*The Insidious effects of sleep deprivation on humour*

There was a boy once, let's call him Joe Blue-Eyes, your normal average boy, living in your normal average suburbia with the dreams of your average boy (*not the type you're thinking about you naughty person you*)

Till one day he heard the Faith and the call, and he knew it was good. The stories of Faith beyond Reason pushing and allowing Man to make remarkable achievements (while Joe Blue-Eyes was not sexist, he nevertheless unthinking adopted the social stereotypes of his culture. Hence the masculine pronouns was also to be used as a gender neutral term).

"We live to deliver" was now his creed and as he watched his heroes putting life and limb at risk to deliver the parcels, he knew that he wanted to be a DHL man. Jumping from a 40-story building with nothing but a fire-reel to prevent a gruesome death, running against the stampede of the bulls to retrieve a dropped packet and skateboarding through the mean backstreets of Bangkok was merely part of a day's work for these men and women of Faith! And Joe began to model his life after these incredible men and women.

Whenever he was faced with problem, he would ask himself, "what would the DHL man do in this situation?" And with the faith in his heart the days passed till he became one of his heroes.

Life was good for our young protangonist in the early days. His faith was strong, his body willing. He became known as the legendary figure who had snowboarded down the icy Alps to retrieve a box which had fallen from the plane. He had taken on the shadowy triads of Hong Kong when a letter had been sent to them by mistake. He had infiltrated a top-secret nuclear facility because the parcel had to be hand delivered but the guards did not understand the burning faith which governed our young hero's life and refused to let him in.

But slowly age and doubt crept in. Did he really LIVE to deliver or was it simply a job he was good at and wanted nothing more than to feel important? Was his faith sufficient to keep at bay the nightmares of the missions that sometimes went wrong? And who was that mysterious little girl with the long hair and cackling voice he sometimes saw?

It was little things at first, a slight hesistation to charge into a melee to get to the other side of the road. A detour to get round the burning debies and sniper-full roads. Till one day, when he could not jump over the Niagra Falls, harness only by a packet of tooth-floss to grab the letter that had fallen over the ledge. As he watched the letter slowly float down the mistly depths only to be churned into so much white froth by the thundering casade of water. That was when he fell to his knees and cried like a baby.

He had lost his faith and was no longer a DHL man.