I Fear

...for the world around me...for the human race...for my sanity.

I encounter a fair amount of stupidity on a pretty regular basis. Normally I try to level my opinion of stupid by telling myself that ignorance does not equal stupidity. If someone truly doesn't know something that I know, that does not, in and of itself, make them stupid. It may still seem funny, but stupid it is not.

But not always.

I did, however, get to witness some evidence that there are incredibly stupid people out there. It is for this reason that I live in fear for what our world may become. These people breed. These people pass their genes on to offspring to continue a legacy of intellectual destitution.

We had a situation develop at work this week where somehow, some way, an employee got ahold of, and cashed, another employee's paycheck. Let's just ignore the level of incompetence that it would take on the part of a manager that allowed this to happen (managers pass out the paychecks!). Here are the facts. The person who picked up their co-worker's check has the same last name. The person who stole their co-worker's check has a very similar first name. So similar, in fact, that there is a possibility that an unknowing person could have thought that the first name on the check was just misspelled. One's name was Maria and the other was Maira.

It's not as if these employees got each others' checks accidentally and one cashed the check before it was caught. Not that simple. One employee ended up with BOTH checks. I dare not guess how this actually happened. She at least thought far enough ahead to cash the checks at two different places. She even thought far enough ahead to have someone else sign one of the checks (at least, judging by the handwriting, it appeared that way.)

So far we have seen crafty deceitfulness. Enter stupidity.

At the check cashing place where she cashed the incorrect check, they asked her for her driver's license number and date of birth. I am actually trying to decide if I think she was just stupid enough to give her actual information or if she panicked and decided it was too late to try to be any more slick (what, no pre-planned fake ID?)...but she did...she gave her ACTUAL driver's license number and date of birth.

Well, a couple of days later the girl who did not get her check asked her manager about it and they called the office wanting to know WHY this gal did not get her check. We explain that it was sent. They explain that it's not in the distribution envelope. We look up the check number to verify that it hasn't cleared the bank...guess what...it has. Both have. It was a matter of minutes before we were able to isolate not only that the wrong employee got the check, but that she had done so intentionally. She stole the money and tried to get away with keeping it only to be tracked down by her identification that we are required to collect in order to allow employment.

So there you have it. A perfect example of why someone may one day walk over to my cubicle and find that I have actually smashed my head into my monitor.