My Rant on Playing Dumb

On Sunday I had an argument with my girlfriend on the way to an Oscar party.

At stake was the Toronto Escalator Rules, which I shall repost now for everyone's benefit so you don't have to click and visit the other page.

What happened was a crowd of us was going down the stairs, my girlfriend walking beside me and we were holding hands. On the left was an escalator going up, which means people at the bottom of the stairs who wanted to go up had two choices:

#1. Take the escalator up, and not block anyone coming down the stairs.

#2. Make the illogical choice of coming up the stairs and blocking the crowd of people coming down.

And lo and behold two morons with their baseball caps turned backwards decided to be jerks and go up the stairs, blocking people on the way and slowing everyone down - meanwhile there was a perfectly EMPTY escalator going in the direction they wanted to go.

They could have - very easily - got on the empty escalator, gone up it at whatever speed they felt like going, and got to the top very quickly and easily.

But no, they decided to block the people coming down.

So I decided to complain very loudly about it.

"Wow, some people are just too stupid to know when to use the escalator."

And then when I got to the bottom of the stairs my girlfriend decided to play dumb and pretended not to know what I was talking about. She even tried to claim that it was not a crowd of people going down the stairs. (There was a pack of 15 people at least on the stairs when I said it.)

And then we got into an argument about what constitutes a crowd.

And she tried to claim that there was only 1 person ahead of us on the stairs when there was at least 6 people ahead of us, not counting the two jerks blocking the stairs.

When I realized she was doing this all deliberately, playing dumb and making me very frustrated I told her off for doing that to me. It was really frustrating. There was no reason for her to be arguing with me and she was trying to make me feel stupid by pretending to be stupid herself.

ARG!!!!!

I get frustrated and angry just thinking about the incident.

Basically my end point here is DO NOT PRETEND TO BE DUMB. You are only annoying people unnecessarily.

It is one thing if your name is Rob Ford and you are just naturally stupid (and annoy people with your sheer dumbness), but it is another thing entirely when you pretend to be stupid as a gag just so you can frustrate your fellow human beings by pretending you don't know what they are talking about.

I swear if she ever does that again I am going to switch the sugar with the salt so she ends up with a spoonful of salt in her coffee. Then we shall see who has the last laugh.

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And then of course there are people who are just plain dumb. I blame our education system that places too much emphasis on looks (drama class, seriously?) and not enough emphasis on simple things like English writing, math, geography...