Big Frick Dot Com

I’ll admit that there are some pretty smart folks doing some pretty remarkable things today.

Like the folks who designed the traffic lights at the six way intersection near my house. These lights have the ability to sense when my car is approaching and immediately switch to red allowing all other lanes of traffic to go at least once and sometimes twice before turning back to green again allowing me to proceed. How it is able to discern my car amongst all the other cars out there is a mystery to me, but it does it every single time.

Or like the telephone guy that installed the phones in my house. He was able to somehow wire my phone to the toilet seat, so that within a matter of seconds after I take a seat I can be assured that phone is going to ring. I have searched for the wires that facilitate this process, but to no avail. This leads me to believe that it is either some sort of wireless remote control or else it’s haunted.

Regardless of the reasons I appreciate bright people and what they are able to accomplish, even if it has a somewhat detrimental effect on me. But no matter how you slice it, there are plenty of things today that are just plain stupid as well.

For instance, I went to the optometrist recently to be fitted for some new contact lenses. During the fitting he reviewed the proper way to insert the contacts by looking at the cup shape versus the dish shape appearance of the lens indicating whether it is inside out or not. But he also pointed out that along with looking at the shape of this tiny plastic disc, around the edge in a font size so small that they could in fact be sub-atomic, are the numbers 123. The doctor said this was placed there to allow the user to tell if the contact is right side out. An ingenious idea, but as I told the doctor, if I could read the numbers I wouldn’t need the contacts. It’s kind of like a pill for Alzheimer’s. If you remember to take it, you don’t need it.

I saw another stupid idea on a recent visit to my bank. As part of a promotion the bank was offering a ceramic piggy bank to anyone opening a new account. Not much new there, but the stupid part was that the pig had a scarf around his neck, a knit cap and appeared to be snow skiing. While skiing is certainly an acceptable depiction of winter fun, I asked if they were sure, in this time of TARP and consequences, that they wanted their promotion to depict a bank going downhill. The look on the head cashiers face was priceless as she scurried off to mention my comment to the branch manager. Surprisingly enough the piggy banks were no longer displayed the next day. These guys probably paid a fair chunk of change to some advertising company to come up with this idea. Did no one see the irony in that image but me?

Perhaps it’s just my warped sense of humor or my firm grasp on reality that makes me shake my head at some of the absurdity that surrounds me. As Forest Gump said “stupid is as stupid does” and stupid stuff usually just amuses me. But even though these examples are stupid to the point of being humorous they are not as stupid as hiring a Treasury Secretary that can’t figure his own taxable income or earmarking almost a half a trillion dollars in a spending bill to build roads, bridges and schools which will likely begin in 2011 and beyond, calling it stimulus and expecting that to fire up the credit and housing markets today.

I guess it proves there will never be a shortage of stupid.

And sometimes stupid ain’t funny.