I have a muscle syndrome called myofascitis which causes mild to pretty severe muscle pain, on bad days, I have often found myself walking similarly. It is because the joints are just not very mobile. I can’t bend my knees very well and it hurts to move my hips in a proper way.
What helped me a ton was getting my vitamin D levels tested and taking vitamin D on a regular basis. And I’m a HUGE skeptic (or was) when it comes to just how much vitamins really help with energy and all of that. Now, when I feel myself seizing up like that, I just take a megadose and by the next day I’m fairly limber again. Maybe your mom should get her D levels tested?
That said, even with muscle issues, and even on a bad day I still walk much faster than these slow people the OP is talking about. Like other dopers have described, I’ve tried to walk at that slow of a pace as well, I don’t even know how it’s possible, I can’t do it for sure.
At work, I’m slow and methodical whenever I do any new task the first few times because I want to know exactly how to do it without messing up. I think about each step, and ask myself why is this the most efficient and best way to execute this task? Others dive right in by the seat of their pants and get in the habit of doing things wrong, then I constantly hear customer complaints about their handiwork, but the manager doesn’t care because they’re moving fast from the get-go which is an indication of intelligence and capability for him.
At my last job, I didn’t have time to complete a customer’s paperwork because another customer walked in and required my immediate attention. The manager completed the paperwork the next morning and later told me that she’d already finished it. I was surprised that she finished it so quickly after I noticed a number of items requiring extra work, so I reviewed it after she left and she apparently missed a whole series of papers that needed to be done to keep the customer out of potential legal trouble, but the customer would never know about the legal exposure unless the authorities audit the paperwork. I like to move slow enough to do things right which may make me appear to be lazy or stupid to many people.
I really do think this is something that can be learned in youth. If not the ability at least the concept. If a kid ever played in some sort of organized sport they should have been coached to hustle. It’s a life skill.
Not that one spends every waking moment as the proverbial chihuahua, but when the moment calls for it, they can find that higher gear.
As for me, I’m fast at anything I can be fast at because I am lazy - I am motivated to maximize my leasure time.
If this wasn’t the owner of the company, I wonder how the guy’s boss would feel about so much company money just sitting there vulnerable to loss or theft instead of being safely in the bank.
I knew this woman in the Army, named Tara. she was from Calgary, and we were on a Combat Leadership Course together.
Part of the course, which is designed to train a person to become an NCO, was teaching a drill lesson, so we spent a lot of time teaching the other people in our section a drill lesson. (My particular lession was on how to execute a right turn.) Tara, for whatever reason, did drill - all drill, every single movement - at half the speed of a normal person. Everything. Actually, it applied to any physical skill she was asked to do - drill, assembling a rifle, raising an HF antenna, any specific physical task. The course instructors would yell at her. When teaching our practice lessons, WE would yell at her. You could be incredibly specific: “Smith, hurry the fuck up! You’re slow!” It did not matter. She simply could not speed up, no matter how hard she tried. Or said she was trying. It was impossible to know if she was trying because she was always at half speed. I’m not exactly sure how she’d done 4 years in the Armed Forces without being able to do basic drill at the same speed as the other 100,000 people in the Forces.
What I found fascinating about this is that nothing else about her suggested a problem. She could run or march or do PT or what have you as fast as anyone else. She wasn’t chronically late. I saw her riding a bike like a normal human. She seemed fit and healthy (in fact, she was remarkably beautiful) and didn’t appear to ne injured. She went to university so presumably was not stupid, and later in the course I took her out to see a movie and she seemed as smart and quick as anyone else. But when asked to execute a physical task, she dropped back into tortoise mode, seemingly unconscious of the fact she was doing it. It was really the damndest thing.
On the other hand you had Dom, a guy I worked with for many years. Dom was the opposite of Tara. He could do drill or assemble a rifle or whatever just as fast as anyone else - but if asked to do anything academic, Dom slowed to an absolute crawl. He was not stupid or even close to it; his work was outstanding. He seemed to have no sense of how slow he was, though, or even of the fact that time was passing. I remember once he was asked to do a briefing on the situation in Somalia - this was circa 1993-1994 - and he dutifully began to present. After half an hour had passed he was still talking about Somalia’s geography and climate, and it dawned on us that at the rate things were going it would take him six hours to finish, so someone said something.
I don’t know what value these stories are, but it’s fascinating to me. I guess the passage of time is not experienced the same by everyone.
I think this is it for a lot of people- they’re not really thinking what they’re doing, so there’s a lot more overhead going on relative to the amount of doing, and that takes up time. The rest of us tend to think a step ahead, so we’re not stopping to dick around and figure out what to do next at that immediate moment.
I don’t walk fast, but I don’t dawdle either. And yes, sometimes I get that foggy/scatterbrained thing going on where I can’t really concentrate very well- it’s like a million things are going on in my head at once and I have a hard time sticking with one thought for very long.
I can’t stand really slow and plodding either. I was walking the dog recently, and we live near a school. I lapped a couple of kids who were walking home from school. By that I mean, they were 2-3 blocks from the school when I spotted them the first time. I walked the dog around 8-10 more blocks and came back around to my starting point to find the same damn kid only about one block further from where I’d last seen him or her. Now, plodding slow kids, I just don’t understand. But apparently the “SLOW CHILDREN” sign is well- and appropriately placed in my neighborhood.
Then it dawned on me. Those kids are toting around 50-60 pounds of books in their backpacks. I know, I picked one up once for a girl who’d dropped hers (running from a tiny little dog that was chasing her) and handed it to her. Ah. They weight 'em down these days, I guess, so they don’t fly off the planet and bounce into orbit.
