First, some housekeeping – I have gotten approximately one million emails asking what happened to the images throughout my site. Here’s the thing – since everything was moved, the links to the pictures are pointing to the wrong spot on the space-time continuum. As such, I have to go back and find the images and fix each link one by one. The album covers stuff is back in order, so go bananas with that. I am also trying to categorize my entries so those of you who like reading about flying can find those entries, while those of you who prefer to cry can go read the sad entries. It’ll take time. Also, the comments part of this here blog has been acting persnickety and I have someone much smarter than I looking into that. His name is Meatball and he is a two year old Jack Russell Terrier. Finally, I added links over on the right side to the album covers as well as my art site because I am about two Happy Meals(TM) away from being on food stamps. There. The house has been kept. Now the actual entry…

I’m sure it will come as no shock when I say that I have an exceedingly low tolerance for dumb people. Let’s define that, though. If a person has an IQ of, say, 70, and wears a dirty crumpled up baseball cap with a picture of Big Bird on it and spends lots of time clapping, they are retarded, not dumb. I have nothing but love for those folks, and I have found in my limited interaction with them that they can actually teach the rest of us a lot about how to enjoy what we have.

When it comes to the people I can’t be around (the other kind of retard), I’m talking about people with average and sometimes above average IQ (or whatever quotient they use to measure basal intelligence) who for some reason depart from logic and spend lots of time wringing their hands in fear of some scenario they have dreamt up, rather than learning from experience and using life to help them understand the way things are. These are the people who are generally ineffective because they are just bright enough to have a semi-profound thought, but not quite bright enough to do anything with it.

Shitty Lifechoicers – I mentioned it a few entries back – they know that a certain friend is a douchebag who causes trouble or has no social skills, but every time you talk to them, they have another story about how that person made bad things happen to them. A similar condition afflicts people who date losers over and over, but I think in that case it is more of a psychological condition than simple stupidity. An extension of the self-loathing it takes to surround yourself with people who are no good for you is this person –

“Dude, did I do something to piss Steve off?”
“You mean Salesguy Steve?”
“Yeah. I said hi to him today and he just looked at me and walked by. He seems like he’s pissed about something.”
“Wait. Steve from sales. Right? The guy who doesn’t wear socks, shaves his forearms, and cheats on his wife? We’re talking about the same guy?”
“Yeah. Cockbag McToolbox Steve. That’s the one. He seems like he hates me all of a sudden.”
“He’s a total douche. Why the hell do you care, and can I get back the time I just spent talking about this?”

We all know someone who doesn’t like someone else, but for some weird reason is disappointed if that person doesn’t like them. I don’t understand that. I like everyone I meet until they give me reason not to, and then if I decide I don’t like them, they no longer exist. I won’t necessarily walk up to them and force them to hate me, but I’m not going to go out of my way to accommodate them or engage them in conversation, and nothing could possibly matter less to me than what they think of me. In fact, it’s better if they don’t like me, because that reduces the number of seconds I have to waste interacting with them.

Another example – people who will not admit that there are correct answers to certain questions, or notruthers. When I was in high school I took this civics class and we talked about social issues as a group. A group of Georgia public high school students. So you know it was awesome and insightful. The debate of the day was the Iraq/Kuwait thing that was in full effect at the time. We had people who thought war for any reason was wrong, people who wanted to put it in God’s hands, people who said we should nuke the entire region, and a handful of people who weren’t retarded. We (non-retards) brought up the issue of alternate energy sources. How are we going to incentivize anyone to really dump some huge bucks into batteries, solar, wind, whatever and make it work like it should? It came to a point where our teacher asked us for an answer, and we’d have to debate it the next day.

So I thought long and hard about it. I wanted an answer that I knew would work. Nothing will make everybody happy, but I know there is an answer to the question “What will make us as a nation really look for other ways to produce energy?”

