Every year around this time, people get stupid. It’s gotten to the point that I refer to the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve as The Season of Stupidity. Of course, I work in IT and a lot of my stupid people are ones who make mistakes that are hard to explain such that the layman can understand them. Many of my friends are techie, but I still struggle to explain the general moron level of December.
So in basic terms, everyone’s IQ drops 10-50 points between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. This results in the tasks you do every day without a problem suddenly failing because you are, in fact, a moron. No one is exempt from this, including me, as we all just have a totally stupid moment. And it’s not just a regular ‘Oops, my bad!’ moment, it’s a big ‘Holy crap on a stick, how was I that stupid!?’ moment. We’re talking the big stupid. It’s not always a mistake, it’s usually just some lapse in common sense judgment that they write stories about.
Naturally I’m blogging about it.
Last year I made a list and the winner was the woman who spent 15 minutes, in front of her boss, berating me for not ‘knowing’ that she had an emergency I needed to help her with. Sure, on the outset that looks logical. She had a problem, I’m a tech support sort of person, I should help. But did she call me? Did she email me? Did she walk up to my desk and say ‘Hey, Mika…’ No, she did not. She did nothing at all until three days later she invites me to a meeting to talk about ‘my process.’ This is normal. I get into the meeting and I’m presented with this: “How can I be expected to CALL you when I have an emergency!? You should KNOW.”
Even her boss sat there, astounded, at this woman. When she paused for breath, he asked me to leave. About an hour later he came by my desk with an apology, written, from the woman.
This year, the current front-runner is the man who calls me up to tell me he forgot his ID. Now, I don’t work on the help desk, I do not reset passwords except for my webapp. I ask ‘If you mean your ID on my webapp, it’s the same as your login ID for your computer.’ He tells me that he doesn’t know what his login ID is, and instead of forwarding him to the help desk, I think I’ll be helpful. “I remember the number, 123, but I can’t remember the letters,” says our hero, and as our login IDs are our initials, followed by some numbers, I figure this is really easy. I tell him to just use his initials and he says “I don’t know what my initials are!”
I really thought it was a joke at this point, but with my boss snickering away, I carry on. The next step is to ask him what letter his name starts with and he bitches “I don’t know what letter my name starts with!” and hangs up on me. At this point, I started laughing. His name was about as bland as ‘John Smith.’ It was one of the most generic English names out there.
Do you have a story from this season of stupid?