People When They Whelm

People be people. They just be.

Over the years, I have had cause to feel very many different things for people and because of people. The other day as I was walking my dog, I thought that it might be good to reflect on the disappointments.

Not the outright anger and all that. Those are righteous. Some people are horrible and you hate them. In no situation could they have been salvaged. