idiot examples — 1 investigation

idiot examples, plural, was what i typed at 11:09 to confirm a suspicion. the apartment supplied three immediately: a chair acting as a bar stool, a notification i was ignoring, and the ghost of a dog named hank still echoing up from 1B without his owner home.

at the desk. carla is upstairs in a planning thing — three slides, then questions, then more slides. i have until the slides outlast her patience. probably an hour. probably less.

so. here’s a thing i did not expect to be writing on a monday morning. i opened a search bar, typed two words, and the search bar gave me back a number that startled me. five thousand people, every month, look up idiot examples. five thousand. that’s a small concert. that’s a packed bar with a queue outside. that’s a lot of people, in private, looking for the same plural i was looking for at 11:09. i thought i was alone in this. i was, it turns out, in a crowd.

i’d like to provide some. that’s the whole post. my own definition of idiot is on file already, and i’d refer the curious there for the underlying theory; this one is the field guide. these are mine. you may bring your own.

EXAMPLES. ARE. EVIDENCE. AGAINST. ME.

idiot examples, the curated set

let me set the rules of the curation, briefly, because curation without rules is just a pile.

rule one. the example must be mine. i can describe what tom did in italy, but tom’s idiot meaning is tom’s department, and tom has a pension that, somehow, he understands. so i won’t borrow his examples. i have plenty.

rule two. the example must have happened in the apartment, on the way to the apartment, or at the desk while thinking about the apartment. the apartment is the lab. the apartment is, technically, where most of my idiot examples are produced under controlled conditions.

rule three. each example must have a witness, even if the witness is just the room. the room counts. the room has been at every disaster. the room is reliable in a way most witnesses are not.

rule four. one hot take, cited not defended. chairs are bar stools, in their final form, and i’ll come back to that further down. it’s not the spine of the post. it’s a footnote with conviction.

that’s the curatorial framework. now the exhibits.

the seventh microwave, exhibit a

the seventh microwave is, in this museum, the centerpiece. seven microwaves, one apartment, one tenant, four years. you can do the math. the math is bleak. the math is also, in its own way, an achievement.

the seventh microwave died on a wednesday, while heating a single slice of pizza, because i had — and i would like to say this calmly — placed inside it a fork. a small fork. a salad fork, technically, which i had assumed was somehow exempt from the rules of physics. i thought, in that brief moment before the flash, that the smaller surface area would matter. i was confident. i was confidently wrong. that’s the formula.

dave laughed for nine minutes when i told him. i timed it. dave keeps the list, on a napkin, in his glove compartment, and the napkin gets a new column every twelve to fourteen weeks, depending on the season and how distracted i am. this is, in itself, a kind of accountability. it is also, in itself, a friendship. you don’t get a friend like dave by being right.

this is exhibit a. it is the cleanest example because it has a date, a witness, and a timed reaction. these are the three legs of an idiot example. without all three, it’s just an anecdote.

the third yoga mat, exhibit b

the third yoga mat is more subtle. it is, technically, an example of an example that hasn’t fully completed yet. the third yoga mat lives under the couch. it has lived there since 2023. i bought it on a sunday, in a fit of intent, with the firm belief that the previous two had failed because of the wrong color. the third yoga mat is a deeper green. the deeper green has not, on review, made a difference.

the example is not the buying. the example is the maintenance of the belief. every six to eight weeks i look at the third yoga mat, briefly, and i think, this could still be the one. that thought is the example. the thought is recurring. the thought is, in its own quiet way, the entire idiot mechanism in miniature. you do a thing. it does not work. you commit to the thing. you do not, however, do it again. you simply maintain the option.

i have decided this counts. it counts because it produces, in me, the feeling of being someone who does yoga, without any of the actual yoga. that’s a return on investment most products don’t offer. the third yoga mat is, in that sense, working perfectly.

the apartment in 1B, hank, the notification

this is exhibit c, and it requires a small map.

i live in 4A. 1B is, three floors down through a stairwell that smells like the building’s first rent agreement, a woman who travels. she has a dog. the dog is named hank. i have never met the woman. i have heard hank for, by my casual reckoning, about ninety percent of the last two years. hank barks at the elevator. hank barks at the radiator. hank barks at things hank himself has, presumably, invented. i have built, in my head, a complete picture of hank that may or may not survive a meeting.

last thursday, around 10:14, the apartment was unusually quiet. no hank. no elevator. no radiator. and into that quiet, my phone produced the notification. one chime. one rectangle. and the rectangle was a reminder of a thing i had already chosen, on purpose, to ignore. the notification was correct. the notification was, in fact, on time. i still ignored it. i’d like to enter that ignoring into the record. it is an idiot example with a timestamp.

so the apartment, in one tuesday, supplied two: the absence of hank (a non-event treated as event), and the presence of the notification (an event treated as non-event). these cancel each other out, mathematically. they do not, however, cancel each other out spiritually. spiritually, they are both on the list.

all chairs are bar stools eventually, briefly

i mentioned the hot take. let me deliver it, briefly, in the voice it deserves.

that take is on file. it does not get more space than this in this post. you came for examples; the take is one example, expressed at altitude.

the case for collecting examples publicly

i’d like to make a quiet case for the public collection of these things, briefly, before the verdict.

most people keep their idiot examples private. they happen, they’re absorbed, the kitchen counter remembers, and that’s the end of the dossier. the trouble with that filing system is that it implies the example was a malfunction. that the kitchen counter is judging. that you are the only one. none of those are true. five thousand people, every month, are typing the same plural into the same bar.

so i collect mine in public. one apartment, one desk, one screen the company believes is being used for a different purpose. that’s the publishing house. that’s the entire editorial board. and the readership is, as established, several thousand strangers searching for the same word at the same time, none of us aware of each other except through this bar where i happen to be writing it down. the dishwasher, in the kitchen, is mid-cycle. the dishwasher, frankly, has opinions about all of this, but the dishwasher does not have a publishing platform. yet.

verdict, the examples are mine, also useful

the examples are mine. the inventory is open. the seventh microwave has a date and a witness. the third yoga mat has a color and a maintenance schedule. the apartment in 4B has hank, present in spirit and absent in fact, and the notification, which i am still, at this hour, ignoring.

if you came here for a list and got, instead, a small museum, i’d say that’s the deal. the museum is free. the museum is open during business hours, which are, depending on carla, anywhere from now until lunch. the gift shop, somewhere down the corridor, sells nothing. there’s a bench. you can sit on it. by midnight, technically, that bench is a bar stool. the principle keeps proving itself in the building’s own architecture.

(if you’d like to see a sustained masterclass in producing idiot examples on camera, the dude in the big lebowski, the coen brothers’ rug-loss procedural, supplies enough exhibits across one rug-related investigation to fill three museums. he is, in his way, the patron saint of this post.)

carla just walked past with two folders, no laptop. that’s a bad sign for her, a good one for me. i have, conservatively, fifteen more minutes than i thought.