For a professional driver (and school bus drivers like me most certainly count), there are two kinds of crashes. There are “preventable” crashes, which are due to driver error or incompetence. Say you ran a red light and pancaked a Geo Metro, or backed into a telephone pole and took out AT&T’s long distance for ten blocks. That’s preventable. On your driving record, it’s an official acknowledgement that you suck. If you didn’t suck, it wouldn’t have happened.
On the other hand, there are “non-preventable” crashes. If a drunk driver stuffs his car up under the back of your bus at a red light, or a chunk of flaming space station falls through the roof of your bus, there’s not much you can do about that. On your driving record, your supervisor will read it as an official acknowledgement that you probably suck, but they can’t prove it. You, the driver, are allowed to retain the right to look at yourself in the mirror and know that it isn’t true.
My record is clean, of course. I take great pride in the way I drive my bus. So naturally, as I put my foot down and steered my big yellow Thomas Built into a game of chicken with a fat, greasy bald man, astride a six-legged horse slash armadillo, wearing shiny copper-tinted armor and brandishing a flaming sledgehammer, the question that ran through my head was, “Is this going to be considered preventable, or non-preventable?”
The answer was a toss-up. Of course, I didn’t have to attempt to ram an armored warlord with my bus. In fact, I probably shouldn’t, given the likelihood of damage to Tib (my bus’ name) and myself. On the other hand, I had no kids aboard–it was just me and a giant talking cat named Annaluna (who, incidentally, would probably also be injured in the crash). And I think the fact that I was jousting in an attempt to rescue the twelve kids who had boarded my bus to go home a few afternoons ago was worth some consideration. And really, the odds of my not living long enough to even see my updated driving record were high enough to render it a moot point, but I was still worried. Take from that what you will.
Maybe I’d better start at the beginning.
