Random Prattles About the Deline of Human Kind

My enthusiasm for people is not at an all time high. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of people. I would love to be able to embrace the enlightenment era outlook of man being a noble a progressing creature with limitless possibilities but the more I see of the reality... well let's just say that it is less than heartening.

If you go into any random restaurant, what are your chances of finding an ignorant and uncaring individual behind the counter? People just don't care enough even about themselves to attain a proficiency at assembling a hamburger. Chimps and even lower primates can be taught to stack simple layers evenly for a reward. These creatures do it consistently and well. Why then can't your average human?

It has been stated by those who track such things that the average American IQ is 90-94. Drop a few points to 75 and you have Forrest Gump. If this is correct and we can assume that it is, and we can assume that this number is a mean average arrived at through normal means then we can easily see the problem. The doctors, lawyers, engineers, artists, inventors etc are running around 135-145 and up in IQ. No they don't make up a huge percentage of the populace (well lawyers seem to) but enough to make the math pretty obvious. If the average IQ is 90-94 and a chunk of the population is much higher, the actual IQs you are having to interface with are much more Gumpish.

It becomes obvious why the elusive hamburger cannot be assembled correctly. Combine pure simple stupidity with the insipid dunning by "children's television" , the entitlement mentality the seems pandemic (everything down to the big screen TV is a basic human right), and the surgically implanted chip on the shoulder carried by every "group" (ethnic, national, religious, sexual, etc, etc) and what do you get?

You get modern America, the land of Miss Teen South Carolina who "personally believe(s) that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some ... people out there in our nation don't have maps and uh, I believe that our, ah, education like such as in South Africa, and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., or should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for."

Really makes you proud...

I think its safe to say that this one will not be skewing the IQ average in a favorable direction. I wonder if she can assemble a hamburger... Except that with her face and... other attributes... she won't have to. We just have to worry about her voting.

Restaurant Nightmares Abound

I have an unfortunate tendency to go out to eat. I have an undeserving and unearned tenderness for the restaurant industry. The industry never pays me back. I always have this strange desire to get what I pay for and I think that I am paying for a good meal. What I invariably get is either a completely taste neutral or downright vile concoction that wouldn’t pass muster in the first semester of culinary community college in Arkansas. The food at your average American restaurant is bloody awful.

As if insult needed to be added to injury, the service is even worse than the food. You arrive with the false expectation of service from people who are supposedly in a service profession (except that they are not in the profession, they are too good for it and are just biding their time before they make it in there real career of acting, singing, dancing, synchronized swimming, or going on the pro yodeling circuit) but what you get, at best, is tacit acknowledgment of your very presence. (At worst they just ignore you. I have gotten up and left without so much as an acknowledgment after 20 minutes) The service when and if it comes is grudging and performed with the rankest of slack-jawed indifference. The miscreant youth who kill time waiting tables or working the counter at fast food joints are too haughty and too drugged out to be able to actually serve the customer.

I can’t help but think that at the heart of the problem is that American society has raised an entire generation or two that think that service is beneath them. We have an economy now that is based heavily on service sector jobs but no one wants to actually perform service. Everyone want to be served and pampered and be given free pedicures with their order but they don’t want to do the same for anyone else.

I know that this slack-assed nature reaches into every industry but I see it most often and most glaringly in the food services. So far gone is the concept or even glimmer of excellence in performing one’s job that it is hard to even find a hamburger that is assembled correctly. How hard is it to grasp the concept of bun, meat, condiments, bun and to line them up? Not too hard. A chimp can be trained to do it, but then a chimp doesn’t think it’s entitled to the treat its trainer gives it. It is just grateful to get it.

Misenthropic Rant

OK, maybe I am a jerk in my own right and maybe I am "touched" in the head but it really gets under my skin when people let little insignificant things get under their skin. (Stone me for contradictions of nature...)
What I mean is how one will inevitably have a co-worker who is a shining exemplar of incompetence, and on some level knows this about themselves, but will try endlessly to justify their existence by being an anal retentive adherent to every soul squelching minutia of process.

One will inevitably arrive on this person's radar by means of a minor (actual of imagined) infraction of some fractional gnat's ass of a regulation. Said individual will inevitably make a big deal out of that which is not and when you, the sane person, places the incident into its proper context, the neurotic self-doubting whipped pup will recoil in horror and slink off to their therapist or local gun dealer with much whining and tooth gnashing.

It really makes me crazy having to navigate the corridors of other people's lunacy.