I’m on a roll here at the moment, aren’t I? I am not going out of my way in the slightest trying to find examples of Stupid People, and yet, they just appear around me. Todays SPOTD was actually spread over the 11:58pm - 12:03am period of the 27th and 28th, so he could actually have taken the award for both days if nobody else had qualified, but the 27th was already won by the neighbour whose car is too modified to get out of the driveway for yesterday.

Last night I went to get Di from work, and was waiting at the traffic lights to cross an intersection, minding my own business and listening to the car radio. All of a sudden, I noticed there was a guy walking on the road, screaming and cursing at the walls and nobody in particular. He was clad in black T-shirt and faded black jeans, and was sporting a peroxide blonde “mullet” haircut that looked rather dank and needing a wash.

His venting continued for about thirty seconds before he abruptly decided to rip off his T-shirt and run around without it. Technically. Since he had taken it off over his head, but still had both arms in the sleeves with the T-shirt behind his back, he was limited to sort of thrusting his extremely white and puny chest out if he wanted to make a point. He stormed back up to the intersection and started screaming abuse at a person around the corner. Based on the location of the person he was yelling at, I assumed (and confirmed later when the lights changed and I moved forward) that he was abusing the bouncer/doorman of one of the strip clubs that are located in that street. Presumably he had been thrown out for some reason, and he was not happy.

Screaming “COME ON RIGHT HERE! I’LL HAVE A PIECE OF YA! MOTHERF***ER!” did not seem that intelligent to me, since the guy he was abusing was about twice the size of him and, in the event the bouncer rushed at him, both his arms were trapped behind him in his T-shirt. I doubt the bouncer could have covered the distance in time to catch him like that, but still, there was a small chance it could have happened.

While sitting there watching all this, a couple of other cars stopped at the lights, one of them being a relatively old, but well-looked after, hotted-up car. The screaming guy started to walk away from the bouncer, still yelling, and climbed into the passenger seat of that car, which stunned me until I realised they must have known each other. The driver of the car began to rev the car angrily, creeping forward in spurts until the lights changed.

While this was happening, the screaming guy had wound down the window and was roaring abuse out of it at the car next to him (the one in front of me) for looking at him. Finally the lights changed and the screaming guy climbed halfway out of the car to sit on the window ledge, hanging on to the roof with one hand, while pointing angrily at the bouncer and screaming “I’M GOING TO GET YOU MOTHERF***ER! YOU ARE GONNA GO DOWN! WATCH YOUR BACK! I’LL F***ING KILL YOU!” while his driver spun the wheels and turned right as fast as he could, leaving a black trail of rubber across the intersection. The driver was obviously so enraged by the treatment of his friend that he ignored the whole “traffic going straight through an intersection has right of way over turning vehicles” and “right turning vehicles must wait for oncoming left-turning vehicles” rules, cutting off two cars mid-intersection as the smoke and rubber peeled off his rear wheels.

The screaming guy continued to hang on one handed to the roof of the car (must have been some pretty strong forces on him actually, since the car was turning away from the side he was on, and would have been “pulling” him out the window) all the way down the street to the next set of lights. At that point, I was across the intersection and lost sight of them, but I figured was a pretty good example of stupidity, and therefore probably worthy of the SPOTD award.

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I did not have to go far from home for today’s SPOTD. In fact, I only had to go out to my driveway.

For the benefit of those folk receiving this that have never seen the place Di and I live, it is a long block of flats that run perpendicular to the road, and there is a long driveway down one side of the flats from the road to the flats right down the other end. The road is a dead-end road, and so is pretty quiet, since the only vehicles on it are residents.

One of the people living in the flats above us is a young Asian fellow who has recently moved in. He is a bit of a hoon, and has a bright yellow car that has various racing stripes, personalised number plates, yellow wheel rims to match the car, and oversize plastic front and sides on it, as sold in the “young men obsessed with their cars” shops. In other words, all the typical stuff of a young idiot out to impress with a loud car stereo up and down the streets where - it is assumed - women will swoon over his choice of motor vehicle and throw themselves at him.

