American trucking companies, understandably, are quite proud of their abilities to move enormous amounts of goods and materials daily – nearly 57.5 million pounds of freight a day, on average.
But even the best, most efficient and heaviest of all the heavyweight truckers today ranks as a freight hauling pip-squeak when compared to the astoundingly large haul one magical little elf makes one night each December.
This “trucker,” who hails from way up north, is named Saint Nicholas but more frequently goes by the handle Santa Claus. If you’ve ever driven on a Christmas Eve night you may have heard him on the CB. He’s known for his distinctive, bellowing laugh.
He’s also recognizable by his long, flowing white beard and hair, and for his signature red uniform trimmed in white fur. He’s also noted for doing an entire year’s worth of hauling in just one night, using a truly magical rig — an old-fashioned, ornate little sleigh pulled by eight small flying reindeer (and sometimes, in foggy conditions, a ninth little deer with what appears to be a red spotlight mounted on his nose).
Nick’s freight hauling numbers are truly remarkable.
For example, simply to bring two relatively small presents, weighing on average two pounds apiece, to the 640,000 kids who live in Dallas, Texas, Omnitracs’ hometown, he somehow stuffs a jaw-dropping 1.28 million packages totaling 2.56 million pounds into that little sleigh. That truly is a magical hauling performance because it would take, at a minimum, 57 full-size tractor-trailer rigs to truck all that stuff the nearly 4,000 miles from Santa’s warehouse to Dallas.
And the driving skills that would be required of the truck drivers who would have to drive all those trucks to match Santa’s Dallas one-night capacity would be prodigious. The first 2,000 or so of the miles on that road would put the guys on the Ice Road Truckers TV show to shame since it would require driving over the frozen Arctic Ocean and the frozen lakes, rivers, and tundra of northern Canada at extraordinarily high speeds. Such speed would be necessary to cover those 4,000 miles in just one night.
The task of delivering all those presents to the children of Dallas in one night also would require hundreds and hundreds of smaller local delivery trucks, staffed with teams of five or six (or more) always-hustling workers to get all those packages up onto the rooftops of all those Dallas homes. Still, it’s not clear how those workers would get all those packages down through those homes’ chimneys without Santa Claus’ magical powers.
And remember, all that would be required just to deliver two presents to each child in Dallas. Nationally there are around 75 million children under the age of 19. And globally that number pushes close to two billion. To move the 150 million packages (assuming two per child) weighing roughly 300 million combined pounds to American children, or the four billion packages weighing about eight billion pounds to all the world’s children truckers would need to amass a fleet of nearly 7,000 U.S. big rigs, and 89,000 full size tractor-trailer combos around the globe to get all those presents to the children. And they would have to destroy every speed limit ever dreamed of to get all those packages delivered on time.
Talk about logistical nightmares!
Thus, given the size of his task, it’s easy to see why the jolly old freight hauler from the North Pole only drives one night a year. He obviously needs the other 364 days each year to recover and rest up for his assignment next year.
Happy Holidays to all our trucking and logistics industry friends. And Happy Hauling in 2018!