The art of being dumb

I was just thinking about dumbness. No one is immune to the ravages of sheer, unadulterated brainlessness no matter how bright they might be. This is because the leaden hammer of chance is always hanging over our heads, Damocles-like, ready to fall at a moment's notice and make fools of each and every one of us.

But dumbness also shows up when we don't learn from our experiences and misadventures. Perhaps the greatest cause of dumbness is simple ignorance. Here's a great example in a computer user's message sent to a support department. It speaks volumes about pen in fifth gear, brain in neutral:

"This morning I tried to sign on and for a purple screen. After several tried with different browsers then I got the message you were down. I tried to exit. It went to a background with huge pixels and stuck. I mean no amount of rebooting would get rid of it. Finally I had to reset my wallpaper."

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I was just thinking about dumbness. No one is immune to the ravages of sheer, unadulterated brainlessness no matter how bright they might be. This is because the leaden hammer of chance is always hanging over our heads, Damocles-like, ready to fall at a moment's notice and make fools of each and every one of us.

But dumbness also shows up when we don't learn from our experiences and misadventures. Perhaps the greatest cause of dumbness is simple ignorance. Here's a great example in a computer user's message sent to a support department. It speaks volumes about pen in fifth gear, brain in neutral:

"This morning I tried to sign on and for a purple screen. After several tried with different browsers then I got the message you were down. I tried to exit. It went to a background with huge pixels and stuck. I mean no amount of rebooting would get rid of it. Finally I had to reset my wallpaper."

Most often, dumbness isn't from what we do, so much as what we fail to do.

Let me give you a couple of random examples, one from a business that outlines bad thinking and the other, all mine, that was the result of hasty action:

Case 1: A corporate d'oh: Publishers Clearinghouse is a well-known brand. Like or loathe 'em, they are part of the commercial landscape.

Like all established brands that aren't completely brain-dead, Publishers Clearinghouse recognized the potential for running its business online and started doing e-mail campaigns.

Of course, being the kind of folks they are - rabid marketing types to be exact - they apparently didn't think that teaming with rabid spam-style mail houses was a dumb idea.

I recently got one of their e-mail pitches, and not only was it kind of lame and sad, but at the bottom there was a whole chunk of teensy random text designed to help their messages get past spam filters. They were, dumbly, trying to game the system.

Where the real dumbness lies is that they are showing us, in no uncertain terms, that they are willing to bend the rules to their advantage. Now that you know this, can you ever trust them (assuming that you ever did)? That surely counts as really dumb.

Case 2: A personal d'oh: When you pass the magical age of 50, doctors forcefully suggest that one has a procedure that my editor would rather I didn't describe in any detail.

So being a good patient, off I go. Well, because this isn't the most pleasant experience, they provide a mild intravenous sedation. Anyway, in short order the procedure was over, I had a clean bill of health (whew), and I went back to the office.

What I failed to take into account was that I was still mildly sedated some two hours later. Not whoo-hoo stoned, merely a little out of it.

I sat down at my desk and tried to pick up e-mail. Nothing. Hmm. I went to the mail server, which was running on Windows 2003 Server on VMware on Red Hat Linux, to see what was happening.

(Digression) Please help me out. My esteemed editor claims that convention says applications run "on" operating systems (the basis of this view being the seven-layer model), while I claim they run "under" (on the basis of them being "wrapped" up by the operating system). Who is right?

It turned out I had run out of disk space under Linux, causing my virtualized Windows 2003 Server system to get upset and crash. I shut down all the VMs and then under Linux started to free up disk space.

Now remember, I'm still mildly sedated, but just enough so I didn't know I was more than a little off bubble. So what do I wind up doing? I delete the VM that runs my mail server!

Ah, a Homer Simpson moment . . . d'oh. At that point I was completely sober.

Realizing just how dumb you've been does kind of take that happy buzz off. All the same, I might be dumb and down by a mail server, but I'm healthy.

Been dumb? Confessions to backspin@gibbs.com.

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