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Be suspicious of any passionate bus driver. You should always be cautious with people who care about their job anyway, but a bus driver even more so.

There was a particularly enthusiastic bus driver in my town back in the late 90s. He really cared about the buses. There are people who care about buses, and there are people who care about buses. He was the latter. The buses were his life. They were his wife. His home, church and something else that I don't even understand.
His main gripe was OAPs, old folk and that. He said their free bus passes were a drain on the company's resources. Like most passionate people he turned to a life of multiple homicides. He was the second biggest killer of pensioners in my town, losing out only to pneumonia.

He used to drink at the same pub as me, and we'd chat every so often. I told him what he was doing didn't make any sense.

"If the people are dead, they can't put money into the buses anyway." I said. But the thing with serial killers is they rarely listen to reason. I think he thought his killings would act as a deterrent for people growing old. There was a subtle genius in it. It certainly struck fear into the hearts of men and women. 65th birthday parties were now melancholy affairs, because certain death became quite certain.

I remember the last time I saw him was the day before he turned 65. We were in the pub and I bought him a pint to wish him a happy birthday.

"Not much happy about it" he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"I'll have to kill myself, won't I?" He explained that he'd have to kill himself to show he was serious about what he'd been doing.

"You could just not get a bus pass" I told him, but he looked at me like I was crazy. That was the last time I saw him.

Adam, Somerset.

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