Living Idiocracy

At times (many times) I feel like I'm trapped in the movie, Idiocracy...except much, much worse. This week has been particularly over-the-top, so much so that I've only today started relaxing my shoulders. I have a habit of scrunching up my shoulders when I'm tense and dealing with stupid people. My Last evening, my shoulders were practically touching my ears. It would probably be better to just tell people I think they are idiots, but as Danny pointed out when I got off the telephone with the doctor's office, "You'll just make them cry, and get called mean." In the old days, they used to hand out Valium for this sort of thing.

In what my husband describes as, "The sort of thing that only happens to you", I achieved some sort of status as Queen of unintended farce.

I call Danny's allergist's office to book an appointment, explaining to a nurse what was happening. She asks me to hold. My call waiting beeps, I get a receptionist asking to book an appointment for Danny. I thought this is odd, and told her I was already on the phone with someone else from the office. She insists on giving us an appointment for a week later, which seemed like a long time after a serious allergic reaction, and try to explain in detail what happened complete with hives, stomach problems and the whole serious reaction. She says she's never heard of anything like that, but I have an appointment and can talk about it Friday. OK. Strange, but maybe the receptionist is new and unfamiliar with allergic reactions. She hangs up, the other person comes back and has no idea what I'm talking about when I mention the receptionist. She tells me, that's fine, we'll see you at your appointment then. I hang up the phone feeling like I was describing the moon landing to a fifteenth Century serf.

Thursday afternoon, I get a call confirming Danny's appointment at the dentist. Yes, that's right-in the course of all that explaining, she never mentioned she was calling from the dentist's office-she just mumbled "Dr. so and so." It sounded like the allergist's name. What's worse, after ten minutes of describing hives and loose stools, she never stopped to say, "That doesn't sound like the sort of thing we cover at the yearly teeth cleaning." No, she just let me blather on, and booked the appointment. Why they are automatically calling to book an appointment is quite another matter, but what sort of an idiot does not realise we're talking about allergies when the conversation turns to additional scratch tests and food challenges?

I quickly called the allergist back, managed an appointment for the next morning, and we all had a terrific laugh-except for the moron at the dental office, who I suppose, I might have made cry. We won't be using that dentist again.

Really, by the time it got to "Benadryl and Eppi-Pen" it really was time to interrupt and start asking questions. In a decent world, we would just let the stupid collect the dole to spare us from having their brainlessness inflicted upon us. Some people really are too painfully ignorant to work, and we should just pay them to stay home. It isn't fair to ask them to do things they are incapable of, and equally unfair to subject everyone else to their inadequacies. Tax dollars well spent, it would be.