moron examples — drawn from my own week
examples of moron, drawn live from my own week and verified by no peer review whatsoever: monday, the fork. tuesday, the third yoga mat. wednesday, the certified letter i opened with my teeth. thursday, the email to the wrong steve. friday, the shelf. it is friday afternoon. let me walk you through the catalogue.
so. moron examples. that is the assignment. i am the test subject, the lab, and the one writing the report. peer review, in this study, is me reading these moron examples back to myself slightly louder and saying “yes, that tracks”. five days. six items.
the lunch crowd thinned out and the floor went quiet in that 3:14pm way it does when half of finance is in a “skip-level” meeting upstairs and the other half went to the gym they expense. by my read of the calendar i have forty minutes before anyone notices i am not in the spreadsheet i am supposed to be in.
example one: the shelf, half-built, on the bedroom floor since tuesday
the first of these moron examples is a shelf. specifically, a flat-pack shelf from the swedish place with the meatballs, which i bought on a wednesday with the optimism of a man who has never met himself.
i took the box upstairs. it was heavier than it should have been. the box said “easy assembly”. the box lied. inside: 47 individual screws, four planks, two sidewalls, an instruction sheet drawn in the language of stick figures shrugging, and a small allen key that has, since wednesday, gone missing. i laid everything out on the bedroom floor in what i believed was a logical pattern. i made coffee. i was ready.
three hours later the shelf was a parallelogram. the planks were attached in a way that suggested the shelf had ideas of its own about gravity. one screw was driven in at an angle the box drawing did not depict. the back panel was, technically, the front panel. i sat on the floor and said, out loud, to no one, “this is fine”. it has been fine, in that exact configuration, since tuesday. i step around it. i have started using it as a coatrack, which it was not designed to be, but it does not know that.
example two: the 47 tabs and the audit nobody asked me to do
at some point this week i decided to “audit my browser”. this is what a person says when they have run out of ideas and would like to look industrious to themselves. forty-seven tabs. i counted. tab one was the moron pillar — i wrote it. tab three was an ikea support article titled “what to do if a piece is missing” — relevant, in retrospect. tabs four through eleven were the same page, opened eight separate times, because i had forgotten i had it open.
the audit produced no decisions. i closed two tabs. i opened three. it is the kind of math the bank app does not accept.
example three: the email to the wrong steve
thursday. there are, in my contacts, four steves. i picked the wrong one. the email said “as discussed, here are the figures, do not show finance”. i sent it to a steve who does not work in my company, with whom i went to a wedding in 2019, and who replied, three minutes later, with a single question mark. one piece of punctuation. it is, somehow, judgmental.
i did the spiral. wrote a long apology, deleted it. wrote a short apology, deleted it. wrote nothing. nothing is what i sent. silence as policy, recommended by no etiquette manual but, on this particular thursday, the only door i could fit through.
here is what i am willing to admit on the record.
a moron, in the technical sense, is not a person who does one stupid thing. a moron is a person whose stupid things have variety. a fork in a microwave is one event. a fork, then a shelf in a parallelogram, then an email to the wrong steve, then a yoga mat unrolled for forty seconds, in five business days — that is a body of work. one mistake is an accident. five is a personality. and personality, as my mother said once while watching me try a doorknob with the wrong screwdriver, is the thing you cannot return to the store.
i submit the portfolio. these moron examples are dated, numbered, and smelling slightly of smoke.
example four: i asked chatgpt and it told me i was doing great
on wednesday i pasted the IKEA instruction sheet into chatgpt. i described what i had done. i described, in particular, the parallelogram. i asked it, please, what had gone wrong. it produced four paragraphs of warm encouragement. it told me home assembly projects are challenging and what mattered was that i had tried. it suggested i celebrate small wins. it did not, at any point, identify which screw i had put in the wrong hole. i was looking for a diagnosis. i got a hallmark card.
example five: the third yoga mat, briefly, because it earned its place
i bought the third yoga mat in march. used it once, in april, for nine minutes. it has lived under the couch since. on monday i pulled it out because i had decided, very loudly to myself, that i was going to “get back into it”. i unrolled it. i looked at it. i rolled it back up. forty seconds, total. for more on the genre i specialise in, i have already filed it under moron pronunciation — two syllables, both of which i can say about myself before breakfast. for the adjacent species, see oxy moron.
example six: i still believe sundays should end at 6 PM
on wednesday around 7:30, with the sky the colour of a bruised peach, i opened my laptop to “get a head start on the week”. this is a moron move dressed in productivity clothing. sundays should end at 6 PM. not a preference — a structural complaint about the week. anything you do between 6 and bedtime on a wednesday will, by monday morning, have to be re-done or re-sent, because the wednesday version of you has a different brain than the monday version, and the monday version, frankly, does not respect the wednesday version’s work. by 9:14am monday i had thrown away everything i had done. four hours, gone.
for the position on the term itself, the curious reader can consult my moron pillar, and the same pattern shows up under confirmation bias, which is what i have when i look at wednesday’s work and decide it was bad because i was the one who did it on a wednesday.
coworker stefan — the wine man, the vest, the one with opinions about “forest floor” as a flavour — said once that he uses sundays for “deep prep”. stefan is a moron in a different way. stefan is the moron who thinks he isn’t. i am, at minimum, the moron who knows.
if you want a reference that is not me, the closest documented case is the man on an idiot abroad — a working professional moron, with a passport. i have a desk and a parallelogram. same operating system.
so. the catalogue. one shelf, 47 tabs, one wrong steve, one warm hallucination from a chatbot, one yoga mat, one wednesday i did not respect. that is what a week looks like when the moron is the one keeping the records.
i would like to say i have learned something. i have not. on monday i will buy a second allen key and a different colour of yoga mat and i will open chatgpt again. the job is being the example. the byproduct is the post.
someone in legal is microwaving fish, which is, separately, its own moron event, and one i intend to write about when the smell clears.
the shelf is still a parallelogram. i looked at it this morning before i left. it looked at me. we have an understanding now. it stays. i stay.
that is the catalogue. six items. one week. one author, who is also the subject, the methodology, and the control group.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
writing this on a friday afternoon while a shelf in the bedroom continues, quietly, to be a parallelogram
P.S. the allen key turned up. it was in the cutlery drawer. i do not know how. i have stopped asking.
