Have you ever felt stupid before? I feel stupid all the time. Every day, in fact. It’s no big deal. I’ve accepted my limited IQ and just try to learn as much as I can along the way while keeping the buffoonery to a minimum. I feel especially stupidy, however, when I’m talking to a Know-It-All. You know these people? They get their information from the radio and the newspaper and their favorite Know-It-All magazines and then graciously dispense it to the rest of humanity, filling our empty lives with their liquid, life-giving knowledge. Here’s the dilemma that Know-It-Alls currently have, however; the application of their useless information to real life scenarios. They seem to know everything about everything, and yet, there they are working side by side with the rest of us dummies. You’d think that being a repository of such a wealth of information would perhaps land the Know-It-All a job at some prestigious think tank where they would spend days and nights solving the world’s problems. You would think that some company out there would pay top dollar to constantly mine the Know-It-All’s brain for valuable data on how to make that company wealthier and more powerful and more able to take more advantage of more people. You would think that by knowing everything there is to know there would be a line of people at their doorstep begging for advice on how to make their lives better and more fulfilling and more like Brad and Angelina’s lives. One would even go so far to think that a Know-It-All would be so valuable to the human race that the government would relocate the Know-It-All and their family to a specially built module in outer space in an effort to protect their massive intellect from being drained by all of us imbeciles down here on earth.
One would think.
The truth is that Know-It-Alls do have very large reservoirs of mind numbingly, tediously, inanely, stale information, and yet, they seem to have absolutely zero knowledge on how to interact with other human beings or make themselves likeable. They believe that a conversation is a one-way lecture on the meaning of life, and they are not the student. They think that we enjoy being constantly corrected for semantical mistakes that no one else seems to mind. A single Know-It-All can bankrupt a whole conversation with pointless factoids that no one ever asked for. They question the validity of the details of our stories and are constantly investigating where we got our facts from as if they are the lead detective in a story mangling crime scene.
I bet you that cavemen never tolerated a Know-It-All in their society. I bet that those hairy, unkempt relatives of ours probably put the Know-It-All in their place before anything got out of hand in that cramped, funky smelling cave of theirs. I bet Know-It-Alls don’t exist in the animal kingdom. Look at a colony of ants. You think that thousands of ants working their asses off, risking being doused by a can of Raid, trying to get food from my kitchen because I forgot to wipe off the counter last night would tolerate a single knucklehead ant standing there telling everyone else that they should lift the crumbs with their legs and not their backs because it could cause spinal problems in the future?
Most of the time Know-It-Alls tell us what we already know. Yes, we know that staring directly into the sun is bad for our eyes. Yes, we know that leaving the toilet seat up is frowned upon when you’re married. Yes, we know that ant colonies can range anywhere from a few dozen to a million and that Raid kills them all pretty much immediately. But, it’s the way that Know-It-Alls present their information that’s so off-putting. They make us feel foolish and moronic. They make us feel like children who couldn’t make the cut when we tried out for the school play because we got stage fright right before the audition and as a result, peed our pants in front of everyone, ruining our playground credibility forever. They make us feel as if our entire lives have been a complete waste of everyone’s time and that every word we’ve ever uttered has been an endless parade of lies.
Know-It-Alls interrupt the natural flow of a gabfest with their endless desire to repair misstated facts, grammatical mistakes and trivial, pointless information that backs up no one’s story at all. They don’t seem to realize that there is a certain level of error acceptability in communication that most people simply let slide. Not the Know-It-All. They are the conversation police handing out tickets to criminals for various social offenses such as improper sentence structure, failure to know how asphalt is made and insufficient understanding in the area of American tax laws. They are the beaver dam in the middle of a swift moving conversation, halting the momentum with trivial tidbits of useless information. They are the burnt piece of pretzel in the Chex Mix of life. A Know-It-All is the single strand of hair that has found its way into your Caesar salad, ruining your appetite for the rest of the day.
Knowledge is good. Being intelligent is good. Being curious about life and having the humility to learn new things from other people is good. Shutting the toilet seat so that your wife doesn’t yell at you is good. Raid is good. Walking around the planet with a smug look on your face and looking down the bridge of your nose at other people because they don’t know that in 1887 something happened to some guy and his family that changed the course of history and now that’s why we have indoor plumbing is not only bad, it’s lame. Quite lame.
I know nothing. Ignorance is bliss!
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