Attack of the Know-It-Alls

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.

Freedom To Fear In Ten Years Or Less

I’ve recently learned that the Department of Homeland Security will be discontinuing the colored threat level of scariness, a system that was designed to keep us safe and scared since the dreadful events that occurred on 9/11.  I thought this was a wonderful public service that not only warned us all of great dangers that may or may not befall us, but it would have or would not have given us ample time to prepare ourselves for the impending/eventual terrorist doom that may or may not come eventually/probably. 

The fact that announcing threat levels will no longer be a public service anymore, it seems to me, merely adds to the danger/havoc/catastrophe that we can all be sure is coming our way. So, now what is our plan of action in the case of a probable/eventual terror attack? Today’s world is scarier, more intimidating and creepier than ever before in our nation’s history. We must be on constant alert for not only potential terrorists but also other deviant groups of people who constantly threaten the sanctity of our public lives like drug dealers, jaywalkers, loiterers, reality stars, people who refuse to wear shirts and shoes inside 7-elevens and people who just don’t know how to stand in line at the grocery store without bumping in to you every twelve seconds. In my opinion, the government’s past recommended activities for the now defunct threat level system seemed a little unproductive, so I’ve come up with a new proactive warning system for thwarting not only eventual terrorist attacks but can also be effectively used for preventing all kinds of unwanted human behavior like peeping Toms, boring story tellers and unwanted dinner guests.

My solution for appropriate behavior for past threat level colors is to respond with corresponding Fear Levels in order to battle the terrorist/peeping/dimwit forces of the planet. Let’s start at the beginning.

Fear level Green: The Fear is Not Ripe Yet.  It’s okay to relax, but not too much.  This is where terrorists get their foot in the door, if given the opportunity.  You could be at a backyard barbeque or reading a book at the library and the next thing you know KABOOM!!!, you, your friends, your family and everything that was on that barbeque are now the size of bacon bits, ready to be sprinkled on a terrorist salad.  This level should be spent quickly glancing around as if you’re a dog and you just heard a sound somewhere in the distance and you’re trying to figure out what it is.  This tells the terrorists that you are alert and ready to act.

Fear level Blue: The Deep Blue Fear.  This is where you need to kick the fear into second gear.  Shaking your hands and jumping up and down as if you were getting ready for a boxing match is a good start.  Perhaps some impromptu stretching may also help ward away radical, barbeque-hating insurgents.  Are you preparing for a Thanksgiving 5K charity run, or are you priming yourself to do battle with the forces of evil?  The terrorists will never know, and that’s the way it should be.

Fear level Yellow: The Banana Supremacy.  Clench your fists and furrow your brows.  Walk around and look like you are about to punch a baby panda in the face.  Don’t say ‘thank you’ or ‘excuse me’ when out in public.  If someone says ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’, do not, I repeat, do not respond at all. At this time we should also begin raising our paranoia level accordingly.  There’s a knock at the door at 2 in the morning; is it the neighbors there to tell you that your house is on fire because you haven’t cleaned the chimney in years and you built an especially crackly fire that evening full of floating embers that caught some of the soot in the chimney on fire before you went to bed in a drunken stupor, or is it one of Osama bin Laden’s soldiers there to blow you and your family to kingdom come because you believe in freedom and they cannot live in a world where you believe in freedom?  Whatever the answer is, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR!!!

Fear level Orange: Freedom Carrots.  Hold your breath until your face turns red.  Bug your eyes out as big as you can so that terrorists know you mean business. Of course, it’s going to hurt, but so will an ice chest full of grenades that are set to destroy freedom. Adding a twitch somewhere on your body is a nice touch of unpredictability.  Continue not responding to other human beings in public.  If you have to, look down at your phone or Blackberry and pretend to be sending an important text message.  This should let the terrorists know that you are not interested in small talk at all.

Fear level Red: Fruit of the Doom.  Prolonged bouts of shouting and punching the air will definitely scare any would-be bomber off.  Shave the number 53 in your scalp to confuse anyone trying to wreak havoc on your political beliefs.  (53 has no real significance to anything, it’s just another random, crazy tool in your anti-terrorism survival kit.)  Every once in a while you should simply faint so that terrorists understand that you are completely nuts and are to be taken very seriously.  Hopefully, they will then come to their senses and go back to the Christian-less campground that they came from somewhere on Mars.

May I add one more level to this scenario?  Threat/Fear level Black and Blue.  This is where we don’t just sit around waiting for the terrorists to strike, peeping Toms to molest us with their eyes or boring story tellers to lull us to sleep in our own homes, but rather, we go on the offensive and bring the fight to them.  We take the fight to their cities and their dinner parties and their bushes near the windows where we get undressed at night with the curtains wide open. We terrorize them, forcing them to come up with a system that warns their citizens of impending American freedom/justice.  Only then can we declare victory in the war on terrorism, peeping Tom-ism and people who just don’t know how to tell a good story at dinner parties.