While I love to drive, I am pretty disparaging of these cars because I like to take my car into state forests and stuff, driving down dirt roads, over rocks, and pretty much anything that the car can (just) handle. Cars like the one described above are designed for the city alone, and I can’t understand those people that do not want to see the countryside every now and then without the need to own another car, or be restricted only to freeways and highways.

Before I left the flat this morning, I looked out of the balcony door and noticed that the yellow car was parked in the driveway, seemingly about to pull into his car space. I did not realise it at the time, but he was actually not doing that at all.

I got into my car, and I could see he was reversing down the driveway and out into the street, so I figured he had not been about to park, but rather, about to leave. I started up my car, and headed off (forwards) down the driveway following him. He reached the street, and that was when I realised there was a problem. One other thing he has done to the car is to lower it, so that it sits only a few inches from the road surface, in order to make it look much more cool.

The problem for him is that the driveway curves slightly up at the start, and the road has a camber such that it angles downward from the centre of the road to the edges (no worse than any other road). Each one by itself is not severe, but with the rear of his car going upward as it entered the road, and the front of his car going downward before it left the driveway, the front plastic bumper of his car was wedged into the concrete driveway. If he just accelerated backward at normal speed, he would have just ripped it straight off the front of the car.

So, while I was sitting in the driveway for about three minutes, he slowly backed out inch by inch, getting out every two inches to check the damage being done to his car, and then getting back in and backing it ever so slightly further out onto the road. I could see the entire front of the car shuddering and straining to stay on, as it scratched it’s way out the driveway.

Finally he got the car out and I was able to get out on the road as well, after the delay. I could see the front of his car has lost a lot of paint now and will probably need a re-coat if he does not want it to look damaged as he cruises around town. To make him feel bad, I drove out of the driveway as fast as I could, merrily zipping out without a problem in my crusty old non-cool, non-modified vehicle.

It was a very sweet feeling to know that he had probably spent a couple of grand at least to make his car look so much better than everyone else’s on the road, and yet, all he had done was to make himself a car that could not get out of the driveway without damage. From now on, his car will have to be kept out in the open, on the road, rather than in the carport, protected from the elements where a car like that really belongs…

Life is good.

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Di and I bought each other a zoo pass for one another’s birthdays (okay, so Di got her present a few months early) and so we can now go to the zoo every day for free for the next year. Which is unlikely, but since it costs $25 for us to go for a day, and $90 for us to go for a year, and we live right beside it (essentially), it seemed a good idea.

We decided to go up there and see the new gorilla named “Yakini” since it was apparently quite cute to look at. There is only one reason to go to the zoo on a Sunday, and that is not to enjoy the place. No. The only reason to go is if you are looking for SPOTD adventures. There were a couple of SPOTD candidates in five minutes at one stage, but I decided to not bother too much trying to find other candidates since I knew I already had a winner from the first entrant.

The runner-up SPOTD award went to the man who walked up to the enclosure for the Red Panda. This enclosure is basically a small concrete fence around an area containing various logs, rocks and plants for the Red Pandas to explore. It is placed in an area where there are paths all the way around the enclosure, then some open lawn and garden beds beyond the paths.

Each enclosure has a sign saying what animal is in it, a map of where it usually lives (eg: South East Asia), as well as some brief details (eg: gestation period of four months, eats only rancid meat, male is smaller than female). Walking up to the sign, he read aloud “Red Panda”. Turning to his wife, he loudly pronounced “Hmm.. Must be in there.”, pointing to the enclosure that the sign was within.

No? Really? You mean it’s not OUTSIDE the enclosure, over getting ice-cream from the stall vendor? Duh. Of course it is in the bloody enclosure!

However, we found this guy second, and he’d already lost to the person we’d encountered a few minutes previous. We were standing in front of one of the enclosures, looking at the animals within, and the fellow strolled up and announced to his lady companion “Hey! Here’s the gorillas! See? I told you they were around here somewhere! They are gorillas, aren’t they?”

We had to agree with him. They were certainly gorillas alright. Well, they would have been if gorillas had grey skin, were really big and, oh, had trunks and tusks. Yes - they were elephants…

SPOTD winner? You bet.