My answer the following day was “Oil needs to cost $300 a barrel and gasoline should be about $10 a gallon.” (collective gasp). ONE person agreed with me, and I was baffled. Considering the millions of times we have seen this economic model in action, people still whined about a bunch of apocalyptic scenarios in which people would have to burn their children to heat their homes. Crazy, illogical, slippery slope answer that stupid people use. BULL. SHIT. Call it a flaw in the system or the beauty of free enterprise, but if you can make it financially more appealing to pursue another avenue, they will find their way every time. None of the world-ending scenarios that the worriers dream up have ever come to fruition. Why? Not because a government program prohibited it, but because that scenario stops making sense somewhere between “people will not enjoy paying that much” and “nuclear holocaust”.

Fast forward roughly 20 years, and look around you. Gas is expensive. People like me (yes, I am the little guy. I have to be extremely careful where I put my dollars) can hardly afford to drive anywhere. And holy shitballs, batman – suddenly Atlanta is figuring out how to make a workable light rail system. Our current light rail system is seeing more business than ever, the big bad evil oil companies are putting record numbers of dollars into battery technology, wind energy, and other non-oil sources. It’s even starting to look like America is finally going to wake the fuck up and start producing nuclear energy like the rest of the world has been doing for 40 years. Can you believe it? Out of financial necessity we are polluting less and walking more. Sure, we’d all like to see a world where everyone does those things out of the goodness of their hearts, but that’s out in the realm of warm fuzzy feelings, which is not the way things work.

So I went into more detail than I had intended with that one, but my point was that some people will only argue the negative – Ooh. look what bad could possibly happen. We’d better not try anything. Special thanks to the dipshits who tied themselves to bulldozers in protest of building nuclear power plants in the 70s. I’m sure the thousands of people who die every year due to the mining and use of coal are grateful that you had your best stupid opinion in mind. Look at what history shows to work, and give that a shot.

Before you fire off an angry email, let me assure you that I am one of the losers in this situation. You think auto fuel is expensive? Try filling an airplane with aviation fuel. As a result, no one can afford flight training, every airline and charter company is feeling the pain, and guys like me have a tough time finding a job. Do I cry about it and wish ill on the big bad corporations? Hell no. Those corporations are going to be at least partly responsible for whatever gets us out of this, so we’d better be careful which hand we bite. Anywhere there are losers there have to be winners, and they are the ones I need to watch and learn from. I personally think that the current energy “crisis” is going to turn out to be a renaissance of ingenuity that history will look on very favorably, and I’m amped to see what new ideas come out of it. Hopefully my generation isn’t such a bunch of weeping pussies that they can see past their temporary setbacks and do something useful.

Back on subject now – more categories of irritating dumbness:

People who get way too caught up in stupid details/their own ego. Also known as people I wish would kill themselves. I was watching that show “Flipping Out” where this completely obsessive compulsive gay dude buys houses and fixes them up. He is a hard worker and therefore successful, but a nasty rude piece of shit, too. I saw one clip where his assistant gets him a starbucks coffee and he says “Is this 140 degrees?” “Yeah. that’s what I asked for.” she replies. “I think it’s more like 150 or 155.” he says “I need it to be 140″. He went on for a minute or two, seemingly just to prove how picky he can be.

I don’t know why, but even seeing someone else have that conversation makes me want to punch a wall. It was even worse when I used to work at AppForge. Anyone who works in a corporate environment knows that there is nothing worse than a self-important moron with a big title who is bored. I have tons of these stories, but I’ll recount only a few.

A few years ago we were having a career fair where we invited a select 20 or so of Georgia Tech’s top computer nerds to come see our company in hopes of hiring a few of them. This chick that worked upstairs asked me to make name tags for them, and although I knew that it was something that could easily be done by our admin assistant, I wasn’t terribly busy so I did it. I made neato name tags for each of them with a Georgia tech logo and an AppForge logo, printed them out, and put them in little badge holders. Done in an hour. Immediately thereafter I had another project come up with a deadline, so I got busy with that. Then the bored retarded chick decided she wanted me to re-print the tags with each person’s major listed on it. I said I couldn’t because I had to do the other project.

