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Excavator and freighter: "Phew, looks bad"
Photo: AP
It's the cutest disaster ever.
What keeps our world going, what goes wrong in the world, all boils down to this one picture.
A brave excavator driver who tries to dig a container ship of 240,000 tons with his commercially available construction site excavator.
The bulbous bow of the ship, usually hidden below the waterline, has dug deep into the desert sand slope.
The entire vehicle is hopelessly wedged in the canal, but a lonely excavator driver digs and pretends to be able to do something.
How we all rummage and act like our actions have an impact on the bigger picture.
It is one of the most important waterways in the world, a bottleneck of globalization.
Armies have been mobilized in the past to secure the canal.
Elsewhere, warships fanned out to drive pirates away in their boats.
Now a simple maneuvering error lies like a finger on a coronary artery of world trade.
What does the excavator driver think of?
Allegedly, data and goods and people who can afford them flow unhindered around the globe.
As we have learned, this is precisely the gag in globalization.
Here we can now see that there is a banal and very tangible side - and it is on the most important waterway like on the A7 between Homberg (Efze) and Guxhagen, when a truck has crossed over again.
Given the layperson's basic, naive trust in those responsible, one would have to assume that certain precautions have been taken on the Suez Canal for comparable accidents.
Special ships, cranes, some kind of lifting device or scavenging mechanism, something big that is quickly on the spot to get the boat afloat again.
And not just eager little tugs who are also called »Mosaed« (helper) or »Mosaheb« (companion).
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Wrecked "Ever Given": Perhaps you'd better go around the Cape of Good Hope?
Photo: Mohamed Elshahed / AP
Now it turns out to be a mistake to assume a competence with which the incompetence of captains could be compensated.
Incompetence compensation competence.
Instead, there are craftsmen standing on the bank scratching their heads: “Phew, looks bad.
We'll try, but we can't guarantee anything «.
A situation that is reminiscent of another, less funny major crisis of these days.
The first customers are already nervously looking at the clock, because time is money.
Should they lift anchor and shop elsewhere?
At the sight of this excavator and its touching hopelessness one does not even have to trouble Sisyphus.
It is enough to think of the piercing looks of those waiting when you are fingering your wallet for change in your wallet for longer than usual at the supermarket checkout.
With the difference that the queue here does not reach over to the magazine shelf, but soon down to the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba.
The first customers are already nervously looking at the clock, because time is money.
Should they lift anchor and shop elsewhere?
For the next supermarket you would have to go around the Cape of Good Hope, that's 5600 kilometers.
If it takes even longer, then it's even worth it.
Next to the steel maritime cathedral is the tiny excavator with its shovel in the mud.
It's not just a picture, it's a symbol.
What can an excavator operator think about when he pokes at the foundation of the giant in such a situation?
In supply chains, liquefied gas, crude oil, freight prices, world trade?
End of working day?
Hopefully he is not a critic of globalization.
Otherwise he takes his time.