Long story short: Bus driver in Tacoma, Washington has a brain fart while driving an empty school bus, plows into pickup truck as well as another school bus. Thankfully nobody is hurt.
Yes, this is a story that really sucks for all those involved, but the fact of the matter, nobody is going to get around a couple of things, and is probably the reason why this is making the rounds on the internets recently as it has been:
- The driver of the bus that was hit appears to be around 116 years old
- The driver of the bus that caused the accident appears to be around 850 lbs.
The media is not naïve, and understands the general gist of captivating viewers, which is precisely the way they are displaying this news report the way they’re doing it. They can paint the picture of the female bus driver being irresponsible with negligent driving, and also not wearing her safety belt appropriately, but the fact of the matter is that they’ll do whatever it takes to continuously show the video clip of the actual collision, because fat people put into strenuous situations is fucking hilarious.
Take all the context out of the equation and what we have is a morbidly obese woman in a rear-end collision, with her gelatinous body flailing and jiggling wildly as a result. It is the kind of stuff that was born to be viral, and pretty much everyone knows it. The fact that nobody was hurt or injured in the entire situation is relief to all outlets that want to feel less guilt about exploiting the tragic clip to hook viewers and keep them watching.
When I first saw this, I was running on the treadmill, so there was no sound and no closed captioning. All I saw were clips of both bus drivers, and frankly it was difficult to surmise which one was the guilty party, because one driver was ancient, and the other was clearly irresponsible enough to let herself get to her current size. My initial thought was “aren’t there any regulations about the people driving our kids to school??” But the important thing is that they showed the collision so many times in the report that I had absolutely no choice but to seek out the entire story when I got back to my computer.
Typically, a lot of news stories go without much follow-up, if any at all. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if this story gets a follow up, like what disciplinary action the female bus driver gets, if she gets sued by the pickup truck driver, or if the old man driver decides to retire, just so that whatever outlet that reports it has an excuse to play the clip of the collision a few more times.
Nobody was hurt, so it’s okay to laugh. Right?
