Several years ago, my wife (then girlfriend) worked at a bank as a teller. Every so often, she would come home with some ridiculous story about how stupid people are when it comes to money, how they can’t grasp the relatively simple concept of balancing a checkbook, or how people would try to rip them off by kiting checks. All of these stories were, naturally, extremely entertaining to me, but there was always one thing that someone said to her that really stuck in my head as the single dumbest thing I had ever heard. Apparently, after being told their account was overdrawn, they asked “But how can my account be overdrawn? I still have checks in my checkbook.” Pretty goddamn stupid, right? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to announce that this statement is no longer the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
While I haven’t really given it a lot of thought, in order to qualify for being the dumbest thing I have ever heard, the statement would have to demonstrate a profound ignorance for the most basic of concepts. The line about the checks certainly qualifies; up until I heard that I was pretty convinced that a checking account was pretty basic: A company holds money for you, and when you write a check you tell the bank to give someone else a certain amount of money. What could more elementary than that? Not understanding the concept of exchanging money for goods and services? Not knowing that 1+1=2?
Anyways, let’s get to what this chick said. Apparently, this girl, who is the sister of a friend, thought that – are you ready for this – female lions were called tigers. I’ll wait while you let that soak in for a minute. Similar to how male ducks are called drakes and female ducks are called hens, she thought — she seriously, actually, truly thought — that lions were only the males, and the females were called tigers. Making this even more flabbergasting is that she lives in the State of Michigan, which, as I’m sure all you sports fans realize, is home to the professional sports teams of the Lions and Tigers. Even worse still is that she was not, say, two or four years old, but a 17-year-old senior in high school. So, to be clear, this girl had just spent a huge portion of the last twelve years of her life in an educational environment (or, should I say, what is supposed to be an educational environment), and thought a female lion was called a tiger. Holy shit.
Now, I know what you are thinking, and it’s the first question I asked too: If she thinks that tigers are female lions, then what does she think a tiger is called? I don’t know the answer to that, but, following her chain of logic, I would assume that she thinks a male tiger is a pterodactyl and a female tiger is a rhinoceros.
Typically, this would be the time where I would start complaining about our piss-poor public educational system, but that isn’t really applicable here. American schools are not that inept. This is not the failure of the schools, rather, it is just the confirmation of a simple fact that seems to become more and more obvious each day: Some people are really fucking stupid. Comically, shockingly, mind-bendingly fucking stupid.
This has been Andy sayin’, “If it weren’t for my horse — as in ‘giddy-up giddy-up, let’s go’ — I wouldn’t have spent that year in college, which is a degree-granting institution.”
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