Musings of the Chronologically Challenged™ Fourth Generation

 
I may have inadvertently contributed to the foreign image of "The Ignorant American" with the following archived post. It gets more foreign hits than all other Indigo Insights posts. Do you think it may be possible that since the post was not accompanied by a cartoon of a huge tongue in cheek, that perhaps the satirical component was missed in Europe? Could it be that Europeans simply don't relate to poking fun at their own shortcomings? Oh Well!


Monday, September 29, 2003

8 Sad Examples of Products of American Public Schools
(or Material for the new book "Chicken Soup for Dumbasses" by Miss Edna, Greenville, NC)

ONE
Recently, when I went to McDonald's I saw on the menu that you could have an order of 6, 9 or 12 Chicken McNuggets. I asked for a half dozen nuggets.
"We don't have half dozen nuggets," said the teenage boy at the counter.
"You don't?" I replied.
"We only have six, nine, or twelve," was the reply.
"So I can't order a half dozen nuggets, but I can order six?"
"That's right."
So I shook my head and ordered six McNuggets.

TWO
The paragraph above doesn't amaze me because of what happened a couple of months ago. I was checking out at the local FoodLand with just a few items and the lady behind me put her things on the belt close to mine. I picked up one of those "Dividers" that they keep by the cash register and placed it between our things so they wouldn't get mixed. After the girl had scanned all of my items, she picked up the "Divider", looking it all over for the bar code so she could scan it.
Not finding the bar code she said to me, "Do you know how much this is?"
I said to her "I've changed my mind, I don't think I'll buy that today."
She said "OK" and I paid her for the things and left. She had no clue what had just happened.

THREE
A lady at work was seen putting a credit card into her floppy drive and pulling it out very quickly. When asked what she was doing, she said she was shopping on the Internet and they kept asking for a credit card number, so she was using the ATM "thingy."

FOUR
I recently saw a distraught young lady weeping beside her car.
"Do you need some help?" I asked.
She replied, "I knew I should have replaced the battery to this remote door unlocker. Now I can't get into my car. Do you think they (pointing to a distant convenient store) would have a battery to fit this?"
"Hmmm, I dunno. Do you have an alarm too?" I asked.
"No, just this remote thingy," she answered, handing it and the car keys to me.
As I took the key and manually unlocked the door, I replied, "Why don't you drive over there and check about the batteries. It's a long walk."

FIVE
Several years ago, we had an Intern who was none too swift. One day she was typing and turned to a secretary and said, "I'm almost out of typing paper. What do I do?"
"Just use copier machine paper," the secretary told her.
With that, the intern took her last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five "blank" copies.

SIX
I was in a car dealership a while ago, when a large motor home was towed into the garage. The front of the vehicle was in dire need of repair and the whole thing generally looked like an extra in "Twister." I asked the manager what had happened. He told me that the driver had set the "cruise control" and then went in the back to make a sandwich.

SEVEN
My neighbor works in the operations department in the central office of a large bank. Employees in the field call him when they have problems with their computers. One night he got a call from a woman in one of the branch banks who had this question: "I've got smoke coming from the back of my terminal. Do you guys have a fire downtown?"

EIGHT
Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message "He's lying" was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the suspect wasn't telling the truth. Believing the "lie detector" was working, the suspect confessed.
posted by HCL at 1:07 PM