Knowledge and the Human Condition

By Dick McCullough

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Have you ever seen one of those timelines of human development laid out like a long yardstick? Over there on the left end, man walks upright. About halfway through, he picks up a club and hits something. Over on the far right, nearest current time, the event line is amazingly crowded with all of the discoveries we are familiar with: Arabic numerals, heliocentricity, gravity, electricity, etc. The point is that mankind's store of knowledge is growing at an accelerating, an exponential pace. Mankind is getting smarter and smarter, faster and faster. Indisputably.

Then why do I constantly run in to such profound idiots?
I once had a travel agent book me on a flight to Minneapolis, Minnesota. I also asked her to book me a hotel room. In Bloomington, which is a suburb of Minneapolis. She sends me tickets and a hotel confirmation number. When I arrive at the hotel, I found I had no reservation. They had no rooms. I showed the confirmation number. They looked it up and told me I had a room reserved in Bloomington, Indiana.

My secretary, former secretary, was a bright young woman fresh from college. Very pleasant. And someone had bestowed upon her a college degree. She, more than once, faxed documents upside down so that the blank side was read by the optical scanner. Blank pages sent digitally over telephone lines. Ah, technology. I asked her to send some materials to a client in Montreal whose first name was Joanne (I provided both names to the secretary). She sent them to a client named Joanne in New Jersey. Unfortunately, we were currently doing a project for the New Jersey Joanne that was top secret. New Jersey Joanne had expressed concern over our ability to maintain security. Her confidence did not increase when she received a few yogurt packages and a note from me explaining how pertinent they were to her situation. She was in the telecomm industry.

The icing on the secretary's cake, however, was that she was always late for work. Not too late, just 10 to 20 minutes late every morning. Since she had primary phone duty, I wanted her there during business hours. I explained. She lived 10 minutes away. Shouldn't be hard. Couldn't do it. I wrote a formal letter telling her that she needed to arrive on time as a condition of employment. If she were late a certain number of times in the following month, she would be let go. She was late the next day. On the day that she hit the magic number, I brought her in to my office and told her she had been late the requisite number of times. Her reply was, chuckling, "What are you going to do, fire me?" When I said yes, she was sincerely stunned. If sneak attacks were this easy, wars would be shorter.

I had a receptionist (where do I find them, you ask) who, for her entire tenure with me, could never recognize my voice on the phone. Annoying. But a senior member of my company got even worse treatment. "Good morning, ABC Company."
"Hello, Alice. This is Colin. Do I have any messages?"
"Colin's not here."
"Alice, this is Colin."
"He's not in. Can I take a message for him?"
Sigh. "Sure, tell him I called."
Since she couldn't recognize us, it's no surprise she consistently failed to recognize the voice of Colin's wife, Elizabeth. "Good morning, ABC Company."
"Hi, Alice, is Colin in?"
"No, he's not. May I take a message? Who's calling?"
Sigh. "Tell him Betty called. He'll know what its about."
"Betty?" Alice eventually became convinced, thanks to Elizabeth's demented sense of humor, that Colin was cheating on his wife.

The ultimate Alice story (and these are all, unfortunately, historically true events) was when Colin asked her to assist him in a small mass mailing. He needed to send a packet of information to 40 or 50 clients. The packet included an individually addressed cover letter and several documents. Alice was asked to attach a cover letter to the documents, place the entire packet in a large envelop and place an addressed mailing label on the front of the envelop. Alice diligently worked at the assigned task. Halfway through, Colin comes by her desk and asks how its going.

"Fine, I guess. Just one question. Do you want the name on the mailing label to match the name on the letter or does it matter?"

We may soon discover the nature of dark matter, even the mysteries at the bottom of a black hole, but will we ever solve the mystery of the average human mind?

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