incompetence or stupidity? (lyn)

Sometimes I wonder why I don’t have a full time job and so many stupid people do.

Here are three recent examples.

I live in a doorman building.  Doormen serve primarily two functions: to provide some semblance of security (although my night doorman sleeps in a chair, with a pillow all night) AND to sign for, and accept, packages.  Yesterday I get a note in my mailbox from the United States Postal Service to go pick up a package.  The PO I am directed to is about 15 blocks away.  I was home all day yesterday so the mail carrier didn’t ask the doorman to call up and see if I were home OR, even more incompetently, didn’t give the package to the doorman who has permission to sign for it. I walk to the PO in the worst kind of weather: intermittent sun and rain, oozing with heat and humidity.  I wait in two long lines.  The first is to get my package, and the second is to speak with a supervisor. I tell the disinterested supervisor the story and want him to educate my mail carrier on the proper procedure for delivering packages.  At the end of my long saga, the supervisor tells me I am in the right place to pick up packages but the mail carriers for my building come from another PO.  “Perhaps they can help you.”  Maybe I imagine it, but I'm sure I see relief in his face that he no longer has to handle the problem, or me.

A few years ago my building redid the hall floors.  First they tore out the old carpets, and then, about a year later, they reinstalled the new ones.  I felt like a squatter every time I walked out of my apartment.  Now the building management is redoing the lobby with apparently the same strategy: half now and the other half in a year or so. The half-done job consists of new lighting and a nice marble floor with no carpeting.  When it rains, the floor is slippery.  So the doormen drag out (if they remember) an old carpet to lie on the floor so no one will fall.  But it’s too ugly to leave out all the time.  Plus, as today’s doorman tells me, “If we leave the rug out all the time it’ll ruin the marble.”  Who is the brilliant designer making these artful decisions?  I’d say they need a new career.

And finally, my friend M (who promises me everyday that she is going to start writing, as she is the second friend in two friends two cities) is having trouble reaching Siri on her iPhone.  She is just not responding…maybe she’s too busy helping Samuel L. Jackson or Zooey Deschanel out in Hollywood.  Anyway, M calls Apple to report the problem, and then adds, metaphorically, “If Siri worked for me she’d be fired.”  The Customer Service Rep responds, “Ma’am, you do know, don’t you, that Siri is not a real person?”  And to think that all this time I believed that Siri was living in my phone, assigned just to me!