5
My experience dealing with Tom Busic at Ippolito Produce
There are moments in logistics that make you pause, stare at your screen, and genuinely wonder if reality has started taking creative writing liberties.
This was one of those moments.
We’re in California. Capacity is tight. Trucks are basically mythical creatures—everyone talks about them, few have actually seen one available at the right time. So when Ippolito Produce needed coverage, we did what we always do: we made it happen.
No speeches. No negotiations over hero status. Just solving the problem.
Fast forward to the border.
The CBSA system goes down.
And suddenly, time itself does what it does best at borders—it disappears. Three to four hours of waiting. No movement. No control. No amount of “please process this” energy speeds up a government server reboot.
A textbook case of: nobody caused this, everybody suffered it.
Naturally, I assumed we’d file this under “unfortunate but understood.”
Tom Busic at Ippolito Produce had other ideas.
Somewhere between “global supply chain complexity” and “things outside human control,” a decision was made:
Let’s apply a $500 deduction.
Because apparently, in this version of reality, CBSA outages now come with a price tag—and carriers are the ones funding digital infrastructure recovery one invoice at a time.
What I found most impressive wasn’t even the deduction itself. It was the confidence. The quiet certainty that a carrier sitting idle at a frozen border should somehow be categorized under “avoidable inefficiency.”
It takes a special kind of imagination to look at a government system failure and think:
Yes. This is clearly a trucking issue.
And of course, this is where the industry becomes interesting.
Because everyone loves capacity when it’s scarce. Everyone appreciates urgency when the load needs to move. But the real personality test shows up when things go wrong and there’s no convenient party to blame—except, apparently, the truck still sitting there.
I’ve learned over time that freight doesn’t just move goods. It quietly records behavior.
Who helped when it mattered.
Who penalized when it didn’t.
Who understood context—and who preferred deductions over dialogue.
So here we are.
A $500 lesson, not in logistics—but in selective interpretation of events.
No hard feelings, of course. The industry is too small for that and too repetitive for it to matter in the long run.
But if CBSA outages are now considered billable carrier performance failures, I suppose we should start preparing a new rate sheet:
A reminder that in trucking, the load moves forward… but common sense sometimes doesn’t.
There are moments in logistics that make you pause, stare at your screen, and genuinely wonder if reality has started taking creative writing liberties.
This was one of those moments.
We’re in California. Capacity is tight. Trucks are basically mythical creatures—everyone talks about them, few have actually seen one available at the right time. So when Ippolito Produce needed coverage, we did what we always do: we made it happen.
No speeches. No negotiations over hero status. Just solving the problem.
Fast forward to the border.
The CBSA system goes down.
And suddenly, time itself does what it does best at borders—it disappears. Three to four hours of waiting. No movement. No control. No amount of “please process this” energy speeds up a government server reboot.
A textbook case of: nobody caused this, everybody suffered it.
Naturally, I assumed we’d file this under “unfortunate but understood.”
Tom Busic at Ippolito Produce had other ideas.
Somewhere between “global supply chain complexity” and “things outside human control,” a decision was made:
Let’s apply a $500 deduction.
Because apparently, in this version of reality, CBSA outages now come with a price tag—and carriers are the ones funding digital infrastructure recovery one invoice at a time.
What I found most impressive wasn’t even the deduction itself. It was the confidence. The quiet certainty that a carrier sitting idle at a frozen border should somehow be categorized under “avoidable inefficiency.”
It takes a special kind of imagination to look at a government system failure and think:
Yes. This is clearly a trucking issue.
And of course, this is where the industry becomes interesting.
Because everyone loves capacity when it’s scarce. Everyone appreciates urgency when the load needs to move. But the real personality test shows up when things go wrong and there’s no convenient party to blame—except, apparently, the truck still sitting there.
I’ve learned over time that freight doesn’t just move goods. It quietly records behavior.
Who helped when it mattered.
Who penalized when it didn’t.
Who understood context—and who preferred deductions over dialogue.
So here we are.
A $500 lesson, not in logistics—but in selective interpretation of events.
No hard feelings, of course. The industry is too small for that and too repetitive for it to matter in the long run.
But if CBSA outages are now considered billable carrier performance failures, I suppose we should start preparing a new rate sheet:
- Weather delay: $250
- Traffic: $150
- Government system outage: $500
- Existential crisis caused by above: negotiable
A reminder that in trucking, the load moves forward… but common sense sometimes doesn’t.
