Stupid People, Revisited

As I've said in other posts, I very rarely call people stupid, because I think very few truly are. Foolish, yes, but stupid? No. However, because of my employer's new office design, we're all on top of each other, so I get a first-hand view of the intellectual capabilities of my colleagues in Finance.

I realize that numbers people are not creative, but rely on accuracy, procedure, and good organizational skills, and that doesn't make them dumb. The numbers people in my office are just dumb. A few examples:

- Maureen was complaining to one of the techie guys about the malfunctioning voicemail indicators on her phone. He explained that the problem was company-wide, and that the server was hung up but would be reset that night. She said, "What?" Like me, he assumed she just hadn't heard him, so he repeated what he'd said. She replied cleverly, "What?" Finally, he realized she wasn't getting the "server hung up" part, so he reverted to child-speak and said, "Maureen, the server is broken. It's broken." Context, Maureen? Huh?

- The subject of this one is Taryn, and let me state that she got off on the wrong foot with me just because of her name. I hate names that are really just other names with the first initials changed, such as Tevin. (I know some of you have friends and family with those kinds of names, but my blog, my rules.) Also, I hate when basically common names are spelled in a quirky manner, like Marriya (Maria) or Jacqui (Jackie). So you can see how "Taryn", which is really a distortion of "Karen", really ticks me off. Anyway, we had a fire drill last week, and Taryn (grrr) and I were the last ones out the door. I headed for the stairs, but this zero starts pressing the elevator button. Hasn't she ever experienced a fire drill before? You don't put yourself in a small, metal, windowless box when there is fire a-coming. The guy running the fire drill had to direct her to the stairs, and I'm surprised he didn't have to instruct her on how to use them.

- Taryn and Maureen are chatters, and their conversations have an inanity level just short of what would provoke the average person to a letter-opener bloodbath. They're both as thin as sticks, naturally, and they go on and on about how terrible they are with food and they eat too much, their faces are too fat, blah blah. There are women in this company who could eat both of them before breakfast and still have room for a bagel, and they're complaining about that two-sixteenths of blueberry muffin they had that morning? Margaret Cho said the first thing you lose on a diet is brain matter, and these two had very little to begin with. Either that, or they once weighed a million pounds each, all brain.

Writing this post has made me feel strangely liberated. And hungry for blueberry muffins.