2019 Hog Hunt Day 0 - Drive Day

A guy I work with is retiring soon - his last day in one month.  Most of his work, like mine, is in the trenches keeping the day-to-day business running.  The kind of work management says we need to stop doing so much of so more focus can be made on innovation.  Whatever that is.  As someone who has been in the department forever, he's indispensable.  Management has chosen not to replace him.  His work is being spread among the rest of the department, meaning the rest of the department that already does the work keeping the day-to-day business running.  The kind of work management says we need to stop doing so much of...
It seems like management is looking for an out on this one.  They are hoping people will step up and volunteer for this work to be absorbed into the system with minimal consequences.  I haven't bitten ... yet.  Management gets paid to make these decisions.  Whether they are supported after is another thing.  I'd like to believe that the decrease in bodies makes my job safer, makes my role slightly more indispensable, but if anything it makes it more perilous.  If no one exists to do the day-to-day work to keep the business running, that leaves only the boy-wonders (and girl-wonders) - who scoff at the day-to-day business denigrate those who do it - to work on innovation.  Whatever that is.  The short term implications would be minimal; the long term ... terminal.
Management wants to believe they follow the model of Steve Jobs and Lee Iacocca - charismatically leading to greatness.  But management's decisions often look far more like Jim Jones.  Desiring blind devotion but to what end?  Elon Musk may be a more current management idol, but the ongoing self destruction makes an analogy to Jim Jones almost too pertinent.
So what does all this have to do with hunting hogs?  Increasingly when I go on these adventures, I can't help but look back from some speculative future of unemployment and see it as financial self-immolation.  But if I'm going to live that way, I may as well be unemployed already, or at least underemployed, since at least then I won't have to drink the Kool-Aid (Mr. Smarty-Pants reminds us that Kool-Aid wasn't the drink used in Jonestown, so in deference to Kraft, we should be reminded that Jel-Sert's Flavor Aid was the beverage of choice.  It was cheaper...).

What counts as work, in the skilled trades, has some intrinsic limits; once a house or bridge is built, that’s the end of it. But in white-collar jobs, the amount of work can expand infinitely through the generation of false necessities—that is, reasons for driving people as hard as possible that have nothing to do with real social or economic needs. - Tim Wu

Jim Jones and Elon Musk be damned, I was out the door after work, in the early evening.  I swore I wasn't going to do this; that I was just going to get up super early and head out through the Winter Storm Warning in the wee hours of the morning.  But the cheap hotel about three hours from home and just outside of the storm's impact area started to make too much sense.
I drive in the dark every morning but there is something different at night.  Overhead lights glare meaner, oncoming headlights are angrier.  Still, the drive went well enough with only one backup at the I75/71 split until I thought I was almost to my destination of Corbin, Kentucky, only to look at the GPS and see 82 more miles.

I clicked through the miles one by one, checked into my hotel and got a meatball Subway sub and a Sprite Zero.  I'll have an idea in the morning if Day 0 was worth it.