought you could do work for yourself but you cannot, even on your own, escape the gravity of the Machine.
Parts quality and design
Another challenge of running a small shop is being beholden to a massive, dysfunctional replacement parts system. This issue is especially difficult in truck and automotive repair. Some trades work closer to raw materials and have more flexibility in how to approach a problem. But in truck repair, you have little to no say in how something was originally designed and that leaves you with no control over how to fix it. You're stuck with whatever parts were made for the vehicle, with no input on their design or quality.
This has always been the case, but it’s gotten worse since COVID. Many parts arrive broken or incorrectly boxed. And unfortunately, some defective parts can only be identified after installation and testing. Since we make money primarily on labor, having to swap out a faulty part means doing the job twice—for no extra pay. This happens all too often.
Just two weeks ago, a customer asked us to replace a radiator. Luckily for us, he brought the part himself—brand new from the local Freightliner dealer. After hours spent installing it and refilling the coolant, the corner of the brand-new radiator started leaking. The bottom tank had been improperly crimped. We had to remove the radiator and get a replacement the next day. Since the customer brought his own part, we charged him to do the job again, but in most cases, we eat the cost because companies rarely cover labor in their parts guarantees.
On top of poor parts quality, modern trucks increasingly rely on proprietary parts that are difficult to source or replace. Older trucks used rubber hoses and standard clamps that you could easily fabricate on the roadside. But today’s trucks use hard plastic coolant lines with fragile, proprietary fittings that must be ordered. You can’t just rig up a quick fix. The other night, I had to chase down a small plastic coolant line for a Volvo—it cost $50 at the dealer. If the part hadn’t been in stock, the truck would’ve been out of commission, stuck because of bad engineering and supply chain issues.
The parts system is fragile and overly complicated, and I’m the one paying the price with my time.
Extraction of our unpaid labor
Perhaps the most frustrating way the Machine works against self-employed business owners is through the companies that insert themselves between you and the customer, tracking and approving work and payments. These middlemen create overly complicated systems, forcing us to spend our time managing the complexity they’ve invented. Essentially, they’re using us as unpaid consultants.
In the trucking industry, fleet management companies like FleetNet handle billing and payments for large corporations like FedEx. We deal with this every day at our shop. Rather than just charging the corporation for their service, these companies skim a percentage off our final bill—typically 8%, plus credit card processing fees. Another intermediary even tried to make us reenter every invoice into their system, a task that should be done by their own employees. They were trying to use us as free office labor. We declined their "job offer."
This expectation of free labor extends even to our suppliers. Earlier this year, Cummins—a multi-billion-dollar company—tried to collect on a $150 bill we had already paid. They forced us to dig through our files to find proof of payment, which we provided. The real issue turned out to be that their credit card processor hadn’t withdrawn the funds from our account. Even after we showed them our receipt, they threatened to send the bill to collections.
Who do we bill for the two hours we spent acting as their unpaid office managers? It’s absurd that a giant company like Cummins would waste our time tracking down a $150 payment error, especially when the fault was with their system. Attempting to collect two years later is just insane.
This all highlights how the Machine orients even small, auxiliary systems toward its own benefit. It robs us of time, resources, and our basic humanity. We generally enjoy fixing trucks and take pride in ensuring packages are delivered and groceries make it to store shelves. But these soul-crushing mechanisms make even simple repairs feel burdensome, turning us into cogs in a machine we never agreed to join.
And yet, this is the gravity of the Machine—there is no escape.
This is very good. I will try to reread more slowly. For now, thank you, and keep up the good work.
Thanks for reading!