My brother’s friend, Ross, is the dumbest person I know. He’s a lovely guy, always up for a chat and totally devoted to his pet ferrets, but he’s been sadly shortchanged in the brains department. I’d like to share some Rossisms with you all now…
Ross’s father started up a second hand book store, and called it The Book Nook.
“Nook means like a corner”, he tells me proudly.
“I know, Ross.” I answered. He seemed impressed as he said
“Well, I didn’t know. I thought it meant, like, nookie. I said ‘Dad, why are you going to call it that? People will get the wrong idea’ and then he told me that nook meant corner.”
Ross and my brother went to the liquor store to get some beer. At this store, you walk into the refridgerated room, and pick what you want. Taking their slab to the counter, Ross rubbed his arms and remarked to the store keeper “You need a fridge in that freezer!”. My brother and the store owner looked at him, and my brother asked “What?!”. Ross said “What did I say?” My brother told him, and Ross said “Oh! I meant you need a sweater in that fridge.”
Ross and my brother were discussing my brother’s job.
“How much do you get an hour?” Ross asked.
“$10.57 an hour” said my brother.
“Wow, not bad, nearly $11.00 an hour.” said Ross, looking impressed
“Ummm, no, that’s about 43 cents short of $11.00 an hour” my brother replied.
“But there’re only 60 cents in the dollar” said Ross.
“Umm, no” said my brother “There are 100 cents in the dollar.”
“Ohh!” exclaimed Ross “Don’t you hate it when you get time and money mixed up!”
Reminds me of a woman who used to work with us. At age 28, and holding a B.A. in history, this woman:
–Was not sure if tobacco was a plant
–Didn’t understand why India couldn’t be part of NATO (because apparently geography’s not that important to history)
–Didn’t understand why Germany could be part of NATO if India couldn’t (it’s not on the North Atlantic, apparently)
–Tried to convince all her co-workers that football (as the USA knows it) originated in England, but they call it soccer
–Was not sure whether the “incumbent” was the person already in office or an opponent
…and many more that I can’t remember off the top of my head.
I recall a conversation I had with one of my cow orkers during last year’s presidential election crisis. He, being a extreme right wing conspiracy nut, was going on about how the whole thing was a government plot to cancel the election so “they” could take over the country. I finally interupted him.
“So you figure this is a secret plot by the United States government to take over the United States government?”
“Well, it sounds stupid when you put it like that.”
Someone else uses the phrase ‘cow orking’? I thought I was the only one- I started using it about four years ago and haven’t managed to break the habit since. It’s a struggle for me to refer to the guy in the desk next to mine as a ‘coworker’ rather than a ‘cow orker’. We’re all orkers here.
Cow orking, I think, has its origins somewhere around alt.sysadmin-recovery, quite a few years ago. I do believe that the Bastard Operator from Hell also has to deal with cow orkers.
Scott Adams, in his Dilbert newsletter, recently encouraged the use of “cow orker” as a secret code word to demean your fellow employees who aren’t too bright. This is in the same vein of using “induhvidual” for civilian morons.
We had a blonde working in the front office of my previous place of drudgery, and felt honorbound to keep her posted on all the latest blonde jokes. We actually had this conversation one morning:
C: “Hey, Kim - why did the blonde climb the chain link fence?”
K: “I dunno - why?”
C: “So she could see what was on the other side.”
K: “That’s totally retarded. Why didn’t she just open the gate?”
I work in a courier company, we moved about 2 years ago. One of our drivers couldn’t find our office. Our office is on the ground floor with HUGE windows. We spot the driver standing in a parking lot looking around for us, he is facing away from us. We get on the radio, alert the driver, tell him we see him and he should turn around. The driver does a 360 and looks again hoping that the office would have magically appeared when he did the 360. It was priceless
I know I say things like #1 and #2. I’m not stupid, but sometimes I can say some pretty goofy things, and then say “D’oh!” Of course, my friends can’t understand or follow what I am saying half the time, so I am really the only one that catches it. And I know that more than him and me are subject to such things. Plenty of my friends and relatives do the same thing. We just laugh and live with it.
And, I do hate it when I get money and time mixed up. I feel for this poor lad.
I was working with a group called the Murder Club[sup]tm[/sup], performing an interactive murder mystery. Cynthia, God love her, is utilized more for the T&A aspect than the brains. But we’re shortstaffed that night, so she’s playing an FBI agent. After the exposition, when the audience is interviewing the suspects, and agents, and everything, Cynthia looks to her husband, who is also playing an agent, and says, “I’m an FBI agent, too, right, honey?”
One of my coworkersis so damned stupid…combine all the “stupid hick” and “stupid Texan” stereotypes, and he’s worse than that. Drives a Chevy K-5 Blazer, wears a ten-gallon hat and super-pointy cowboy boots, and is dumber than a box of rocks.
Sample: I made the mistake of telling him about racinchikki. Some quotes from that conversation (imagine the stupidest Southern hick voice you can):
“So she’s from New York? How does she like being a city girl?” That’s excusable, almost. I tell him she’s not from NYC, but upstate near Albany.
“I’ve never heard of Albany.” It gets worse. He asked how I met her. I said “on the internet”.
“Really? They have AOL all the way up there?” Well, yes, but she’s not on AOL (she uses a local ISP). I tell him I met her on a message board.
“What’s that?” “Y’know what chat is? Yes? Well, this is kinda the same, but it’s on a web page and not real-time.” He still doesn’t understand the concept.
Had to leap in here. The phrase “cow orker” is of course a misspelling of “co-worker”, but it originated in alt.folklore.urban. I saw it for the first time in 1993, and I remember well how everyone jumped all over it and thought it was wonderful. It’s been part of the AFU phrasebook ever since. AFU has a lot of unique sylistic variations from the norm, including the cow orker, voracity, and the “internym” (the crazy-phrase-as-a-middle-name-or-alias thing).
Cow orkers, like manny peoples, condiment wars and the tow truck industry, is (depending on your point of view) either an old tradition or a stale joke from the now defunct AOL version of this board.
