Pit the Insanely Clueless about The World

The BBQ Pit
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This thread got me thinking about some of the really ignorant, stupid, foolish, naive and just plain insane people that I have known. The kind who appear to operate normally and are often productive members of society, but who, when you scratch the surface, don’t have a fucking clue how the real world operates.

And so I pit them, and invite you to post your own encounters with the UnWorldly.
I worked with John at two different companies, knowing him only for a couple of months at each place, about 10 years apart.

John refused to cross the city line into Minneapolis for fear of being shot. Drive-by, stray bullet, mugging. Just total paranoia that this would be the natural outcome of him setting foot within the city limits. He would be shot, period. Had no fear of any of the suburbs, just Minneapolis proper.

He went to Scotland on vacation. Pub crawled around downtown Edinburgh at 3am. Felt “safe”, because there were “no guns” in Scotland. When I pointed out that the robbery/mugging rates in Britain and Scotland were 3 times those of Minnesota, he got royally pissed off, insisted that he was safer in Scotland than his own backyard and went on a rant about guns. Ok, sure. Think whatever you like, fatboy.

Next he tells me that we should all be living in small villages under an oxymoronic ‘system of anarchy’. Tear down the big cities, disband the corporations, dissolve all goverments. The idea that there were far too many people in this world for this was met with disbelief. Plenty of room, why look at all that empty land out west! We could invite millions more from poor countries to move here and live in our villages! Every village would produce what it needed, and trade for neighboring villages for what the lacked. Good Will (ie, profitless) Trade networks would “naturally” develop to bring needed raw materials to where they could be put to good use. Because that’s what is in people’s best interests. (Delivered by flying bunnies and pink unicorns, no doubt)

Criminals would be banished from the village. Simple and direct. If they caused problems for other villages, then they could be banished from them as well! If someone was really nasty, word would get around and sooner or later, they would find that they were unwelcome everywhere they went! (He was unable to deal with the questions of serial killers, armed gangs and the wrongfully accused, insisting that those things would be worked out in time.)

There’s only one response to this… :smack:

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Well, there’s also :rolleyes:.

And this guy sounds a lot like a former intern of mine.

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Next, meet my ex-wife, if only for one thing.

Just before we got married, she maxed out her credit card to the tune of over $6,000. While at the same time, lying to me and saying that she only owed about $1,500, and that this was her only debt other than her car.

Shortly thereafter, I found out that she also owed $1,200 to the government, because she had failed to pay her previous years taxes.

About 2.5 months after we got married, the truth came out. Not only the debts above, but she owed her mother $5,000, she hadn’t made a payment on her house - her parents owned the mortgage - in almost three years, and a host of other debts totalling well over $30,000. Fortunately for us, this was right as I was completing the sale of MY house and I had the money to deal with it.

The insanity was the CC debt. She was getting calls from bill collectors because she was failing to make the minimum payments. When I confronted her about this, because she definitely had the money at that point (because I had taken over most of the payments for everything else), her response was (direct quote);

“They’re being mean to me by not letting me use my credit card any more. So I’m punishing them by refusing to make the minimum payments. When they let me use my card again, I’ll start paying them.”

:eek:

I tried to explain how credit cards work, how large, faceless corporations work. That NO ONE was seeing her payment and making decisions about it, but that it was all automated and automatic. You exceeded your limit, you can’t use your card until you get it back below the limit. Period. Paying less than the minimum means that you’ll never get it below the limit. It also means that you’re trashing the hell out of your credit rating, and that affects not just you anymore, but the both of us.

But she stuck to her guns. They were being mean, she was punishing them. She was never going to make a full payment, ever! The minute I got the money from my house, I paid it off. And then she spend the rest of our brief marriage whining and crying about how I didn’t trust her enough to give her access to my accounts and how I was so mean to her by not putting everything into a joint account. :rolleyes:

The postscript of the story is that we separated after 10.5 months of marriage when I had her removed from the house under an Order For Protection. She was that fucking nuts and that violent. She filed for divorce using her stepfather’s attorney, then told her family that I had abandoned her, was concealing large sums of money, had physically abused her, was trying to steal her house, and that I was the one who had filed for divorce.

Nine months of a brutal divorce process later, she settled out of court owing me $27,500; with her attorney admitting that I could have gotten at least $40,000 if we had gone to court. Her mother and step father paid me $25,000 of it immediately, before the divorce was final.

Then she accused them of trying to destroy her, trying to gain MY sympathy at that point. Seriously. After all she did to me, she tried to cry on my shoulder and get my sympathy because her stepfather, who paid off $25,000 in HER debts, was “out to destroy” her. Sure thing, Queen Insano. Find another victim.

