Incompetent People Need To Eat Too

Incompetence at its finest
from www.cakewrecks.com

           Many of you know of my distaste for football, and with that I refer to the American kind. It has, however, recently come to my attention that the Canadians also have an American football league. And I find that hysterically funny. Yesterday I was spending time with some old friends and, unfortunately, that time coincided with the Patriots game. I was aware of the strike of the NFL officials; I did not know they had been replaced with total hacks. I did not enjoy the game, but watching the coaches’ and players’ frustration with the nonsensical officiating was unbelievably entertaining, with the game culminating in a winning field goal that appeared to not actually be inside the goal posts. INCOMPETENCE. The word of the day, brought to you by the letter “F” and the demonstrative pronoun “this.”

            I think it’s probably a gross understatement to say that we all encounter incompetence regularly in our daily lives. I know that some of the places I’ve encountered it are at the espresso machine, the pharmacy (yeah, that’s a scary one), the highway, Chili’s, job supervisors, employees, the grocery store, McDonald’s, Radioshack, Circuit City (there’s a reason they went out of business)… Let’s face it, there are days when I think everyone is incompetent. To quote my wise and wonderful friend Shannon, some days are just “mind-numbing moron-athons.”

            It seems that incompetence is rearing its ugly head more and more these days, and I’m racking my brain trying to figure out why. Are Americans as a whole becoming stupider? And if that’s the case, whom do we blame? The teachers, the parents, or the inbreeding/anti-birth control craze? Look, I know that a lot of religious folk are not into birth control and I completely appreciate that and bear no judgment at all. I am just thinking that in a situation such as the infamous Duggar Family (“19 Kids And Counting!!!”) of the TLC Network, I would like to propose the possibility that perhaps a couple’s genetics only have so many intelligent chromosomes to pass on. And, oh, maybe after the 12^th or 13^th child, the rest of your kids are just doomed to be dolts, if you can even remember their names. Maybe Jim Bob and Michelle are great parents. What do I know? There are definitely people out there whom I don’t want having 19 children.

            If Americans as a whole are not growing stupider, then incompetence has to be a result of ignorance and laziness. I think I’ll also throw in a pinch of self-righteousness as well. That last bit comes from my views on incompetent drivers. Have you noticed they drive as if the roads are empty? They think that if they don’t look at you, you’re not there, q.e.d. cutting you off is no longer against the rules. The guy at the grocery store who puts your dozen eggs in a bag underneath the container of laundry detergent, I have no excuse for him. And that yahoo who manages to mess up your coffee drink at Starbucks even though they don’t even pull real espresso shots, that person sucks at life so bad you almost have to feel bad for them - after you get over the anger of paying $6 for a cup of coffee that tastes like burned tar. 

           What I would like to propose, since it’s the beginning of the week, and we all need a little less anger in our lives, is compassion. Perhaps we should show a little bit more compassion for the incompetent of America…compassion for them because they also need to go to work so they can have food to eat. If they don’t go to work, guess who’s going to be paying for their food! YOU! I’m not sure which is the better deal, letting these people ruin little pieces of your day or take little pieces of your paycheck. The next thing I propose is that we take a step back and feel gratitude. Now hold on, the gratitude is not for the incompetent, the gratitude is for ourselves and the natural filters of the universe. 

           The fact that we are running into these incompetent people in our daily lives means they have jobs doing dull things. We need to step back and be grateful that these people are spoiling our coffee, not anthrax vaccines. They are knocking the rearview mirrors off our cars instead of flying airplanes. And they are smashing our bread and breaking our eggs instead of operating on our aortas. I’d like to think that the more incompetent people I see in regular living, the less incompetent people there are doing important jobs. Of course, if we brought government jobs into it, we’d be here forever….