Everything Breaks

Riding my bus today, I see a UPS truck being towed by one of those over-sized tow trucks.

I find myself wondering if they emptied it of its contents before hitching it up, and what sort of portable electronic tracking equipment UPS uses to record the transferred location of hundreds of documents and parcels that now have an altered ETA.

What exactly happened to that truck? Did the driver come back to it after a delivery to discover it wouldn't start? While it was incapacitated, did it tie up a fire lane?

Were I a mechanic for UPS and saw a truck get towed into my shop, I would be tremendously embarrassed. Fleet mechanics are supposed to know their machines backwards and forwards and identify potential problems well before they occur; at least, I'd suppose that's the expectation on them.

Were I a UPS executive in town on business and saw that sight, I also would be embarrassed. Perhaps I might entertain thoughts about arranging the sabotage of a FedEx truck to balance out the lost business of everybody who sees the disabled vehicle and forms opinions about my company's overall quality.

But everything breaks. The world is in a continual state of decay; things go from a state of order to chaos, and it is only by maintaining a vigilant stand against the corruption of nature that we can remain the same.

This, by the way, is G.K. Chesterton's definition of a conservative. In his time of a soot-filled atmosphere in England, he opined that a white lamp post will not remain white for long if left unattended. A progressive will state that the natural order of the lamppost is to become blacker and blacker and will embrace that change, taking credit for effecting it. The conservative, however, knows that in order to conserve the lamppost's intended character, one must always be repainting it and renewing it. The conservative therefore is the one who puts forth the effort to renew things in order to keep them the same, and the progressive leaves things to decay and praises this new state as an improved one, thanks to his own doing.

I can therefore infer that UPS' mechanics are a bunch of liberals.