One out, all out
MURPHY, you will recall, taught us that if something can go wrong, it will. (A subset of his law provides that Murphy was an opti- mist.) Just In Time management is especial- ly susceptible to this law. The petrol stations had learned to expect their supplies just in time, for who wanted to sit on expensive inflammable stocks if there would always be another tanker coming down the road? So, when the tankers stopped, everything stopped. In a wider sense, the oil producers are in Murphy's camp. They have kept the new paradigm going with cheap and plenti- ful fuel, but now the demand is so strong that the fuel has ceased to be cheap, and we are out of stock. (The United States has an emergency tank, but getting Al Gore elect- ed seems to count as an emergency.) Even the euro has fallen away from its schedule. We are all of us apt to confuse good luck with good management, and it takes quite a lot of both to keep a Just In Time system going, in a factory or in a global economy. Murphy is ready to see it go wrong, and to arrange for us all to be Just Not In Time.
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