dumb person — a working profile, drafted in the first person

a working profile of a dumb person, drafted in the first person, with sparky the fork as the cover photo. the dishwasher consults on the bibliography. nobody else is in this apartment. nobody else needs to be. the profile is twelve pages and the seventh page is just the word almonds, twice.

so that’s the cover. the body of the profile is below it, in numbered items, eleven of them, drafted at this desk on a thursday at 1:42pm while the all-hands meeting eats the third floor whole. i have, noted, the rest of the morning. carla is up there nodding at a slide. i am down here taking a self-portrait in list form.

i should say up front that this is a profile of a dumb person in the working sense, not the clinical one. no manuals. no jargon. no diagrams with arrows. the only diagrams in this investigation are the burn pattern on a fork and the dent in the microwave door, and even those i drew from memory.

writing this from the desk. all-hands on the third floor. i have, by the count i keep running, the rest of the morning before the agenda hits “any other business” and people start wandering back.

the file i’m working from is a draft of a draft. it lives in a folder that lives in a folder that lives, ultimately, in the same drawer where i keep the broader dumb investigation, which is the long view of all this — the working theory of being one. this profile is the short view. eleven items. one apartment. one kitchen. one desk. one fork.

1. dumb person, the working profile (~260)

a dumb person, for the purposes of this profile, is not a person in distress. is not a person in crisis. is not a person who needs anything other than maybe a smaller microwave and a longer attention span.

a dumb person is somebody who, at 8:14am on a thursday, opens a document on a work laptop and writes, as the working title, the words dumb person — a working profile, drafted in the first person, and then sits there long enough that the screen dims twice.

the file is twelve pages. eleven of them are items. the seventh page is, as noted, the word almonds, written twice. i remember the moment i wrote it. i do not remember why. i have left it in because removing it would feel like editing the evidence, and you don’t edit the evidence. you photograph it and you label it and you put it back in the drawer.

this is also why the cover photo is sparky. sparky the fork, with a small black mark on his middle tine, sitting on a tea towel like a portrait of a retired admiral. sparky has been through one microwave already. he is a dumb person’s emeritus. you can read about how sparky earned that mark in the broader idiot investigation, where the fork makes his canonical entrance.

2. items one through three, the kitchen evidence (~260)

item one. the seventh microwave. the seventh microwave sits on the counter in the kitchen and looks identical to the previous six, which is, on its face, a cosmetic decision the manufacturer made and not a diagnostic one. a dumb person, to be specific about this profile, is somebody who has bought seven of the same appliance in the same kitchen in a manageable number of years. the receipts are all in the drawer. they are stapled. there is a clip.

item two. the dishwasher. the dishwasher, per HT18, is the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you, and i would like to log that here as a piece of cited testimony, because the dishwasher in this kitchen has, by my read, opinions. it knows what i put in it. it sees the bowls. the bowl with the burn ring. the bowl that was once a microwave casualty. the dishwasher hums at a slightly lower frequency for that bowl. i am not making this up. i am, however, possibly hearing things.

item three. the dishwasher’s bibliography. the dishwasher consults, as a profile note, on the bibliography of this document, because the dishwasher is the only appliance at home that runs on a cycle longer than my attention span. forty-seven minutes. i write better when something else is also working.

3. items four through six, the desk evidence (~260)

item four. the desk. the desk is, ostensibly, where serious work happens. the desk is, in practice, where i write profiles of myself at 1:14pm on a thursday while the all-hands meeting goes long. the desk is the second-most reliable surface in my life. the first is sparky.

item five. the second monitor. the second monitor is, at this moment, displaying the spreadsheet i told myself i’d open at 9:00am and have populated by 10:00am. the spreadsheet is empty. the spreadsheet has been empty since tuesday. a dumb person, on this metric, is somebody who keeps an empty spreadsheet open as proof of intent. proof of intent is, i’ve concluded, eighty percent of the modern workplace.

item six. the notebook. there is a notebook on the desk that contains, in chronological reverse, the eleven items of this profile, plus three other lists that didn’t make the final cut. one of those lists was titled “things i could fix today” and had three entries. the entries were “the toaster”, “my posture”, and “stefan”. stefan is not fixable. stefan is a wine-tasting evening that happened two months ago and that i still, at this desk, cannot stop revisiting. there is a small ecosystem of stefan in my brain. it has its own weather. you can see Dumb and Dumber on IMDB for a comparable two-man weather system, just for context.

4. items seven through nine, the snooze evidence (~260)

item seven. the 9-min snooze. the snooze on the phone is set to nine minutes, by factory default, and i would like to register, for the working profile, that nine is a strange number. nine is not five. nine is not ten. nine is the manufacturer’s compromise between a person who needs to wake up and a person who would prefer not to. a dumb person, in this profile, presses the 9-min snooze five times in a row and arrives at forty-five minutes of additional sleep, which is, coincidentally, the exact length of the all-hands meeting upstairs.

item eight. the alarm tone. the alarm tone is the default. i have not changed it because changing it would require, briefly, caring about what kind of sound wakes me, and that kind of caring is, i’ve decided, a luxury for people whose sleep is not already compromised by the 9-min snooze pattern from item seven.

item nine. the morning. the morning is the part of the day where this profile gets written, which is, you’ll note, also the part of the day i spent forty-five minutes snoozing through. there is a contradiction in here. a dumb person, for the working draft, is somebody who notices the contradiction, holds it for a second, decides not to address it, and moves on to item ten. that’s the methodology. it has held up.

5. items ten and eleven, the sparky-the-fork evidence (~260)

item ten. sparky the fork with the black mark. sparky lives, at present, in the drawer to the left of the dishwasher, on a tea towel, in retirement. the black mark on his middle tine is from the microwave incident that took the fourth microwave (not the seventh — the seventh is unrelated, the seventh died of a different injury). i pull sparky out for special occasions. i define “special” loosely. last week’s special occasion was a frozen dinner i overheated by ninety seconds.

item eleven. the manifesto. the manifesto, in this profile, is the unwritten document where i would, if pressed, explain what sparky represents. i will not press myself today. but i will note, for the bibliography the dishwasher is consulting on, that the canonical sparky moment — the spaghetti, the vision, the sparks plural and yellow — is on file in the broader investigation, and that dave’s nine-minute laugh, timed by me, is also there. dave’s laugh is, in some readings, the foundational text of this entire profile. without dave’s laugh, sparky is just a fork. with dave’s laugh, sparky is evidence. it’s a small distinction that becomes a big one over a series of microwaves.

6. closing pulpit, the dumb person profile is a self-portrait (~230)

noted, the all-hands has hit any-other-business. the meeting is one stefan-question away from disbanding. i need to close the document and look like i was reading the deck.

so the working profile of a dumb person stays in the folder, the folder stays in the drawer, the seventh page stays as almonds, twice, and sparky stays on the tea towel until the next frozen dinner asks too much of him. the profile is twelve pages. it took the rest of the morning. it will be back.