My Looking Glass

Idiocy Abounds

There are a few human attributes for which I have little to no patience. Some of these include neediness, whining, and narcissism, but the characteristic I'm going to focus on today is stupidity. And maybe it's Murphy's law, but it seems that despite my best efforts to avoid these people like Britney and Paris avoid panties, they find me nevertheless.

So I ask you. Does Petco get some kind of tax credit for hiring people with low IQ scores? Case in point:

When I approached the checkout with a 20-pound bag of cat food over my shoulder yesterday, there were two cashiers open, each helping one customer ahead of me. I got in line, and about 30 seconds later, the cashier told me he was closing. I turned to get in the other line, and discovered there was another customer behind me pushing a cart almost right into my back.

"He's closing," I said to the woman with a sour expression on her face. Side-stepping her cart, I proceeded to the adjacent line.

"Is this true? Are you closing?" she demanded of the cashier as she gesticulated angrily.

"Oh, I guess not," said the wimpy idiot as he let her move forward.

"Excuse me," I said, "I'm the one carrying the 30-pound bag of cat food, and I believe I was ahead of her."

The look of panic on Moron's face was priceless. He already had one wrathful woman in his line, and now by his own stupidity, he had managed to incite rage in another one, namely me.

I should add that this guy was in his 50s to 60s, not his teens to 20s. You'd think at his age, he'd know better. He didn't.

The second random act of idiocy imposed upon me recently was by my employer.

Heretofore, I have avoided writing too much about my workplace. That's because I've been telecommuting for the last few years, so my exposure to the antics in the office is limited. But trust me when I tell you, my office is rich with stories of craziness, packaged large and small, ranging from subtle to extreme. I was in-house for six years before the sublime gift of telecommuting was bestowed upon me, and I am here to tell you that if I were to pursue my education in psychology to the graduate level, I'd have only to do a case study on a small percentage of the madness in my workplace to be awarded a doctorate degree from any university of my choosing.

But I digress. This isn't an example of crazy, it's an example of stupid.

In order to telecommute, I use VPN (which some of you may know as SRA - secure remote access) to connect to my employer's mainframe. From there, I am able to do my job as well as retrieve my company email. So last night, IS (Information Services department) changed the VPN/SRA server, and today, no one's password worked because of the server change. We all had to call this 800# to get new passwords, blah blah blah. So once I finally got into the mainframe, I found an email from Dummy Supervisor with instructions on what to do because of the server change. Apparently, it didn't occur to Dummy that no one would be able to see her email before figuring out on their own how to get back into the mainframe to see her DUH email. (We have two supervisors, Dummy and Forgetful. Forgetful is fine except for that annoying memory deficit thing.)

Okay, raise your hand if you think I'm premenstrual.

posted by LA @ 4:41 PM