For the past 25 years I’ve been a trucker. There have been some technological advances in our field but so far they haven’t come up with a way to replace trucks and drivers. We still do the job better than anything else including railroads.

For the past 17 years I’ve been contractually associated with a company that has grown from being small to one of the largest and most successful in the nation. Is that good? Yes and no! Two things I’ve enjoyed. First and foremost, I’ve enjoyed the freedom of the road and independent responsibility my occupation has allowed.

The other is the enjoyment of establishing friendships and relationships with the people I’ve done business with – well most, anyway. All this now is rapidly changing. Business contacts that used to be handled by personally or by telephone conversations are now being computerized. People I’ve come to know over the years are losing their jobs. Agents who used to make personal contacts with customers now do it all either by phone or the Internet. Many of them don’t even live in the regions they serve anymore. Our company has been trying to computerize their people run dispatch system, and have urged us all to get computers and become computer literate so that they can close down their dispatch offices.

Sound good? I’m not sure it is. I’ve resisted it. I like talking to the people I’ve come to be friends with for the past 17 years. Last week I got fined $65 for failing to get a periodic– every four months — inspection that for years my friends in the dispatch offices had reminded me was coming due. Was it just a people error? Nope. It seems that the company kept them from telling me as a means of “urging” me to switch to computerization.

According to them that’s how the cow is going to eat the grass from now on. I don’t want to switch. I like my human contacts. I don’t want to see my friends lose their jobs. I don’t want to lose mine either, at least not yet. If I’m going to stay in business and keep working, I guess I have to get with their program and give up on the idea of enjoying human relationships. Is this progress? I don’t think so. I think it is dehumanizing and inhumane, to say nothing of being inhuman. But what can we do? The alternatives don’t look either promising or enjoyable, at least not in the long run.

Yesterday we had a windstorm and power outage. When I went to report it both to the power and telephone companies I found myself talking entirely to computers. If you think it is bad when you’ve had business conversations and found yourself talking to someone with an accent you had difficulty understanding because they happened to be India or somewhere on the other side of the world; now it’s just digitized voices that don’t eat, get paid, need medical or unemployment insurance, have feelings, and certainly no sense of humor. What’s this world coming to?

So much for the utopia of progress and modernization. The promise of economic improvement seems to be limited to fewer and fewer people most of whom call themselves CEO’s. If there’s a bright side, I’d like to know what it is.

Al Williams is a truck driver living in Oak Harbor.