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Another SPOTD report, although this one was not too bad in the end. I was driving down our street going home from the Uni campus and I noticed there was an old bloke (about 70yo) standing beside his car unhappily, with the bonnet up. Seeing it is Senior Citizens Week, I figured I’d do a good deed and pull over to offer assistance, since I was in no hurry, and he was dressed in a full suit and might have been struggling to do something simple without getting filthy dirty.

I parked the car and walked across the street to see if I could help, and I could tell from the pool of water forming under the car it had just overheated. He was trying to undo the cap to fill it up with water and was struggling. He looked up at me as I approached and gave one of those half-smiles you give when you greet someone at the same time as your car has overheated. He straightened up and asked if I could remove the radiator cap for him so he could fill it up, because he was afraid of getting scalded.

I could hear the water still boiling inside the radiator, so I decided to just loosen the cap the recommended quarter-turn to let the pressure dissipate. As soon as I reached for the radiator cap, he stepped forward in alarm and said “no, no, not that cap, it’s the other one”. I looked again, and knew I was taking the cap off the radiator, so I looked to see which cap he meant. He was pointing at the oil cap, which is the one I thought he was undoing as I walked up, but when he straightened up, he’d taken his hand off it and so I couldn’t tell for sure.

I corrected him and showed him the logo of the oil can on top of the oil cap, and how the radiator cap was the one I was undoing, but he was rather dubious about it for a couple of minutes. I had to get him to listen to the noise where the water was boiling, so that he would agree with me that the radiator cap was indeed the one that needed to be removed.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that he had been trying for about 10 minutes to get the oil cap off to fill it with water but had not succeeded since he did not have the strength in his hands to do so. I had rather fortunately (for him) decided to stop and offer a hand or else he would have eventually gotten the oil cap off and filled his sump with water.

So how does this fellow get SPOTD? Well, for those that know me, I know pretty much nothing about how to fix a car, and had only really stopped on the basis that he was of an age unlikely to own a mobile phone to call for professional assistance, or maybe offer him a cup of tea or coffee while he was waiting since it was only a couple of hundred metres from our front door. I never really was in a position to help if it was anything too complicated, even something relatively simple like a fan belt problem.

And yet I knew more about the internal workings of the car than him, so he had to get the SPOTD award.

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Yesterday I worked inside all day, never leaving the flat with the brief exception of 10:40pm - 11:00pm to go get Di from work. However, that does not stop me from finding Stupid People, since they’ve taken the extra step of coming to find me if I am not out looking for them.

I was sitting at the desk, churning through some numbers on the computer when I heard a dull thudding sound. It was getting closer and louder, but definitely slowing down. With the Doppler effect, the sound swelled in size, then slowly began to recede. I could not figure out what the noise was, so I went to the balcony and looked out to the road, in the direction of the noise.

There, stopped in the only “no standing no overtaking” part of the road was a Budget rental truck, of the size people hire when they want to move house. The truck had obviously blown the rear left tyre, as it was angled downward in that direction. The driver of the vehicle must have been wondering what to do, and after a couple of minutes of sitting in the cab, decided to continue driving down the road.

The wheel rim was scraping on the sealed road, and the tyre was still booming out a rhythmic thudding sound as pieces of it continued to shred off while the truck was in motion. I thought perhaps it had just happened, and they had been forced to pull over in that section of road. However, when I went to get Di, there were pieces of shredded tyre stretching back more than a kilometre from our house. The driver had also stopped at two sets of traffic lights, had ample spaces to pull over, and ignored all these chances to do so in favour of driving the truck on three tyres and a wheel rim, shredding the remnants of the tyre all the way down the road.

I’m not sure how stupid it is possible for people to be. All I know is, they seem to be attracted to wherever I am…

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Okay, time for another Stupid Person Of The Day adventure. As the saying goes, there’s one in every crowd and they always seem to find me. Today there were two of them, but I will step up here right at the start and say it was my fault.

I ventured into a Centrelink office.

