Going under a bus

I have a new staff member. Sadly he is staff at work rather than staff at home. It would be nice to have a butler... Anyway, later this week I intend to get him to update and improve much of our process documentation at work. The reason for this is that it will be needed if I get "run over by a bus". The number of times you hear people worry about dying in this messy way, you might thing it was a particularly common way to end your days on this Earth.

As an actuary, death rates and causes are something of a specialty of mine. I have tables which tell me how many people out of a large group will die in a given period of time. I have access to tables which detail the percentages of deaths which are due to different diseases or methods of passing on.

So I looked up the "Going Under A Bus Rate", or GUABR as the more senior actuaries call it (generally seems that the more senior you are, the more you tend to use impenetrable acronyms). I was surprised at what I found. I thought that I'd start by looking up the GUABR rate for 28 year old males. I myself am a 28 year old male so this would be a pertinent statistic. I could use it to bolster my case for documentation improvement.

Here's the shocking part. If you took a large group of say, 1000 28 year old males, 46% of them will die from being run over by a bus (or related injury) before they reach 30. 46%. That is 460 young men with everything to live for. Some of them may have wives. Some may even have children. Some who hail from Barnsley may even have grandchildren. I can't even begin to estimate the mega-tonnes of sadness that all this death would cause.

But it gets worse... The chance of a 35 year old male dying by bus before his 40th birthday is 92%! Almost unbelievable. It's a wonder you don't see middle aged men piled haphazardly by the side of the road in bloody heaps, carrion crows picking languidly at their toupees.

Now I understand why bus journeys can be so bumpy sometimes.

So I am now quite worried about my own future. Almost an evens chance of me being splatted within the next two years. Bugger. I guess there are two things that need to be done now. Somebody (not me, I'm too lazy) needs to start a campaign to reduce bus-related deaths. And secondly, you should all update your process documentation asap. Your colleagues will thank you for it when you're gone.