I've Upped My Standards.

(Read 1 orsell your soul)

Time:	5:25 pm.
Music:	Bloodbath Eaten.

I'm considering a trip to HM tonight because the weather's so nice and I haven't been in a while.

I was talking with

lio the other night about the rigorous safety training a UPS Driver has to endure. It doesn't stop with the initial classes. It's pretty much a constant, ongoing thing from which you can never get away. Every week there's some new horror story about a driver that was crushed or killed or how someone ran over somebody's kid or dog. Last week we were informed about a driver in some other state that was close to retirement (mentioned, obviously, to add some degree of emotional weight). He was driving a big rig without his seatbelt fastened and apparently skidded off the road into a ravine. Dead. The reason he is dead is, of course, because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt.

I'm not anti-seatbelt by any means, I always wear mine (it's just a lap belt), but when they make outrageous claims about how a driver's life could have been saved if he/she had just been wearing his/her seatbelt I just don't see how it helps the cause. If your truck goes plunging off a bridge into the sea one hundred feet below it's not going to make much difference if you remembered to buckle up. Really.

One of my favorite instances of force-feeding the drivers a big, steaming pile of crap is when they showed us a picture of a package car that had been in some kind of horrible accident. The entire front of the truck was completely gone. You could see where the cab used to be, but the engine, steering wheel, drivers seat, etc. were no where to be found in the shot. The caption beneath the photo read; "Wearing a seatbelt saved this Driver's life!!!"

Ummm...no.

Not bloody likely.

If the driver's seat is gone, so is the driver. I don't know what hit this truck (or what the truck hit), but there seems to have been sufficient force to render the driver a lifeless side of beef. They probably had to sluice through a great deal of blood, chum and gore just to find some kind of identifying mark or limb, possibly a tooth to match up to dental records. I mean, give me a fucking break. You're not fooling anybody.

It's mind-numbing which, in this numb mind, seems to defeat the whole purpose.