Yes, not content with the last few days being fool-free, I had this overwhelming urge to go into the Centrelink office and stand in a long line of people for whom welfare is a lifestyle choice. Before I get flamed for saying that, let me just point out I have no doubt there were several people in that office that were genuinely trying to get work, and were not just rorting the system.

However, I was in the Newmarket office, right next to the housing commission high-rise flats, so there was a higher than average proportion of deadheads in there. For those wondering about the area, only last year it was officially designated as the cheapest and easiest source of heroin out of all the Melbourne suburbs. For a housing commission carpark to have that many 1999 BMW’s, Mercedes Benzs, and Lexus models in it, there has to be some form of income other than welfare…

Back to Centrelink - I walked in the door and was faced with two lines to the main desk, for different benefits. One line had twenty two people in it, the other had only six. You can imagine my delight when I found I was to join the smaller queue, and so I happily strolled up to my place at the end of the line. I was standing there for about a minute or so, and was just looking around the waiting room at the assortment of humanity that populated it, and wondering how some people could let themselves sink so low. I was interrupted from my thoughts by a male walking up to me and stepping in line in front of me.

I was rather surprised by this, and he turned and simply stated “I was in line behind that bloke” and faced forward again. I really did not care too much. If he was really trying to line-jump, he would have tried it closer to the head of the queue, and so I assumed he was telling the truth, and let him go. He seemed to be dressed quite neatly in a polo shirt and trousers, although the one blue thong, one red thong footwear didn’t seem to match quite as nicely as the rest of his outfit.

As I stood in line, he called out to his son, a three year old terror named Matthew who was intent on destroying the children’s play area. Picking up the plastic slide, he quite effectively began drumming a rhythm on the large front window of the office, as his father called out “Matthew put the slide down!” over and over. It would have been much quicker and quieter to simply walk over, unarm the child, and walk back to line, but then, he did not seem to be a man of great intellect.

After a while, a creature I believe is officially termed “human female” started speaking to him. She was the sort of beauty one hopes not to see, the lowest dregs of society all bundled up into one person. Her nose was broken in two places that I could see, she had the words “F**K THE WORLD” tattooed on her neck above the collarline, and was completely and utterly wiped off the face of the earth with drugs. Her eyes were fully dilated and she was having trouble focussing on objects, and was generally in need of some serious bathing.

The conversation between the two of them whipped along at a cracking pace and I would have so loved a tape recorder to give the true beauty of their speech pattern justice, but alas, I am able to provide you with a transcript only. As you read through it, try to imagine the harsh gutter speech of the long-term unemployed white trash that do drugs all day and bitch about the world being against them…

(I might add there are naughty words used although I have used asterisks as much as possible to dilute the language).

Male (M): “How’s it goin’?”

Female (F): “S**thouse mate, f**king s**thouse!”

M: “Yeah? How come?”

F: “Jase’s still in hospital, mate, that’s why!” ( Trav’s Note : “Jase” being short for “Jason”)

M: “Yeah? Go and see ‘im then”

F: “Can’t.”

M: “Why?”

F: “I just f**king can’t.”

M: “What’s wrong with him?”

F: “Nothin’. Just not allowed to see him, eh. F**king bitches!”

M: “What? Won’t they let yer see ‘im?”

F: “Nope.”

M: “They can’t do that. Matthew - put the slide down.”

F: “Yeah, well they barred me.”

M: “How come?”

F (snarling): “He’s still in detox so they barred me.”

M: “Didn’t you go see him yesterday? Matthew - I told yer to put down the f**king slide!”

F: “Yeah, that’s why they’ve barred me, eh. F**king bitches!”

M: “What happened?”

F (exasperated): “Ah, they got all fired up ‘cos I slipped ‘im a couple of pills.”

M: “Yeah?”

F: “Yeah. It was only, like, a couple, so no biggie, eh?”

M: “Yeah.”

F: “Anyway, they’ve barred me now, b*tches!”

M: “Oh. That’s f**king wrong of ‘em!”

F: “F**king right!”

M: “How’s yer man?”

F: “Yeah.”

M: “Yeah?”

F: “Yeah.”

M: “Ah well, he’ll get over it.”

F: “Yeah.”

