Global Logistics

This is a subject I touch on a lot, but it's been a while since I've take a few moments to reflect publicly on the subject, and I think it's something we often have a tendency to lose perspective on.


As some of you know, I work retail for a living. Recently, while putting up some freight, I came across a pen in a box of shoes. The pen had obviously not been placed their intentionally, and my assumption is that it fell out of a shirt pocket of an employee and the packaging location for that particular pair of shoes. As I was busy that day, I just grabbed the pen and put it in my pocket. Later, as I got to thinking about it more closely, I pulled the pen back out and looked at it in a different light.


This pen once belonged to a factory worker, somewhere out there. There was a worker out there, somewhere, who had at some point in the not so distant past, found themselves in the same position I often find myself in...looking everywhere for my pen that has miraculously disappeared. The difference is usually my pen ends up in a drawer in my office, this persons pen ended up in the hands of a retail manager in central Indiana. This pen, had found it's way across the country, into my hands of all the places it could have been sent. This pen was now an actual tangible connection between myself, and the person who used to own it. My life, and their life are now in the smallest of ways, connected, and all because of a lost pen.


I don't know who that individual is, and I may never know, but I do know that it's a bit awe inspiring to think about the implications of it. How many people that we will never know, are we connected to in the same way? Who packaged the computer you are reading this on? Who was the person who stocked the coffee mug you drink out of each morning onto the retail shelf you purchased it from? Who are you connected to, and in what ways?


Everything is part of the same web. Everybody is part of the massive Global Organism that our modern world has not only created, but perpetuated without most of our even noticing. But it is certainly something worth taking note of. This phenomenon is an opportunity to stay connected on a global scale, with the remainder of our kind...people.


I left my pen on a table in a McDonalds in Frankfort Indiana. I don't know what has happened to my pen since that day several weeks ago, but I know that by placing it there, I've made myself a part of bigger adventure than I can ever begin to imagine. Perhaps my pen was picked up by a truck driver on his way through town and is not resting in the center console of his rig. Perhaps it was picked up by a stay at home mom who now uses it every week to fill out her grocery list. Perhaps it was simply thrown in the trash. I don't know where it came from, and I don't know where it's gone, but I do know that for the briefest of times, it was with me. And whether for good or ill, I had an effect. The smallest of effects, but still an effect.