Wednesday, April 27, 2016

One more dummy for the road

If you've ever worked a 15-hour day, you know that desperate feeling of just wanting to go home when it's finally over. Maybe eat a bowl of cereal before getting in bed, but more than anything else in the world, you just want to get back to the place where you sleep at night already. Odds are at least 50/50 that when you've experienced that feeling, life has thrown at least one dumb thing in your way to keep that from happening as easily as you would like.
A couple of weeks ago, I was leaving work at 1AM, departing a basically empty parking garage. Except for one other random person, a person that just happened to back out in front of me as I was on my way out. Now there are only two people leaving the garage and somehow, we're a line. That's mildly annoying. What drove it up a notch was how this person handled his attempt to exit the garage.
Can you see what's happening here?

He's paying the machine so he can exit the garage.

Did you happen to notice the position of the gate?

That's right. Not only was I behind someone, I was behind someone too dumb to notice that the gate is open and that he could have driven right out if he wanted to.

Look at him. Look how dumb he is. Here he is paying with the dumb money he got from some dumb job, because some company was dumb enough to hire him to do dumb things. And of course he has a fistful of singles because that's probably how he demands to be paid. Dumb people love to have a whole bunch of singles because that way you can have a lot of money even if you don't have very much money.

I yelled at him, because when you want something to happen at 1am after you've worked a 15-hour day, you yell.
"The gate is up! Just go!"
I yelled this twice and then decided to take the picture because he was obviously ignoring me and I felt like this incident needed to be documented. Because what if I told this story and nobody believed me? No, there needed to be some sort of record to prove the existence of someone this dumb.

Then, because I was frustrated, I yelled again. To this, he stuck his dumb head out of the dumb window of his dumb car and yelled back, "I lost my ticket and you have to pay a fee of $9 when you lose your ticket!"
I replied, "I know you lost your ticket". I didn't know anything about this person beyond this situation but of course I knew he had lost his ticket because dumb people can't be trusted to hang on to things that cost $9 when they lose them.
"But you don't have to pay anything. When the gate is already up, it's not necessary to pay anything to make it go up. The fee is actually zero dollars to make that happen. Because it's already happened."
He simply wasn't having it. Nothing was going to stop him from taking nine crumpled one dollar bills and inserting them into the machine, sometimes successful on the first try, usually not. "One...two...three...oops, how many did I already do?"

Eventually, he got all nine dollar bills to be uncrumpled enough and facing the same direction to be accepted by the machine, which caused the gate to do nothing, of course, and he drove off.

I'm sure I'll see him again soon, driving the wrong direction on a one-way street because this is Tampa. Maybe then he'll actually manage to kill me.

1 comment:

Tom said...

At least the guys has integrity.