The Art Of Stupidity

You’re all probably aware that there are a lot of stupid people in the world (heck, you might even be stupid yourself, and you’d never know). People who time and time again crush your hard-earned faith in humanity, interject in your normal conversations with inane, pointless comments, randomly pick fights with you despite the obvious fact they couldn’t win a fight against a bus stop, or simply those who trail off mid-thought or sentence, and barely know their arse from their elbow half the time (like myself). All of these people deserve a swift slap, but for the goodness of society, you manage to fight the urge.

Some people really do test your patience. I’m talking, of course, about the sort of person who knows full well that they’re completely wrong in an argument but refuse to accept it (very much like myself), the sort of person who fails to perform a simple task (“fetch me a pencil, please?”) and then tries to justify it with an excuse which completely sidesteps the fact that they’re an imbecile (“you never said it was green!”), the moron who ridicules random people in the street then wonders why they end up with bruises, scars and short-term memory loss, and of course the sheep who believe these morons to be “cool”. You will all have met people like this at some point in your life.

As we all know, bumper stickers speak many great truths

However, some of you may not have met the arrogant “techno thief” who thinks his pathetic attempts to steal the bank account details from a convenience store will work against a grizzled, tech-savvy cashier who doesn’t suffer fools gladly (like, for example, myself).

You can normally tell when someone’s trying to do something they shouldn’t be doing, because usually, it never occurs to them that the job would be a lot simpler if they acted personable, rather than making themselves stick out like a sore thumb by being a holier-than-thou prick. This particular example began the transaction by ramming his credit card into the card reader and gawping at me. I eventually broke the awkwardness by politely inquiring, “can I help you?” He suddenly leapt into arsehole mode and shouted (far louder than necessary) “can’t you just reach over there and grab my stuff?”

I was rather taken aback by this statement. I nearly said “what sort of service do you think I’m providing here?” before he produced two 2-litre bottles of Pepsi from outside my peripheral vision, from an area that I know full well I can’t reach without throwing my entire body over the counter. I’m not a very large man; it should really be obvious I can’t reach that far. I can only assume I bear a striking resemblance to Stretch Armstrong.

I begrudgingly rung up his items, and, as I’m required to do as part of my job, I asked if he would like a bag. I don’t normally take kindly to the response “what do you think?” normally it triggers something in my brain which automatically makes me a patronising little twat. “Well, you might be fortunate enough to have a car”, I’d probably say. “Perhaps you don’t need a bag because you can carry the items just as easily in your car.. Maybe you only live up the street, and carrying two bottles in your hands isn’t much of a problem for you. Or you might be eco-friendly and as a result you don’t believe in the use of plastic carrier bags, or, quite simply, you realised you had no problem carrying these items to the counter in the first place, so you’d certainly be capable of carrying them a little further. So, you tell me. Would you like a bag?” However, for the good of society, I managed to fight the urge, and just grumbled to myself as I reached for a bag.

Then he came to pay. After taking several attempts to drill into his feeble mind that the card reader doesn’t always work properly if you ram the card into it before prompted, he eventually got the message and did it properly (not without a few underhand snipes, mind you). Unsurprisingly, an issue immediately arose. Instead of trying to draw money out of his bank account, the card reader tried to debit his account with the money.

Idiot proof technology

I’ve read about this sort of thing. Some people use specially made cards which confuse the reader into putting money into their bank account rather than removing it. I’ve heard since that these cards also record the bank account details of the shop they’re in, but this is unconfirmed.

Of course, I pointed out this little “mishap” to him, and suggested that there was a fault with the card reader. If there wasn’t anything fishy going on, he would simply have removed his card and reinserted it, like I asked. Instead, he realised he’d been thwarted, yanked his card out of the reader, stormed off yelling profanities, and insulted my intelligence: “I’ve never met anyone so stupid they can’t work a damn card machine!” . Obviously, this revelation ripped into my soul and burned away inside me, reducing me to a hollow husk of a man and injuring me in ways that I may never recover from.

So, that was an eye-opening dose of flawless stupidity right there. You can meet as many people in the world as you like, but trust me on this; you will never come to understand the dizzying heights of pure idiocy that some people can reach until you’ve witnessed it from behind a cashier counter. People like him make being a moron look like an art form.