khan
Posts: 1554
Joined: May 2007
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| Quote (stevestory @ Oct. 20 2008,22:42) | Tard of all kinds fascinates and/or dumbfounds me. I'm back in BFE florida temporarily, and I have some relatives here, you know the kind, the kind who thinks that when you're looking for informed, educated scientific opinion, Ken Ham and Kent Hovind are probably slightly more reliable than, say, a consensus of the last 178 consecutive people who won the Nobel Prize. And they're suspicious of any fancy book larnin. And I'm talking to this one guy last thursday who stopped by to talk to me about his job search. He hasn't worked in a while. He has very few skills. Well he got lucky and found a job that pays $15/hr, and interviewed last week. Interviewer said basically he could have the job because his references spoke so highly of him. He thought it was a job on the edge of the town we both live near, which is 7 miles away. Turns out the job is mostly here, but occasionally at a satellite office 25 miles away. Now this guy isn't qualified to do much of anything. And this is BFE Florida. I mean, middle of nowhere. There are more trailers in this town than houses. Not making fun of trailers, I grew up in one, I'm saying this area is charitably described as 'low income'. You want an el Camino? I can get you five. Right now. I could probably get them to throw in the Astroturf for the bed for free. Anyway. So the guy scores a job for double minimum wage but half the time he'd have to drive 25 miles to go to work instead of 7, twice a week. And he flat out turns it down. Tells the interviewer no way, no how. The interviewer tells him the days he goes to the other town he'll get an extra $10. No, he says, no way, no how. And he tells me this, and I almost spit out my cigarette. And over the next 15 minutes I tried, with at least 3 different arguments, to convince him to take the job rather than work at, say, Subway for $7/hr. And I can't make this guy understand, for the life of me. There's nothing I can do. It's hopeless. He refuses to even think about the question. He's got this model in his head, "7 miles = nothing. 25 miles = possible catastrophe of biblical proportions" and there's nothing i can do to change it. I tried everything.
me: "You don't mind driving 7 miles to town x right"
him: "sure. town x is nothing."
me: "town y is just like 3 trips to town x"
him: "no its not. You don't know what could happen."
me: "for $15/hr and an extra $10 on top, you'll make way more than in town x."
him. "No you won't. Because you don't know what will happen. The car could throw a rod. That would cost like $1000 dollars."
me: "You could throw a rod going to town x"
him: "I've driven to town x a thousand times never threw a rod."
me: "You could drive to town y and never throw a rod."
him: "You can't promise that. Ain't nobody can promise that."
me: "There are ways to estimate the cost. The state pays like 50 cents a mile. That's whether you go to town x or town y. It's an average cost of expenses."
him: "Average don't mean anything. You could get a flat and no 'average' tells you you're going to get a flat. And you'd be S.O.L."
me: "no, of course, no average tells you anything particular, but it tells you about how much it'll cost. If they never meant anything insurance companies could never operate."
him: "I ain't no insurance company and you ain't neither."
me: "that's not the point. The point is you can estimate the cost and by any reasonable estimate you're better off at $15/hr in town y."
him: "Can your 'estimate' tell me if me car is going to break down tomorrow?"
me: "of course not." (rubs forehead)
him: "that proves my point. You don't know and I don't either."
me: "oh goddammit."
him: "you can't tell me driving to town y for $10 I'd make money."
me: "I never said you'd make money if your job was just driving to town y and back for $10."
him: "yes you did."
me: "where's my vodka?"
him: "can't make no money if you don't know how much it'll cost you."
me: "but you do have an idea how much it'll cost you."
him: "Nope. No idea."
me: "yes, idea. Because if I offered you a million dollars to drive to town y you'd take it. Because you know, on some level, that it wouldn't cost you a million dollars to drive to town y, because it's twenty five F&$#ing miles away. Because you know some vague, approximate, rough idea what it would cost, and you just refuse to deal with that any more specifically. You'd rather put it out of your head and not consider it."
him: "oh yeah, well, that's stupid because nobody would pay you a million dollars to drive to town y."
me: "ugggggghhhhhhhh...."
And of course it doesn't end there. Because I'm obsessed with tard. He leaves and I have like 4 shots and I can't stop thinking about it. I'm not even measuring at this point, it's just 4 fingers of vodka and the rest is Mountain Dew. What would have worked? How can I make him understand? And my girlfriend shows up like 3 hrs later and gets pissed off that I can't stop thinking about it. She's a wonderful girl and we met in Gifted maybe 16 years ago and obviously she gets it, but she's not obsessed with tard. So she can totally forget about tardacular things and I've only gotten maybe 50% better since then. About an hour later the guy's wife shows up and starts complaining to me that I called her husband an idiot. Which I never did. He just got the impression that I thought he was an idiot because I was so desperate to figure out a basic argument which would work. Which, let's face it, is true, but I never said as much. And I try to explain to her how the numbers work out but now she's refusing to get it because even though she's smarter and can easily get it, that would require contradicting him, and he's the man of the household, so now she's pretending to be as dumb as he is for social reasons. And now I drink several more shots of vodka and smoking Camels like they're about to be banned, and she leaves, and now my girlfriend's pissed because Camels are stinky and the conversation reduces to
me: "I don't get it." (puff puff puff)
her: "I know."
me: "I don't f*$%ing get it." (puff puff puff)
her: "I know."
me: "I mean....how...I mean...how....Look...I mean." (puff puff puff)
her: "I. Know."
me: (puff puff puff)
Coda: that was thursday or friday and she was annoyed at me but then we went on to have a great Saturday in Gainesville watching a Black Box production of Cloud 9, which was mediocre, because it was supposed to be 'subversive' about gender roles, and it was, but 'subversive' in a way about as subtle and clever as being hit in the head with a 2x4, and we walked around the lake Sunday, which was nice, and had hungover breakfasts at Bob Evans, except for the gooey part of the whites which is a constant problem if you go out and get sunny-side-up eggs, and lots of extracurricular activities, and it was in the end a great weekend, but still a lesson to be learned. If you have a tard problem, get help. It's a terrible addiction, and it will cause problems in relationships. Don't think you can figure out the tard. You can't. Tard is eternal. There is nothing you can do about it. All you can do, is make your peace with it. Don't make the mistakes I made. Find a way to accept it and take pity on us poor junkies, freebasing tard at UD and promising to quit tomorrow.
Which I will.
Just one more hit.... |
I too am fascinated with tard; even the borderline type.
It's a large part of why am divorced and live alone.
When someone commits tard, I am curious and ask about the thought process that led to that particular incident of tard.
Looking back, I guess I'm lucky I was only yelled at.
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"It's as if all those words, in their hurry to escape from the loony, have fallen over each other, forming scrambled heaps of meaninglessness." -damitall
That's so fucking stupid it merits a wing in the museum of stupid. -midwifetoad
Frequency is just the plural of wavelength...
-JoeG
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