Rantings of Stu

In the never-ending scientific research to better understand why some people are stupid, a lot of attention has been focused on road ragers whose logic seems, well, illogical.

Road ragers are often hypocrites — tailgating others then slamming on their brakes when they are tailgated, cutting people off then giving the bird when honked at but giving the bird and honking if they are ever cut off, trashing Utah drivers when they themselves are a Utah driver (yet all the while proclaiming their immunity to the “Utah driver” moniker), not using their turn signal but throwing fits when others do the same… the list is endless.

And thanks to the great American tradition of spending money on pointless studies, scientists at Colorado State University have discovered and revealed in a recently published paper that drivers who plaster their cars with bumper stickers are more likely to have issues with road rage.

Come on now. Is this really news? You’re driving down the street and you see a car with something like, “I Brake for Nekkid Chicks” or “Keep Honking, I’ll Deal With You When I’m Done Yanking My Chain,” and you instantly understand the dope-hat behind the wheel isn’t particularly bright.

Now, while I don’t believe those geniuses down at CSU included this bit in their publication, I’m fairly certain that their research found that anybody with the bumper sticker of “We Love Stu!” is a happy, content, loved-by-everybody-and-would-never-commit-road-rage all around awesome person.

So… I stopped by the Macey’s on my way home from work today to pick up a bottle of some sweet Pace Picante Sauce. It was on sale for about a third off. Wow! Could there possibly be a better deal to be had anywhere in the universe? I think not!

Anyway, let’s get to the conversation part shall we?

I hit the express lane. Ten items or less, and I’m second in line. I’ll be out of there in no time! Unfortunately for me, the older gentleman ahead of me was using an archaic payment method. I think they call it “writing a check”?

Okay okay… I know. The conversation.

Okay, so the gentleman ahead of me takes a look at me and says, “Too much basketball?” and pointed at my slung-up arm.

“Too much motorcycling,” I respond.

I was about to continue the conversation when the man’s wife walks up and informs the man that he wrote his check out for the wrong amount. So he tears up his check and starts anew.

Now, this is where things get interesting. After the man finishes writing his new check and hands it to the amazingly hot cashier (yes, as you’ll find later on, the hotness of the cashier is an important factor to the story) he turns to me and says, “You know, six years ago they found a tumor in my colon that was this big,” and he holds his hands up to express a tumor that is roughly the size of an orange.

Okay. Now for some people, that might be a perfectly normal thing to say to a complete stranger that you meet in the checkout lane of the local grocery store. But for me, not so much.

My first thought was to respond with, “Wow, that is really gross!”

I managed to get out, “Wow…” before catching myself and realizing the rest probably isn’t very socially acceptable. Yeah, talking about your gigantic, cancerous, stage three colonic tumor is okay. Saying that talking about your gigantic, cancerous, stage three colonic tumor is gross is a bit inappropriate; or so says Miss Manners.

A bit taken aback, I’m not sure how to respond, so I say, “You know, I write for a living and I’ve written a lot about cancer treatments. It’s amazing what they can do these days.”

So after I learn that after 6 months of chemo treatments — no radiotherapy! — the tumor disappeared, the cashier has rung up my picante sauce and, looking quite apologetic for interrupting our stimulating discussion about cancer in the 7th planet from the Sun (Uranus… get it? Hahaha! It never gets old!), tells me I owe her $2.05. I hand my cash over.

The man then says he’s gotta go and bids farewell. Of all the places to get tongue tied! I wasn’t sure what to say. I almost said, “Good luck!”

Then, realizing that would be stupid (we’re in Orem Utah, not an unregulated whore house in Reno), I stammer out, “Have a good one!”

I turn to the amazingly hot cashier, who I would normally have been quite charming with, and simply thank her for allowing me the pleasure of spending my money

The end.

Remember the Family Guy episode where Peter accidentally locks his keys out of his car at the grocery store parking lot? He yells at passersby to hand him his keys which are lying on the ground just outside his car, but nobody helps him.

Something quite similar happened recently. Luckily the girl who locked herself in her car had a cell phone. That’s good because with all her windows rolled up — her battery dead, making it impossible to roll them down — she couldn’t hear the instructions from the cops who were there trying to help her, so she signaled them to call her on her cell phone.

See, with her battery dead, she couldn’t roll down the windows and crawl out, and the electric door lock switch didn’t work either. So when she finally got the cops on the phone, they were able to give her instructions on how to use the manual door lock override. Yeah, they told her to use her finger to slide the door lock to the unlocked position.

I wish I could say that this was Paris Hilton or some other equally useless “celebrity.” But alas, this actually happened in Utah, right here in my home town of Orem.

Here is an excerpt from the story, taken from the website of local news station KUTV:

Automatic car features are supposed to make life easier for motorists, but they may be leaving some people without the know-how to do things the old-fashioned way. That’s what happened to a driver in Utah County who became trapped inside her own car.

When police arrived, they found the woman sitting in the car, unable to get herself out.

Once officers were able to talk to the woman on the phone, they were able to tell her how to manually operate the slide lock mechanism on the inside door panel to open the door and free herself.

“I’m just glad she had a cell phone to call for help,” an officer said.

Uh, yeah. Good thing she had her cell phone, because it would have been so unfortunate to lose one of this century’s greatest minds!

Read the actual story on the KUTV website.

Alright. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, so I’ll cut the lady a little slack. Then again, no. I’m sorry, but that was just really, uh, how you say… stupid?