Stupidity

I have two little tidbits to share with you today. Both of which truly left me speechless when I encountered them. One is IT related .. and one is related more towards knowledge any 3rd grader should have.

The building that my gym is in also houses a lot of medical offices for the company I work for. Due to the specific nature of a lot of the medical programs and hardware configurations, they hired a full time IT person for over there. She is employed by the health division and technically has no affiliation with our IT staff here at my office. Every now and then she will call over here looking for help with something she can't figure out or doesn't have access to in her position. I begrudgingly help despite the fact that she is flat out annoying as hell, stupid and lazy.

This past Friday .. as I was getting ready to finish up a very long stressful week, she calls me about 10 minutes before I am ready to head out the door. Her voice alone makes me cringe and now that she is bugging me right before I want to leave has me quite irritated. She starts going through this whole spiel about how this big multifunction copier / printer they have over there that the medical staff uses is not working. I start working through some troubleshooting stuff with her, assuming she has done the basics already. I told her to call the IT Engineers for the medical side of things and she said that she had already talked to him and that there was nothing wrong on the server side of things. I'm running out of possible reasons for them to be unable to print. I then remembered that this individual is both stupid and lazy. So I make her go through the basic things again like cycling power on the printer, clearing out any stuck print jobs from the queue etc. Still not working, so I get the IP address for the printer and connect to it remotely to see if I can look through the logs and find an error message. As soon as I connect to the web page for the printer, I see 2 flashing alerts. One for printing, one for copying. I mouse over said alert and here is what it said:

"Tray 1 .. out of paper"

Normally I would get angry, but I am trying to control my rage at stupid people. Honestly, between stupid and lazy.. its a wonder she can get dressed in the morning by herself much less actually be expected to physically look at the printer and see the big message that I'm sure was on the display there about being out of paper. Sadder still is that 8 people in the health department over there were all complaining about not being able to print and not a single one of them bothered to go look at it. Yes, its time to try and shake the stupidity out of some people again. However, with that quantity of stupid we are dealing with here and how deeply ingrained it is, normal shaking is just not going to cut it. Besides with 9 of them in total, my arms would just get too tired. Instead I am going to have to see if I can design a supersized 9 station device like the thing that they have at the hardware store that shakes cans of paint really fast. That should work. To be honest, I could probably sell it to a japanese game show after I was done with it. Those people are crazy and would probably make a game out of it.

The second incident involved a member of my online gaming guild. This is the same individual responsible for the forum post that I discussed in this earlier blog post. Yes.. that master of the english language is still around. I don't know why he is still in the guild. Maybe its just my morbid curiousity at what could possibly come out of his mouth next. Maybe its because my soft side thinks that even a certified window licker deserves a second chance.

So there we are .. hanging out.. talking and having a great time. This individual, which I will call Durth to protect his identity, types a question out in guild chat that goes something like this:

"wat is the heroic daly today?"

I am willing to overlook the misspelling of 'daily' because that one IS tricky. But the fact that he spelled the word 'what' as 'wat' is one of those pet peeve things of mine. It just bugs the crap out of me for some reason. So, I type back into the guild chat:

"Durth, the word is 'what' try to use it next time. Your teachers will thank you for it."

He doesn't say anything for a bit. I figure maybe he got his super sensitive feelings hurt. Part of me was hoping that maybe he was sitting at his keyboard crying. It turns out he wasn't crying though. He was trying to form a thought and trying to bend his mind around that statement I had typed in. About 3 minutes after putting that into our guild chat, I get a private message from Durth that said this EXACTLY:

"wat wurd are you talking about?"

Again.. ignoring the misspelling of the tough words in that sentence like 'word', he apparently didn't even recognize the fact that 'what' is the right way to spell 'wat'. I was literally speechless. I was trying to tell the people I was playing with at the time over voice chat what had just transpired and I was just babbling. I just couldn't fathom the level of stupidity contained in that question as a response to my statement. I started thinking to myself.. oh, this must be his attempt at a joke. There is no way someone who is 17 and not locked in a padded room is that dumb. There is just no way. I didn't respond and just let it go. Durth didn't however. 2 minutes or so after his first respone, I get another private message that says this:

"blade, wat wurd?"

It seems I am just going to have to make that human sized paint can shaker-thing a 10 person unit so I can slide Durth on in there too. I consider my kids to be fairly smart. They always get very good grades, and so when something like this comes up, I always think to myself "Can my 4th grader handle this?" If the answer is yes, unless you have to wear a helmet full time to protect yourself, you should know that the word 'what' is spelled with an H at this point in time. Even if by some freak of nature you somehow missed that before you made it to 17, when I typed in that the word was "what" .. how can you not compare that to the 6 words that were in your statement and by process of elimination figure out which one I was talking about.

what = daly? nope.. thats not it.
what = is? maybe, but I don't think so
what = the? well there is an H in it.. hmm
what = heroic? not sure, I just copied the word from someone else to sound smart.
what = today? I know wat today is.. its friday, not whatday
what = wat? 2 ez, has to be a trick! ne way I no wat is speld wat!

Nope, Durth just didn't know so rather than appear to be a moron, he sent me a PM to clarify. Depsite that old statement to the contrary, I am here to confirm that there are indeed STUPID QUESTIONS. Pretty much anything that Durth asks at this point is bound to fall into that category. I think I just need to mute him in vent and put him on ignore before it spreads. Now we are all stupid from time to time. If you were in vent and hanging out with a group of us on Saturday night, you will know that many of us were quite intoxicated. Yet despite my drunken state, I can pretty much guarantee that if you asked me how to spell the word 'what' I could still manage to remember to get the H in there.

I think that wherever Durth lives, they must not have banned lawn jarts yet. Or maybe he has older brothers who like to bow hunt and decided that poor little Durth needed to play William Tell with them and sent him over to a stump with an apple to put on his head. Seriously, there is no way anyone can be that dumb without having suffered a serious head injury. Maybe I should tell him to go play with the lawn jarts again. Maybe a second serious head trauma will knock things back to the way they should be.

Anyway, after the second request to tell him 'wat' word I was talking about, I sent him this:

"Durth, take your right hand and use it to smack yourself in the face as hard as you can. Do it right now"

His immediate response to this request? Cmon.. work with me here.. I know you can come up with it if you really try. Yes, indeed it was:

"wat for?"

/Whimper ... I don't know how to handle that. I just can't deal with it. He has overpowered my will to even attempt to make fun of him and that takes a lot. Durth, I concede. You have beaten me. I cannot compete at that level. Well played sir, well played. Your reward is coming in the mail. Along with your helmet that you must wear at all times now. This helmet is flourescent pink and says in bold letters "I'm not with stupid .. I AM stupid" Wear it with pride buddy, you have certainly earned it.