Things That Piss Me Off — Too Many Stupid People

By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
As you can tell I have too much time on my hands. I think too much. That’s always bad, thinking too much. Thinking is bad for you.
I get frustrated when I think too much because then I notice all the stupid people. Stupid people drive me nuts.
Dogs, they’re OK. You don’t expect a dog to be especially smart. Cats, birds, goldfish — for animals your expectations are pretty low.
If the dog manages to wait to pee until it gets outside, that’s pretty much all you can hope for. Anything more than that is just gravy. It’s hard to be disappointed by a dog.
But people, you expect more from people. You expect them to be smart, or at least to have enough brain power able to defrost a burrito in a microwave without first having to watch a YouTube video. But they’re not. Half the time they can’t even figure out how to use YouTube in the first place.
They’re a constant, searing disappointment!
“No, moron, instead of killing six postal workers and then killing yourself, wouldn’t it be much more efficient if you just killed yourself first and saved all that effort?”
I could take it if I only had to deal with the occasional moron, but they’re everywhere! You can’t escape them.
True story: A guy goes into a Walmart and tries to buy five hundred dollars worth of stuff with a fake million dollar bill.
Idiot!
How the hell do you expect them to make change? What, you think that the eleven-dollar-an-hour cashier’s got $999,500 in her drawer? You think she’s going to whip out a pen and write you a Walmart check for $999,500?
And you’re only buying $500 worth of Doritos and beer? You’ve got a million dollar bill and you can’t find a sixty-inch flat screen? What, are you on a budget? Idiot!
And you know the thing that really gets me? We have no scale for stupid people. No measuring stick for stupidity. For smart people, sure. “She’s a genius. He’s a real Einstein.” But what’s the measuring stick for stupid people? I mean who in history really stands out as the pinnacle of stupidity?
It can’t be someone who’s merely narrow-minded, tunnel-visioned, and devoid of imagination. If that were the benchmark we could call people a “George Bush” — “Frank’s job is to install the third bolt on the Camry’s passenger-side rear wheel eight hundred times a day, but it’s OK. He’s a real George Bush.”
No, boring and unimaginative are not enough. I’m talking D-U-M-B here. If Einstein is the poster child for smart people, who’s the archetype for stupid people? See, it’s not that easy. Smart people get all the attention.
If smart people are measured by the term “IQ” then maybe stupid people should have an “SQ” — a Stupidity Quotient. 100 could be a normal level of stupidity. If you call someone with an IQ of 150 a “genius” then what’s the name for someone with an SQ of 150? Moron? Pinhead? Birdbrain?
Is a birdbrain smarter than a pinhead or dumber than a moron? You see, no standards at all.
But maybe a straight numerical scale is the wrong way to go. Maybe we should designate a particular person as representing some basic unit of stupidity, like the executive at Kodak years ago who passed on buying the rights to what became the Xerox machine.
“Gee, why would anyone ever want to copy something when we have carbon paper?” he’s reported to have asked. I don’t know his real name so let’s just call him, I don’t know, “Homer Simpson.”
If we made him the Unit of Stupidity (UOS), then we would have a scale against which we could measure other stupid people. “Charlie? Oh, Charlie’s one and a half Homer Simpsons. ___________? [name withheld to avoid litigation] Two Homer Simpsons.”
I’m now accepting nominations for a real person whose name we should use for the benchmark unit of stupidity. And don’t say “Donald Trump.”
Stupid is completely different from dishonest, dishonorable and mean . The first is an accident of birth. The second is a lifestyle choice.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
Just to make sure that everybody gets it, this column is satire, humor, fiction. Hey, I’m joking here.
I say that explicitly because I don’t want a bunch of people posting comments like, “If you don’t like stupid people then you must hate yourself” or “How can you tell?” or similar misguided remarks.
If that happened then I’d have to counter-comment with something like, “Hey, this column is satire, humor, fiction, which Homer Simpson would have known without me having to tell him” and that would have been kind of mean.
And mean people also piss me off, so there’s a risk of sort of a vicious cycle there which I would like short circuit before it even begins.