Then she came back down and said “We really need these nametags. The event is tomorrow.” “Uhh…you have the name tags.” I said. “No we need them to have their major on them.”

NO YOU DON’T. YOU ARE BORED. GO CHASE A LASER POINTER OR SOMETHING.

Finally the person who requested the new project said that the chick needed her nametags, and I should work on those. I am convinced that a huge number of decisions like this one in all areas of the company eventually led to AppForge closing its doors. We are going to put our only creative resource on (pick one – making name tags, changing someone’s title on their business card from VP of sales to VP-sales, creating package graphics for a product that no one intends to launch, making custom placeholders for a meeting, or any of a million other things that will never have a positive impact on the bottom line), instead of doing the things that help us sell software? It was everywhere – meetings to discuss how we would categorize customers we didn’t even have, meetings to schedule meetings, new products built on products that had already failed, the list is endless.

So I put their goddamn majors on the name tags and printed them out again. Still not good enough.

She said “I think we should put the date of the event on them.” “Really? Why?” (hoping she had a damn good reason, but disappointed as usual) And by the way, why does it take an entire batch of finished name tags for you to make the next stupid decision on how to waste time?

“In case they decide to come back next year and want to use the same name tag.”

She actually said that in front of three other people, and I am the only one who laughed. Are you fucking joking? Do you really have nothing else to do but micromanage a completely inconsequential project? Do you honestly believe that ANYONE will keep up with this stupid tag for an entire year and bring it to the next job fair? Please kill yourself. Please. I’m begging.

Sometimes when these situations came up I would go to someone else just to make sure I wasn’t crazy. Why can’t anyone keep this from happening? SOMEONE PLEASE SHAME HER AND MAKE HER UNDERSTAND THAT SHE NEEDS TO FOCUS ON SOMETHING ELSE. In every case, there would be a shrug of the shoulders, some kind of “I know it’s frustrating” rigamarole, and a “just get it done and it’ll be over.” I’d walk away wondering if maybe I just live in a parallel universe and there was something huge that I didn’t understand.

In the end, I spent six hours reprinting those name tags until they were the best damn name tags ever to be completely ignored and thrown away before the job fair was even over. I took the time to point this fact out to the retard who thought they were so important- *holding the garbage can up with a dozen said name tags in it* “Hey, do you think we should maybe get these out and clean them up and then mail them to their owners? It should only take a day or two to figure out where they all live, and we can pack each one in a custom made wooden crate…”, but that was just me being difficult, as I later learned while being reprimanded for my out of control common sense.

Another great example – we were throwing a party at a trade show and I wrote and submitted phrases for fortune cookies we would have there. Little somewhat humorous things about how the future is bright for you if you use our stuff. Whatever. A few of them said “Confuscious say….” (because they were fortune cookies, and that’s a classic fortune cookie line) and someone with the word “Chief” in their title actually made us change the whole frigging thing because “If we have any Asian people there, they might get offended.” If you are the person who made that phone call, kill yourself. Your job and lot in life are useless and pointless. Really.

Someone also had an idea for the name of a database where customers could share applications they made with our product. Since our name was AppForge and Napster was all over the news at the time, one of our more inventive software guys coined the name “AppSter”. Simple. Descriptive. Topical. Very good.

As I was producing graphics for what I thought was one of only a few truly creative ideas that hadn’t been dumbed out of existence, I was informed that we would not be using that name. “Too much negative publicity around it, and we didn’t want to give anyone the wrong idea.” Yeah. Just too edgy and dangerous. What were we thinking?

Again. PLEASE. Kill yourself, whoever took the time to come to that conclusion. If it was a group decision, tell me what room you are in so I can lob a hand grenade in there.

Another agonizing example (and I swear on whatever book you worship that I am not making one word of this up) – I designed and printed brochures for another company I was working for, and on the back in 6pt type it said “copyright blah blah blah, all rights reserved” We had to re-print them because someone said there needed to be a period after the word “reserved”. Kill. self. now.

