idiot person — and i’m 7 microwaves sure

an idiot person, technically speaking, is a person who owns seven dead microwaves and keeps the eighth on layaway; i checked the kitchen, and the count is accurate, the certification is self-administered but valid, and the appliance graveyard is, in my view, a credentialing body in good standing despite the smell.

parked at this workstation, mug three, the one with the chipped handle i still pretend not to notice. the floor lead pulled half the team into a vendor walkthrough at 11:03am, which gives me roughly forty-one minutes before someone notices my chair.

so the phrase i want to put under the microscope today is idiot person, the noun-with-modifier version, the one that shows up in search bars typed by people who have just done something unfortunate in their kitchen and would like a name for it. i am ready to provide the name.

idiot person: a fully equipped human who proceeds, on a kitchen morning, with absolute confidence toward an outcome a child could have predicted, and who, after the smoke clears, narrates the disaster aloud with detail and conviction. the version is not the same as a stupid one. a stupid one stops. this one continues, with a story, and possibly a fork already in the microwave.

IDIOT. PERSON. IS. A. POSTURE. WITH. A. KITCHEN.

i need that on the table, because there are at least 4 readers about to argue the term is unkind, and those 4 readers, i would bet a small amount of Dave’s three hundred dollars, have not stood barefoot on a kitchen tile holding a smoking appliance and trying to remember which drawer has the warranty card.

i have stood there. seven times. for the long-form treatment of the umbrella word — minus the kitchen, plus more taxonomy — see my fuller portrait of the term, written from this same chair a few weeks back.

idiot person, the working portrait

the portrait, since that is what the search bar wants, has three load-bearing parts. these are the parts Dave uses, on his napkin, to determine whether i still qualify, which i do, every quarter, automatically.

part one: equipment in working order. the brain is online. the wiring is fine. the alarm went off. nothing in the system is excused. the diagnosis cannot plead malfunction. that is what makes the result funny later, and unbearable in the moment.

part two: a decision, made with the chest out, in the wrong direction. nobody drifts into the bad outcome. the subject walks. the subject sometimes whistles. the fork goes into the microwave on purpose, because the actor has decided, in that quarter-second, that this microwave is the one that can take it. it cannot. seven have already disagreed.

part three: a story afterward. an idiot person narrates. there is a phone call to Dave. there is a sentence at the bar with mike. there is, in my case, a roughly 1,400-word post on the subject the same week. the disaster gets turned into a paragraph. that is the gift, and also, in legal terms, the evidence.

the idiot person and the kitchen, a love story

why the kitchen. because the kitchen is the natural habitat. small. heat. metal. an exhaust fan you never turn on until it is too late. the kitchen is where the diagnosis performs at the top of its game.

i have, in mine, killed seven microwaves. the seventh sits in the cabinet under the sink, draped with a dish towel, awaiting whatever the disposal rules in this building turn out to be. the eighth is on layaway, a phrase i did not know was still legal, at a place that ships next thursday. Dave keeps the count on a napkin he refuses to surrender. that napkin is, by now, a record of my entire career.

the room rewards confidence in a way few others do. you put bread in the toaster. it browns. you have, in a small way, won. you do this enough times and you start to feel the appliances are on your side. they are not. they are tools. they are indifferent. the fork i once placed inside a microwave is still, in some metaphysical sense, inside that microwave, judging me.

the third yoga mat, by contrast, lives under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving its own ecosystem. i mention it because the diagnosis does not respect rooms. it travels.

how the idiot person reads instructions, allegedly

here is a thing nobody talks about. an idiot person reads the instructions. that is the cruel part. you open the manual, see the words, run your eyes over the pictograms — and then, having performed reading, execute a different procedure. the manual said do not microwave metal. i microwaved metal. the manual said do not microwave metal again. i microwaved it again, slower this time, with conviction.

some readers will say that is not reading, that is glancing. they are correct on a technicality. but what happens is a third thing — a kind of reading that is more like a handshake. you greet the manual. the manual greets you. nobody learns anything. then the manual goes back in the drawer with the takeout menus, and you go back to the appliance with your fork.

i suspect this is a situation where my own brain is doing something to me i would, in any other context, call deceptive. it’s a kind of confirmation bias problem dressed in a kitchen apron — the brain believes the manual is on its side because it wanted the manual to be on its side, and reads the page accordingly. the bias is the apron. i still wear it. it has pockets. one pocket has a fork.

the idiot person at parties, briefly

the diagnosis also exists outside the kitchen, less comfortably. at a party, it is the man on the counter explaining the cheese to the wine, with the wine in the wrong hand and the cheese in the wrong century. i have been this man. i have also nodded politely at this man, which makes me, by the transitive property, two men at the same party.

this is the version stefan is famous for, in posts i have written elsewhere. stefan does not know he is stefan. that is the central tragedy. the kitchen version knows. that is the central comedy. the kitchen idiot knows the fork is wrong; he just believes, for the duration of one bright second, that the rules don’t apply this time. they do. they applied to all six previous microwaves.

at parties, the figure is loud. in the kitchen, alone, the figure is quiet — at least until the flash. (the flash teaches.) Dave laughs for nine straight minutes when i call to confess. i timed it once. nine minutes and four seconds. i rounded down, out of courtesy.

the idiot person vs the dumb person, a small line

now, the line. an idiot person and a dumb one are not, despite what your group chat thinks, the same noun. the dumb one does the wrong thing without a story. the operative one does it with a story. that is the entire difference.

the dumb version, in the kitchen, places the fork in the microwave and never speaks of it again. the dumb version eats whatever survives. that one, by my taxonomy, is at peace. the operative figure, by contrast, will write a long post about it and link to that 2006 mike judge film about a future where nobody narrates anymore, just to underscore the point. the narration is the diagnosis. the narration is, possibly, the cure.

verdict, the portrait is mine and i signed it

so here is where i land. the working idiot person is a fully equipped adult who, on a kitchen morning, decides against his own best evidence and tells you about it later with feeling. the kitchen is the headquarters. the manual is in the wrong drawer. Dave’s napkin is admissible. the fork was a choice.

i have, on this question, also looked sideways at an earlier definitional pass i did on the umbrella word, which i still think holds up, and at a 2017 novel i have written about and still have not actually opened. there is also a parallel test from my earlier note on a children’s cartoon and a square of cardboard, where the box turns out to be innocent and the apartment is the suspect.

before i let this go: the upstairs neighbor — the_4b_guy, who runs his television at a volume that has been escalating since friday — does not, as far as i can tell, qualify. he is loud without narration. loud without phone call. loud without post. that is closer to weather. the operative type tells you the weather is his fault. the 4B guy just is the weather.

the floor is quieter than usual. the walkthrough is presumably running long. eighteen more minutes before the laptop has to look like a spreadsheet again.

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