Volvo Sees a Slowdown

So I'm back from having one of my knees cut open and stitched up and then spending a week locked up at the vet for a lucrative (not for me) TPLO procedure. Can't imagine going back in for the other one. Ouch, and ouch again. Anyway, doing pretty well other than that.

This, though, is one of the most staggering current economic statistics I've yet seen, courtesy The Financial Ninja:

Volvo said it received 115 order bookings for heavy trucks in Europe in the quarter, down from 41,970 trucks a year earlier.

I've looked at that for some time now, and somehow trying to think about some 42k bits of kibble shrinking to a mere 115 warps my fragile little mind way more than Eric Cartman's sometimes-amusing shtick ever could. I've seen cliff-diving before, and even imagined some steep ones, but never quite so steep.

Actually, the follow-on sentence just really clears everything right up:

Customers in Europe are taking a "wait and see" attitude amid turmoil in global financial markets, Volvo said.

Gee, you think?