I'm feeling arrogantly misanthropic with, and darkly superior to a significant portion of my fellow man today. I am not a likable creature right now. I am mean and horrible, and have probably been reading a bit too much Transmetropolitan for my own good in a world like the one we live in. It comes in my lesser moments when doing Tech Support for a living. Case in point; the lady I got off the phone with a bit ago. Ostensibly, she works with the software I support every day. And as we’re in a list of her clientele, looking at the one name on the screen after narrowing it down with a search, she asks me, “So what do I do now?”
I watch her mouse as it hovers over the person’s highlighted name. I imagine her empty cow-eyed stare. Hear her dead voice come out of her slack lips. Her hopelessly blunt-hammered synapses continue stubbornly not to fire.
“Do you want to edit that account?”
“Yes.”
“What would make the most sense to do next?”
“I don’t know.”
Her mouse continues to point at the name in question. There are at least three buttons on the screen to get her where she needs to go. And that’s if she doesn’t want to just double click on the person’s name itself in the list. She’s been provided with so many labeled and intuitive ways to achieve what she wants. Were this an oncoming car, she’d have been roadkill by now. If it were a snake it woulda bit her. Quickly, Ma’am. What if lives were at stake?
“So… with your mouse pointing at your person’s highlighted name, the only name in the list whose account you want to look at the details of, what do you normally do in this very same situation?”
“I don’t know.” she repeats.
And there it is. My respect and patience for humanity slips another notch. My caller hasn’t called to learn how to do the operation she originally wanted for help with. She wants it done for her. It’s too hard. Hard stuff is too hard. She’s checked out. Slipped her gears into neutral and gone coasting. I have to imagine this is her defense mechanism. Something that kicks in whenever she’s confronted with the myriad of things she doesn’t understand or want to have to think about. I can hear her slack jawed voice uttering the words in my head. “It will not go.” And lazily implores me from the well of her being. Packlid-like, she dimly knows something is wrong, but cannot form the coherent thought to express what it is. She just wants this to be over. “You are smart. Can you make it go?”
My compassion falls away like the solid boosters on the space shuttle as my disgust and my gorge fire upward. If she’s not listening and just wants an operator to make her hands go, then my willingness to engage with her as a person goes away too. “Double click on the name if you’d like to edit it, ma’am.” I say robotically. Our interaction turns machinelike. She is wasted flesh, obeying my commands. An extension of my will. “Click on the thing. Click on that box. Enter in the appropriate numbers. You will have to do the math for that person’s remaining balance. Yes I understand it’s difficult, Ma’am.” I stop short of apologizing for the inconvenience. I’m not sorry. I want her to understand that her ignorance is suffering. Her incompetence is not cute or funny. It’s sickening. Try not to let her willfully stupid attitude touch you, man. It’s Friday. Another few hours and you won’t have to deal with these people for a few days. Then you get a whole new week of this crap.
This is how tyrants get elected. This is how the thousand little indignities visited upon us are carried out; by vapid guile-less drones paid to do and not think. Told what to do and not to think. The perfect modern feudalist serfs. They do what they’re told to. Buy what they’re told to. Vote for who they’re told to by their democratically elected sovereigns. Their god’s in his heaven, and all is right with the world. Someone else needs to take care of things for them. Don’t make them think. Stuff is hard. Someone who knows stuff should be making the decisions. “Just tell me what to do.” they plaintively whine. “Oh I don’t bother with instructions. I wouldn’t understand it anyway. How come it doesn’t just work? Can’t you do it for me? Why not? I’m not a computer person. Isn’t that funny?”
And at this point, I feel it would be a bad thing for me to be President. Who’d want to lead a country full of brain-dead cattle? Who’d want to be the person who has to think for the teeming legions of philistines; not only content with, but proud of their ignorance. I can imagine herding them down killchutes into abbatoirs towards people with ballistic-loaded sledgehammers and rotary razor-threshers. I can imagine the hungry automatic car-wash roar of the machines; cycling up to flense the flesh from their bones as they walk face first into the blades. Some cry as they go. Lowing for their next order or command...But they go none-the less. They shake their heads and wonder why someone hasn’t done something about all this. Something here is wrong, but they’re incapable of understanding what. Their practiced inability to comprehend finally fails to result in someone else thinking or fixing things for them. Self-lobotomized with their critical thinking faculties destroyed, they process through into the only fit end for cattle. Some even wave flags for the cameras as Paul Mauriat’s ‘Love is Blue’ serenely drips from hidden speakers throughout. What’s a few shreds of fabric and splinter in the leftover meat between friends, yes?
And I feel badly and sick with myself for such horrific frustration and anger. And then I’m mad at them all over again for feeling badly on their ill-deserved behalf. This existentialist dread of my fellow humans. Their willful inability to think is not my responsibility to feel compassion for. You can lead a jackass to water, but you can’t make him think. At some point, they need to engage too. We’re loaded down with them. Half consumed by them. Pinks. Insensate food-chutes merely acting out some super-evolved version of searching out carbohydrates and proteins in the primordial ooze. Held back. Trapped in a world with them. So many opportunities to learn. So many dumbed-down ways to get where they want to go, what they want to eat and what they need to see to pacify and placate them. So little understanding of how any of it works. Just this desperate need that someone else do the thinking and make it all right.
I’m sick with it today.
I need to get out of this line of work. It's making me mean.
