The Daily Hassle

Laughs on the go.

slow daze

 

I don't have anything against government employees. I used to be one. And yes, it does take a certain kind of stupid to fill a certain kind of role. Hey – I was desperate to fit in at the time.

 

On more than one occasion, I used to glance across at any given coworker and wonder if we should stop looking for the missing link. If you've ever had the displeasure of entering a government department and interacting with my ex-fellow employees, you quickly realise that intelligence and common sense have put a “gone on vacation” sign on the foreheads of these office Neanderthals.

 

Conforming to a serious care of nepotism, these under skilled under-worked overpaid hairless ape-like sloths hire a gross amount of their own kind and seriously clog the arteries of the government system with slow speech and a rather opaque drool. If this were the eighties I would ask you to imagine “captain caveman” at the helm of every desk.

 

Okay, I might be a little tough on these cretins. After all I used to be one of them. But the difference between myself and these govern-"mental" ewoks would obviously be my superior intellect and the fact that I actually want things done so I can move on to getting other stuff done. I also think daily, while these retarded muskrats they take their endless supply of coffee and cigarette breaks, that they were only hired in the first place to fill out the grey cubicles and in part that they wouldn't demolish the building that looks as intellectually fragile as they do.

 

“Conforming to a serious care of nepotism, these under skilled under-worked overpaid hairless ape-like sloths hire a gross amount of their own kind and seriously clog the arteries of the government system with slow speech and a rather opaque drool. If this were the eighties I would ask you to imagine “captain caveman” at the helm of every desk.

 

Still think I'm harsh?

Example time.

 

So the other day, I'm on the phone with a government medical insurance corporation. I called them with the intention of faxing them a document and all I needed was their fax number. A simple process yes? No. The lady on the other end of the phone insisted on asking me a series of questions in order to authenticate whether or not I was capable of using fax with the given digits on my hand.

 

Failing to understand why her “defcon” colour is orange, I tell her to lower the mission impossible theme song playing in her head and reassure her that all I needed was her fax number. I repeat gently that we were faxing a form on behalf of a client and the only job I needed her to complete was to read out an eight digit number that can be used to transmit information on paper.

 

It took her 10 minutes of putting me on hold (quite possible to take another coffee break) to what I thought was locating her own fax number.

 

For a brief moment I wonder what other people in the world would think if they dialed the same number to reach this section of stupidity.

 

She finally answered the phone after I’ve had my fill of the on-hold elevator music and uttered something I won’t forget.

 

“I’m sorry sir, we have no French number”.

 

“French number?” I repeated.

 

“Yes sir, I’ve never heard of it”.

 
I blinked twice. For a moment I thought stupidity was a virus and it has got hold of her hearing. I never once thought that the telephone reception on my government issued landline phone was degrading.

 
I got so angry and jumped on my chair yelling at her obvious mistake and throwing things around my office. In the midst of my tirade I made eye contact with my supervisor who was passing by the office timber wood glass panel door. Though it was a soundproof office, she happened to catch my ape-like peepshow performance.

 

They say we evolved from Stone Age.

 

I guess some of us are still evolving…