Stupidity on Parade

Everybody knows/That the world is full of stupid people. Remember Banditos by The Refreshments? Truer words were never sung to a catchy pop tune. Sometimes I wish that we could set up special times of the day for these people to be let out, so the rest of us could get our shit done without having to suffer along with these unfortunates.

Part of it, I know, is that some people just haven’t experienced life. They’re young, or they’ve been sheltered. For instance, there’s a guy at the office who came to us fresh out of school. Poor guy. He gets thrown in with the rest of us hardened, cynical professional types, and has to endure our looks when he asks us to explain ROI. I want to pat him on the head sometimes. Other times, I want to bark at him to settle down. Some of us are tired, dammit.

Or the young kid driving the Jeep that I got behind coming home from work late last night. Just my luck, I get behind the one Jeep owner in the world that doesn’t see merging as a personal challenge. So I’m stuck at a crawl while Studley the Testosterone boy is thumping his block-rocking bass, with his friends doing their impression of Night at the Roxbury. Dude. Owning a vehicle with plastic windows does not automatically impart to you some sort of fierce individualism that the rest of us feel compelled to cower in front of. I can break into your car with a lit cigarette, okay? You’re only one step removed from duct-taping garbage bags to the door frame. Yes, I see the huge mud-shoveling tires and the chrome extras package, and I’m truly sorry about your penis, but for the love of Chrysler would you use the fucking accelerator?

Then there are the people that don’t realize that the rules apply to them, too. These are the assholes parked in the fire lanes or going through the parking lot against the arrows. Or you get behind them in the express line at the grocery store, where they are claiming that 127 cans of cat food and a bag of Doritos count as only two items, and then try to pay for it with a third-party check from North Yemen. Hey numbnuts, take your shekels over to the regular line, and let me ring up my potato wedges and get back to work, hmmm?

Something else that frosts my ass (apart from a three-foot snowcone) is when parents encourage their children to remain stupid. I know a woman that completely indulges her son in his incapacity to do anything for himself. I’ve overheard several panicked calls. “Mooooom. There’s nothing to eeeeeeat.” It makes me want to bitch-slap him. Here he is, 20-odd years old, in college, and he can’t turn on the fucking stove? He works in a restaurant, for God’s sake! If they won’t teach him how to cook, he could at least get some food there, you think? Leave early. Get food. Eat food. Clock in. Work. How hard is that to figure out? What makes me want to beat this woman about the head and shoulders is the fact that she indulges this codependency. “Okay, sweetie. I’ll leave here in time to drive the 40 minutes home and cook you something before you have to go to work.” Makes me want to cut her gas line just so “sweetie” has to develop some fucking domestic skills.

When you think about it, stupidity is the biggest roadblock to progress you can name. So much time is wasted because we have to dumb-down the game for the conceptually-challenged. These are the folks that don’t realize the full potential of what’s in front of them. As an example, I had occasion to visit a new doctor recently. It was fortunate that I got there early, because the registration paperwork was approximately the size of the Yellow Pages, and asked for a family history going back to the “begat” lists in Chapter 5 of Genesis. Did it not occur to anyone in the office that it might save some time if they put their forms online? That way, I could fill them out at home, where I can call grandparents and third cousins, look up old obituary clippings, and go online to try and determine what caused that weird growth on Aunt Josephine’s neck. The thing that really pissed me off was going up to the desk to deliver the stupid document, and seeing their gaggle of Clerk II typists entering the information into the database. How much effort is being duplicated, here? All of it. Add to that the fact that my handwriting looks like it was penned by a ferret on crack, and I know that my rather benign occasional sleep apnea is probably in their records now as acute ebola.

MySpace. ‘Nuff said.

I know that life is hard when you’re stupid, but only to a point. Some people are too dumb even to realize that, and they’re the ones that drag the rest of us down to their level, then beat us with experience.

This is why I own a gun, because as the song goes on to say: Well I got the pistol so I'll keep the pesos/Yeah and that seems fair.