Again, it comes back to a matter of there being a right and a wrong answer. It may be merely my opinion that this font is better than that one when I use it on your letterhead, but it is a fact – undeniable and provable beyond any doubt – that the time and money it takes to change it to a different font, add a period, or shorten the music by two seconds in the intro is not going to make a single penny, improve anyone’s experience, or otherwise improve the existing situation in any way.

A slight variation of this is the clutcher. This is the person who will pick something irrelevant out of a conversation or situation and get their little mind all twisted up into it to the point that they can’t move on. Think of a car driving through a parking lot at 5 MPH, running over a skittle, flipping into the air and bursting into flames. That’s how I think of these people. I dated a lot of girls who had this flaw, and that may be the reason I can pick it out from three statute miles. Let’s say you’re discussing something about technology, and you mistakenly use the word “pornograph” instead of “phonograph” while making a point. Slip of the tongue, two second chuckle, and move on, right? The clutcher will bring it up over and over in an attempt to derail the conversation because he or she has nothing useful to offer.

“Where you going? Gonna go listen to your pornograph? haha.” Shut up.

It’s like having a conversation with a friend and his dog is sitting there, and then you say something like “…after she left, the sheets were in a ball at the foot of the bed. I’m telling you- best $13 I have ever spent…” and the guy’s dog goes bonkers and starts running around barking and won’t shut up because you said the word “ball”. You’ve lost the dog at that point and he’s just going to ruin the conversation for you and your friend.

the clutcher also suffers micro-traumas from other events that would be ignored by most people. Let’s say my ex girlfriend was so stupid that every time we went to her house, she would get off the highway at an exit, drive across the overpass, and get back on the same highway. One day I asked her why she always did that (I thought she might be afraid of bridges or something), and she actually thought she was getting on a different road. I laughed a little bit about that, as I was entitled to do, and thanked god she wasn’t ugly, or she’d be in the middle of the desert begging for water. She was a clutcher, so any time anyone did anything mistakenly after that, she’d say “Are you going to make fun of them? Wanna’ make them feel stupid? Seems to be your hobby…” instead of just letting me forget about it.

Now let’s get into naysayers and pointmissers -

Naysayers are the people who will always take an opposing position to what you say, just so they can consider themselves objective. They are closely related to the Negative people, but really just have loose control of their mouths. If you make any kind of observation about how something is crap and you got railroaded (even if all you are doing is venting), they’ll come immediately to the defense of the other side and make you start defending your position like they have some special interest in whatever you are ranting about.

“I got a frigging parking ticket, and I was walking up to my car at the same time the meter maid was. What a bunch of losers those people are, you know? Just walk around giving tickets to taxpayers. Was there really no better job available, or are they being punished? I mean really, is there a life form below meter maid? I’d rather have dinner with a child molester.”
“Well, you know…they’re just doing their job. It’s just like you have a job doing whatever you do…”
“Seriously? Is meter maiding a proud family tradition for these losers? Did their grandparents travel across the ocean from the old country in a ramshackle golf cart with blue lights mounted to the top of it? Because I really really doubt it.”
“No, I’m just saying, you need to look at it from their…”
“Shut up. You might as well be saying ‘Hitler had a point’ right now. I can’t believe you are asking me to defend my stance on being raped.”

The pointmisser/reinterpreter is the person who will write me an email after reading this and say “You sure are angry lately. I thought you were smarter than this – you hate people who disagree with you? That is my definition of a stupid person. I wish someone would kick you in the balls.” Instead of understanding that writing style and actual mood are separate entities, and sometimes examples are used to illustrate a broader idea. You have to explain things to some people as if they are three years old.

“We do need to figure out a way to control the borders. I mean, how much longer can a country sustain…”
“So if you hate Mexicans, then why don’t you stop eating those delicious burritos, you racist?”
“Uhh…hate what? What part of your brain is malfunctioning right now?”

Of course, that doesn’t cover every kind of stupidity out there, and everyone does some of this stuff now and then, but overall, those are a few of the characteristics of the kind of people who mess things up for the rest of us.

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