Well, dear readers, I'm back! I've been quite busy but I'm going to try to post something Every day.
For those of you wondering, I'm still in Florida and I'm still working for the railroad here. Besides my writing, my job has been my number one priority. Today, I'm going to do something a little different, I'm posting a classic post of mine.
This was originallly posted in Febuary, 2005.
Enjoy!
Darwin was Wrong...
It never ceases to amaze me how stupid people in general are. Some folks I meet are so stupid I'm in awe that they've lived as long as they have. I'm no rocket scientist, but I do have some common sense. And I'm not talking about little goofs here. I'm talking about the proliferation of what I call "Stemmers".A Stemmer is a person who's only brain function is on the primal level. Their brain stem is working, they're sucking air and pumping blood. A good friend of mine calls them "Oxygen Thieves". These are folks with the IQ of a stump who are found all over the place in great numbers. They're found in the cities, suburbs and in the rural areas. No one part of the country has more stemmers than another.I've also found these stemmers are more likely to breed in direct correlation to their IQ. Lower the IQ, the more offspring they spawn. It's only rarely that the progeny of these stemmers is not a stemmer themselves.
Survival of the fittest? I think not.
Most people going through life don't realize this little tidbit of info, but if you work in the public sector like I have for the last twenty or so years it's glaringly apparent. The jobs where you meet the most stemmers are in the law-enforcement & emergency services fields. I've worked both for quite a while an I know what I speak of. This is the very reason I have changed careers mid-life and now am aspiring to be a railroad engineer. I won't have to deal with stupid people anymore.
I'll give you some examples. Shortly after I moved to Arizona, I took a job as an armed guard at the county courthouse. Myself and another person ran the security station at the entrance. We had an x-ray machine and a walk-through metal detector just like at the airports. Now if you really want to find mental midgets, go to your local courthouse and sit in on the cases being heard. They're a hoot. But to really experience the mental conditioning of our great country, stand by the security station and listen to what myself and my partner listened to for ten hours a day for two years.
My partner there asked me at one point what the hardest thing about being a cop was. I told him it wasn't the shootings, homicides, rapes, car wrecks... Oh no. The hardest thing you will ever have to do in the law enforcement or EMS fields is keep a straight face. The urge to say "You've got to be joking?" and laugh your ass off at some dipshit are overwhelming. I kept a small notebook in the pocket of my uniform shirt and would write the most interesting questions asked of us. Here's a few examples:
"Where is downstairs?"
"Is this a real courthouse?"
"Is this the post office?"
"Is the elevator on this floor or another one?"
"Are there courtrooms in here?"
"Is this a building?"
"What's the right what to get up stairs?"
That's just a small sampling of the questions. Now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be bitching about this if this were just a once-in-a-while thing. This was several times a day, every day. It wasn't just the questions either. It was what some of these boneheads would do. When you run the x-ray machine, you asked everyone coming though to empty thier pockets of all metal objects and place them in a little plastic tub. These are the questions I would get from this simple request to empty you pockets:
"Do coins / keys count?"
"I've got a belt!"
Over and over again to the point where I would just take a five minute break just to go and beat my head repeatedly on the wall in the men's room.
This happened once. A guy walks up to the security station and asked what he had to do. I requested that he needed to empty his pockets of all metal objects. He said he didn't have any so directed him through the metal detector. He walked through and it lit up like a Christmas tree. I pulled him aside and asked him to empty his pockets.
With both hands he dug deep and pulled out what must have been four pounds of 10-penny nails.
What part of ALL metal objects don't these shitheads understand and when did the key companies, nail manufacturers and the US Mint start making those things out of plastic? Somebody should have sent a memo out to everyone, and if they did send a memo, I somehow missed it.
We also would get folks in and they would tell us in great detail about thier court cases, or just why they were visiting. We actually have a guy come in one afternoon to check on birth records. He told me and my partner he was trying to find out (I shit you not) if his grandparents had any children...
My question to him should have been if his parents had any children that lived...
The visitors weren't the only people who did this. Other cops, lawyers and the judges did the same thing. I had this one woman once. A local attorney. She came in one morning as placed her handbag on the conveyor to the x-ray machine. As it went through I was looking at the monitor and a little whistle went off in my head. I hit the stop button and in a low voice as not to alarm anyone asked her if she had anything in her purse that she might like to take back out to her vehicle. She said no, she didn't. I asked again, are you sure? Yes, she said rather testily at this point like I was the moron.
I sighed, motioned her over and turned the monitor around so she could see what I was looking at.
The full color monitor clearly showed inside her purse the outline of a Smith & Wesson model 10 .38 Special with a 4" barrel.
Her response? "Oh, I forgot I had that in there!"
How the hell do you forget you have a two pound pistol in your purse? I can understand a little derringer or something, but a damn .38?
That night driving home, after putting up with stupid questions all day, I was behind a small Dodge Neon for almost ten miles on highway 89 going north into Chino Valley and I just had to say "What the fuck!"
What made me say that?
On this car in front of me, was the nozzle still in the fuel tank and ten feet of hose from a gas pump dragging along side.
And my ex-wife wondered why I drank.
Darwin was wrong. Dead wrong.
Copyright 2005 ~ 2009 Thomas J Wolfenden