I guess I need to remind people that by definition our population is a bell curve when it comes to IQ. So that means half, 50% of all our fellow citizens are below average in intelligence. Throw in low work ethic and you have the semi retards that populate places of business. Throw in the fact that most of them end up in the service sector and that explains why it seems that so many people you interact with on a daily basis appear to be borderline incompetent. They are. We tend to be lulled by the first line of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. We may all be created equal with it comes to our inalienable rights, but certainly we are not all created equal when it comes to our potential intelligence. Education is only one variable in the equation: some people are just drooling imbeciles and no amount of education will change that.
As a teacher of Aikido, which for the uninitiated is basically a martial art that uses physics to undo an opponent. Steven Segal practices it but he uses a more active form, rather than passive, since its more flashy for the screen.
An example. A person who moves at the speed you describe, can generate far more force than a fist traveling twice as fast. Physics tells us the Mass X Velocity Squared = Force. So to simplify, lets just use Mass times velocity. If a person weighs 100 lb and he is moving 3 feet persecond, he can generate, 100lbs x 3 ft/second = 300 ft lbs of force. I weigh 260lbs so if I were to hit you with just my extended arm, not a punch, just my arm like a ram, I could move forward with my hand 2 inches away from your chest and shove you with nearly 900lbs of force. Think I’m crazy, try it. But be sure the person has a mattress or swimming pool to fall into. You dont’ actually step, you slide your foot forward in a gliding move, in a horizontal movement. Your arm is horizontal, and you hit them like a ram, they will pause as their chest absorbs some of the force then they will be thrown backward too fast for them to remain on their feet. It will shock the shit out of them. We have this false notion that to hit someone hard, you cock your fist and throw a punch. That relies on muscle strength, not pure physics. In boxing the move I just described is banned, its called cuffing. In Aikido, we do not stand toe to toe and take a punch to make a punch. That game is for fools. We wait till the other person makes an aggressive move then use their weight and momentum, plus ours against them. Case in point. I took a would be assailant out when he walked toward me and threw a punch, I caught him full in the face with the move I described, shoving his face backward with probably 700ftlbs of force. All I felt was the softness of his chin in the palm of my hand, but his head snapped back while the rest of his body, moving forward to throw his punch continued forward. He ended up, hanging upside down head to the ground about 5 feet off the ground for a second, before coming down on his head. What probably saved him from serious injury and me in jail for manslaughter was he landed on the hood of a parked car. That was all for him. the two guys behind him, put their hands up and walked back to where they came from leaving their friend in a heap on the ground. I got in my car and drove off.
There are some jobs which absolutely demand speed. Og forbid if you’re either not naturally speedy or you fail to come up to speed, especially if there’s a production element involved.
I can’t begin to tell you how many s-l-o-w people with whom I’ve worked. In some cases it was obviously because of age, which was excused. If you were young and had some experience under your belt (as opposed to newly hired with no prior experience), everybody would descend upon you to SPEED IT UP SPEED IT UP SPEED IT UP. As one of my old managers used to say, “Move your ass or move on right out the door 'cause I don’t have time for you.”
Of course that meant that 1) most of the work was dumped on the fastest workers, including myself, which meant 2) if any of us were either injured or on vacation, work would grind to a halt. Then TPTB would be all over the manager’s ass as to why nothing was getting done in the allowed allotted time frame.
This is possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read. When you throw a normal punch, you don’t swing your arm with only the mass of your fist behind it. Your whole body’s momentum is put into that punch PLUS the muscle pushing your fist forward. It’s like throwing a baseball. A pitcher can throw a baseball 100 mph not by swinging his arm super fast, but by channeling the momentum of his entire body to maximize the amount of force he is able to apply to the ball. The arm is just a little bit of whip-crack on the end of a complicated motion.
Holding out your arm and stepping into someone like a battering ram might be slightly more effective than flailing wildly, but there is no way it beats a properly thrown punch.
Also, I have a neighbor who mows his lawn slower than anyone I have ever seen. It takes him about 4 hours to cut a very small lawn. I’d guess he moves at about .3 mph. I’ve seen him walk the dog the same way. I think he must have some kind of neurological problem, but I can’t imagine what.
I believe that, in Ontario, the standard speed used to establish how long pedestrian signals need to be active to allow people to cross streets of different widths is 1.5 m/s.
I had a boss like this once. Here is a good example:
I would show him a slide or something.
“Sir, here is a decision we need to make. Due to financial constraints, we can only pursue one of these projects. I will need your approval for this decision.”
The options would be:
A. Develop weapon to kill all cuddly cute things
B. Develop product that would cure all cancers
He would look at the page/decision…
My foot tapping Listening to crickets I play the final jeopardy music in my head Boss still looking at the page
“Sir, do you have any thoughts?..I recommend option B.”
“Yes…I agree.”
As others have said. He wasn’t dumb. He had great ideas a lot of time. I will even admit that he did sometimes come up with some ideas that I may have bypassed in my haste, but the man was never in a hurry, even with the simplest of thoughts.
I am slow both physically and mentally, i have been like this since birth. It affected my schooling years resulting in poor grading. It gives people the impression that i’m not so smart, but of course that is not just true.
And physically, i find it hard to hold on to a job because i can never keep up with everybody else, so i have lost a lot of jobs. So as a result of that i have spent most of my working life unemployed. I have no superannuation that will be of any help when i retire, i will never have the opportunity to ever own my own home.
The worst part is that no doctor can tell me why, and every time i mention it, they seem uninterested. I ask if there has been any studies or breakthroughs in that area, or if they could recommend anything they could give me to speed up. But going by the looks they give me, i’m sure there thinking that all i want is a prescription for speed or something like that.