Well, I just realized that we’ve been around for nearly nine months and we haven’t really given an account of ourselves on the level of knowledgy knowledge.
Sure, many people know about us at the level of seeming. They know that we are officially an “ice-trucking” company, have a fanatical association with heavy metal, have a website, IrkutskIceTruckers.com (which you’re probably reading from right now), etc.
But they probably don’t really know us, our story, how and why we came to be, etc. And as Aristotle says that knowledge of the fact alone is insufficient and it is better rather to possess knowledge of the reasoned fact, that is, the fact and why it is what it is and no other, we’re here today to give an account of ourselves.
We’ve told bits and pieces of this already of course, but Irkutsk Ice Truckers was inspired by a man who, since our founding, has had almost no interaction with us. I’m talking about Ryan, the Senior whose risibility brought about our rise into something he never could have imagined.
Ryan sort of mentioned the idea of ice trucking to our founders, who took on the business idea he was really just randomly mentioning and were inspired to make it a reality or bring it into actuality. He had said Irkutsk Ice Truckers in a joking manner, but the WCC Class of 2022, urged on to do great things by the divine wisdom everpresent among them (Andrew) decided there was something to his words.
It began as a joke, an attempt to “get” Ryan, as several of us played along with the idea of “Irkutsk Ice Truckers”. We bought a few ice trucks, launched our website, set up our email servers, and launched a single ice trucking route Anchorage to Irkutsk across the Bering Strait. Everett, the official founder and the one to whom Ryan directed his “joking statements” was our first driver, president, owner, and mechanic for about a month. Our other founders were supporters of him but did little. When you have only one truck, two people can’t drive it at once, right?
But then Everett and the other founders, the members of the Board realized that there were other needs closer to home for the WCC community that needed vibrant and innovative new entrepreneurs to be met. At that time, Everett was also exhausted having had to leave Lander at 6 pm every night, drive at 500 miles an hour all night to run our own scheduled route, and return by 7 am the next morning.
“A couple of months of no sleep may do wonders for your rocker look,” he commented, “but I found I couldn’t rock much anymore, too exhausted as I was.”
So Everett decided to spend most of his time developing the larger business of ice-road-trucking”. This meant frequent cancellations of our night-trucking service but allowed us to launch other related businesses of importance from Irkutsk Ice and Metal Mining, a band called the Death Metalhead Ice Truckers, movies with Irkutsk Ice Films including the blockbuster Tetonic Blast, dating assistance services, sourcing engineering. We became jointly associated with the agency of ETBMugBug and Bro’s in Winter 2018/2019 while supporting charities like HSDT (How to Shut Down Tangents) and launching our first online social network service – Facetruck.
Even as our primary business of ice-trucking declined, revenues more than doubled month over month to $0.50 in February as our customer base tripled. A hub for all our business ventures and our leading news coverage – from Lander to the world – Irkutsk Ice Truckers News was launched in January and outpaced all of our other ventures combined as several new employees were signed on just for our rapidly growing news coverage. Professor Thomas Urgo of North Carolina was appointed as our manager of sales amidst this growth and we were finally able to resume our full ice-trucking schedule with the late hire of James Green as an upper region driver.
A broadening of our online audience led us to hire S. Ezra Smith to launch content curated to our American audiences and THE Average Muslim Liturgist for our Muslim readers and insight on liturgical traditions more broadly. Irkutsk Ice Care (health-care services formed on new insights from our research division) and Irkutsk Ice Weddings were each launched in March as we aimed to meet the needs of the Wyoming Catholic College student community (out of which he had begun) even better.
Mysteries, confusion, and tensions spread through the community that month while we brought on Sophomore (at that time) Sophia Donaldson as a commentator, drawing upon her years of community organizing work. IIT, our new holding company more broadly for all of our businesses, won a WCC contact for operating an ice-cream shop seasonally on school property in April, which later became known as Irkutsk Ice Cream. IIT was heavily involved in studying the situation and reassuring the community when six Protestants showed up to visit Ruth later in the month.
Our first published book, the Evangelium Andreii launched our publishing division, Irkutsk Ice Books, in May as a dating website for WCC students and metalheads, MetalMatch entered beta-testing that same month.
But that’s only just the beginning, IIT has a lot more planned, from t-shirts and other official merchandise to welcoming the new freshmen class trucker style, to fulfilling our mission of bringing metal to every industry.
So we’re just getting started.
Why don’t you support our mission by buying our custom t-shirt, reading more of our articles, or taking a look at the wisdom and teachings of Andrew? And if you are not yet a WCC student rocker – consider being one!