M (pointing to cigarettes): “Where’d ya get them?”

F: “From the bloke I’m living with.”

M: “That’s alright. Good bloke?”

F: “Tried to get into me bed three times last night. I mean, he’s a nice looking fella and all, but geez, he’s 60 years old, and he’s an darkie!”

NB: This comment was said at full volume in a room containing no less than fourteen dark-skinned people, and not one of them flinched. Probably like me wondering how desperate you’d have to be to attempt doing it with this woman…

M: “Oh, that’s just f**king wrong, eh. Did you tell yer man?”

F: “Nah. He’d f**king shoot the dark bastard!”

M: “Yeah, well better not tell him then.”

F: “Yeah.”

M: “Yeah. Matthew - don’t do that with the slide mate!”

F: “Yeah. Hey, where’s yer missus?”

M (surprised): “Jail. Thought you knew. In for three.”

F: “Yeah?”

M: “Yeah. Just me and the kids now.”

F: “Doing alright?”

M: “Yeah.”

F: “Where’s the other one?”

M: “School. Goes every day now. Bright little s**t, eh.”

F: “Yeah. Good.”

M: “Caught him using the ‘f’ word the other day, but. Had to smack his bum.”

F: “S**t, they pick up words early, don’t they?”

M: “Yeah. I mean, I know they hear it around and all, but you kinda hope they won’t say it ‘emselves.”

F: “Yeah.”

M: “Ah well, gonna say it eventually I guess. Look at us, we use it. No point in kids not knowing it, eh?”

F: “Yeah. Hey, want one of these?”

M (head quickly spinning to look at her, then notices she’s offering a cigarette): “Yeah!!! Oh… I thought you said E’s…”

F: “Nah. Wouldn’t waste good E’s on a s**t like you, eh.”

M: “Thanks a f**king lot, bitch.”

F: “I’m going out for a smoke. Got a lighter?”

M: “Nope. Given ‘em up for a while.”

F: “Yeah?”

M: “Yeah, no money. Gotta look after other stuff first - food, rent and kids first, then other s**t later.”

F: “So no lighter?”

M: “Nope.”

F (turning to me): “Got a lighter, mate?”

Me: “I don’t smoke.”

F (surprised): “Yeah? Big tall fella like you doesn’t smoke? Thought you would.” 

Me: “But I’m tall because I don’t smoke. Smoking stunts your growth, remember?”
F: “Oh. So you ain’t got no lighter then?”

Me: “No.”

F: “What f**king good are you then?”

M (interrupting): “Gimme ten minutes and I’ll show ya…heh heh” (gives a couple of pelvic thrusts)

F: “P**s off! You ain’t good enough for me!”

M: “Baby, I’ve got what you want and you know it!…heh heh”

F (getting distracted): “How much f**king longer is this gonna take?”

M: “Dunno. Not my fault anyway. Bloody government won’t send out me damn card, so I gotta keep coming in here and asking for it.”

F: “Yeah?”

M: “Yeah. Been three weeks now and still nothing.”

F: “F**king slow, eh?”

M: “Yeah. Want some?” (reaches across and takes a swig out of a baby bottle filled with juice)

F: “Nah.”

M: “Whassamatter? Not enough grog in there for ya?”

F: “Yeah. Too good for me.”

M: “Yeah. Ah well, gotta drink somethin’ or I’ll die of thirst”

F: “Yeah?”

M: “Yeah.”

At this point, they happened to reach the head of the queue and the male stepped forward to explain something about his card not arriving, but I was too far away to hear properly.

I got the impression that the male was actually trying to be relatively decent, for the position he was in, in looking after the kids and giving up smoking to make sure they were fed and clothed. The female on the other hand, was essentially a waste of skin from what I could tell.

Still, I did go into their lair, so to speak, so I brought it upon myself. At least the person behind the counter was amazingly good at their job, and I was done with my task in less than six minutes from start to finish. I expected it to take about 30 minutes, so I was pleasantly surprised.

I guess it was all part of the balance in life - listen to two idiots prattle on for ages, and then get a reward for doing so. That must be the way it works. Eh…

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