Let's say, you snore. It pisses off your wife, girlfriend, bowling partners, whatever.
According to the government, you might have Sleep Apnea, especially if you drive a truck involved in interstate commerce. This infliction, they say, may cause you to become overly tired in your daily routine. A routine that involves sitting at a large, round wheel and watching white lines click by for hours & hours. Now it's hard to imagine how something as stimulating and thought provoking that would put you to sleep but add in the fact that the truck driver may have been sitting at a warehouse for hours waiting to load or unload and he or she has just listened to an hour of conversation with other drivers on how the industry operates and you might see why they could become comatose.
Now, somewhere in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy, there exists an agency called the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration or FMCSA. The folks that operate this agency have the power to decide what happens to truck drivers at the moment they turn on the key in their trucks to the moment they turn it off. At the urging of 'concerned citizens' (many of whom are lawyers, sleep study doctors and insurance sales people) the FMCSA has decided that sleep apnea is a plague that has descended on our nations trucking professionals and it must be eradicated using mountains of money. This would require that the FMCSA take control of the truck drivers life even when they are asleep.
Recently, that group of 'concerned citizens' all met at a 'safety conference' and agreed unanimously that the FMCSA should begin to determine whether a truck driver might be afflicted with sleep apnea by calculating their body mass index or BMI during routine physical exams. The hard working, public safety minded group agreed only many long, very expensive sleep study tests (performed by their members) could assure the motoring public that truck drivers were not sleeping as they piloted their monstrous commercial vehicles down America's highways. They recommended sleep studies be required for any commercial driver with a BMI of 35 or more.
As I explained this potential federally mandated gold mine to my currently unemployed girlfriend Anna, she smiled and slipped her warm hand under the third roll of cellulite on my chest. "Wow!" she exclaimed. "You mean I could get paid for looking at fat guys sleeping? It would be just like a weekend with you only I wouldn't have to pay!"
And so, the idea of a new cash cow (no pun intended) for my ladies was born. Here's the plan:
My new company - Sleep Lovers Underwriters Technology Systems, Inc or SLUTS, Inc. will develop mobile sleep apnea study vans that will operate throughout North America. These vans will carry the most up to date sleep apnea technology and the testing will be administered by my team of crack sleep experts.
The studies will be completed at the drivers convenience and a certificate of compliance issued. The studies will cost less than a third of sleep clinic studies and we guarantee complete satisfaction as well as a memorable experience. The program is currently in the review process by FMCSA and will be officially announced upon acceptance by the agency.