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How very odd. Most men marry women who are smarter than they are.

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[hijack]

I don’t think any society deals with those issues well and effectively …

And I think that kind of economic and social structure would work very well in a world with the current information technology, if we could devise a non-carbon based transportation system.
[/hijack]

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It wouldn’t work well at all. Besides being less efficient and therefore an even bigger burden of the environment for less return ( no economies of scale ), like a lot of Utopian visions it requires everyone to be dedicated to it, now and forever. Because as soon as some people decided they wanted to form into larger organized groups, they’d dominate the little disorganized villages without effort. And of course, someone, somewhere, would do so with ill intent, which means that others would either be overwhelmed, or organize and arm themselves to resist - and you’re right back where you started.

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See, that’s whats wrong with the world. They’ll let any random insane person have a fucking job. Seriously, go into the office tomorrow and just look around and realize that if we went with the village concept, most of the villages would be able to trade nothing more than conspiracy ideas and wet farts.

People who belive such things are never going to be capable of building a quality car or doing your taxes.

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Well, it’s obvious. He was fat. Obviously proves him an idiot right there. No need to go further. How dare that tub of lard even exist in the same world with us?

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You could just link the Travian thread for emphasis :wink:

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Thank you, Bricker.

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I dealt with a nut job like this just three weeks ago. I was ready to scream after I left, but I stayed polite, because I hadn’t dealt with this person for a few years. I will avoid this person for the next few years if I see them.

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That’s why less people are getting married, and just living together. At least that’s what a smart person told me. :slight_smile: At least they sounded like they thought they were smart.

I couldn’t resist the set up. Your best friend Chandler.

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I don’t think the point was that he was fat. The point is that he was a fucking moron.

And certainly not all fat people are morons. But some of them are.

I once knew a woman who was struggling with weight issues. She and a friend decided to join a gym. They went for an hour. When she got back home, she weighed herself. She weighed one pound more. From this, she concluded that exercise was “bullshit, man!”, and refused to go back. I tried patiently to explain that weight loss takes sustained and repeated effort, that there is no one-to-one correlation between a single exercise session and weight loss, and that one pound could have come from simply drinking water or not taking a dump recently. Nope. She had none of it. Exercise makes you fat. She had all the proof she needed.

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Maybe Chimera was talking about his Harley? Or to his Harley? Or…okay, I got nothing.

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Put on a couple pounds lately, Bricker? Just kidding. There was no need for the OP’s cheap shot.

Only because we can’t find women who are dumber than us.

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We’d end up eating the pink unicorns. (Wonder if they taste like candy.) The flying bunnies would be tough to hunt in a world without guns. Not to mention the constant rain of poop pellets.

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In the magical kingdom the dreamer is always a king or hero, never the drudge or peasant.

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In the land of skunks, the man with half-a-nose is king! (5 nerd points for placing that quote)

Fighting ignorance is a noble cause. Fighting insanity is as useful as tilting at windmills. If you present these people with evidence, facts, alternative ways to view things, and they refuse to change- your job is done, walk away.

Anything much beyond that is becoming gratuitous and sanctimonious saner-than-thou mental whackfest to make yourself feel better by comparison. Which is fine by me, but call it what it is so I can choose to walk away from you also.

(you=generic form, I only responded to this post cuz it reminded me of that quote.)

thus ends my more-tolerant-than-thou post :stuck_out_tongue:

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:stuck_out_tongue:
Come on folks! I was hoping to hear other people’s stories of “hair shirt hippies”, delusional friends and other clueless barely functional people!
I’ll add another;

Back in the mid 80’s, I had a roomie for a couple of years named Robert. Robert was a smart guy. He was an Actuary. But he had some obvious holes in his catalog, if you catch my drift.

1> This was when Japan was eating our lunch. Robert had no problem with it. He said that we should freely give them all of our “worthless” money in exchange for all their “valuable” trade goods. Then when we ran out of money, we simply declared that it wasn’t worth anything anymore and made NEW money. The idea of how this might affect our economy or that those “valuable trade goods” eventually broke and became worthless themselves was a bit of a shock to his thinking.

2> I bought a window AC unit for our apartment. On the very first day, it was 90 degrees. I turn it on, close all the windows and go out to do some errands. I come home and it’s running full blast and every window in the entire apartment is open. Robert decided that he needed the air flow in order to cool the place off and help out the AC. :dubious:

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Or maybe we could have a discussion without getting side-tracked into a 17-page hijack about some stupid, offhand comment. Maybe. Someday. I have a dream…