When I left high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Randomly, I spent a year in a harbor town, learning to become a ship's captain. The class continued after that year, but I didn't because I realized halfway through it wasn't the life for me. As part of the first year's program, however, there was a six-week trainee period on a ship. Mine happened on a small container ship running between Oulu, Finland, various ports in Germany, and sometimes Sweden. That experience left me with the best two truths and a lie, and also an annoyance with cargo ships in space opera. In this essay, I want to explain that annoyance, entangled as it is with the love that I will always have for space cowboys and big damn heroes. I am mostly going to be talking about the books that deal with shipping cargo (with the sole exception of Becky Chamber's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet). I am purposely excluding military SF as well as SF that mostly takes place on station or planet side, as well as space opera that doesn’t deal with the workmanlike aspects of cargo, such as Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes. Mostly because otherwise, we could be here forever.