Should I be Worried about Getting Stupider?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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And yes, I know that grammatically this thread title should’ve been phrased “…Getting More Stupid?” but I just like the sound of the word stupider better. Oh, the irony.

Anyway to business. I’m out of work. So, I’ve been doing the job agency rounds and some of them require skills tests. I used to ace these things. Now, not so much. I just finished a skills test for a census taker’s position. The test had twenty-eight questions to be done in thirty minutes. Well, I finished ahead of time, and thought I had done pretty well. There were only a couple of questions I felt iffy about. In the remaining test time I checked my math on a couple of questions, and found nothing lacking.

So, I call in for my results, and I am told I had missed five questions. Five frickin’ questions!! I mean, WTF?!! Okay, yeah, I passed. But still, not one or two wrong answers, but five!! And these were logic questions that could only have one answer, and it was multiple choice!

On a different test for a temp agency, I got only an 83% for accounts payable principles. I’ve been doing this shit for a living for over twenty years, and I only manage 83%?? The recruiter was reassuring and all, saying all that means is that I have a strong basic knowledge…blah, blah, blah. Okay, I’m not a CPA, but these were simple bookkeeping questions that I’m sure I used…USED to know.

All this ties in with the worrying I’ve been doing that I’m skipping letters when I write. I never used to do that. And the names I’ve been forgetting. And the history tales in my head that are foggier now than they used to be. Yesterday I couldn’t say for sure if the Zimmerman telegram was concerning WWI or WWII.

The week before, I was trying to remember who was the Civil War general that got his leg blown off at Gettysburg who had killed his wife’s lover some years before that, getting off on temporary insanity? I couldn’t remember. Then, two days later, I’m sitting there watching TV, and it just popped into my head: The name was Dan Sickles!

I mean, what the hell was my brain doing for two days?? Looking up old receiving records? Down in the basement of my thalamus, hauling out dusty file boxes? Then it interrupts Mythbusters to tell me, “Oh gee boss, by the way, that Civil War question from two days ago? The answer was Dan Sickles. Guess it got misfiled. H’yuk, h’yuk.”

So, am I getting stupider? At what point do I start to worry about stuff like this?

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Sorry, wrong thread.

Really, really, really wrong thread.

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I am more worried about being more opinionated and inflexible, though that could be part of being stupid too.

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Sometimes you freeze, once at an interview the lady asked me what “unearned income is.” It flew out of my head. I was the assistant controller at TWO HOTELS, yet the answer just flew out of my head.

Another temp agency gave me a test and it was one of those Excel skills test, I have advance Excel skills and the num lock was off and I didn’t realize it and it kept giving me errors. I was like lady, believe me I’m not stupid, the num lock key was off.

LOL

I think a lot of times with accounting you learn the GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) like I did, but over the years, business (especially hotels where I worked) do things a bit different, so you may not be actually doing it right. But they’re minor variances. I bet a quick trip to the library would brush you up.

Another trick for temp agencies is to dumb your skills down. If you say you’re intermediate with Excel you can fly through that test and when you get an assignment impress the bosses even more.

It’s not you, you’re just not used to the testing. You’ll get better as it goes.

It’s like when I took the written driver’s license test, I was studying so hard. And someone asked me “Why you can miss like 10 questions” I was like “I would rather flunk out of college than fail a driver’s license test.”

I don’t know why, and to those who failed, I’m sorry it’s not a rap against you, but it’s just how I feel :slight_smile:

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The last few years I’ve been wondering the same thing. Just as an example, earlier today I was doing an acrostic and one of the clues was “Son of Jocasta”. Now I know this, and I know that I know it, but I sat there for a full minute staring into space and all I could remember is that it starts with “O”. Finally, after considering and discarding Orestes and Odysseus as obviously wrong, it finally came to me that the correct answer was Oedipus.

I’ve also been doing things like using the wrong words when I type and getting off the couch and then forgetting what I was going to do.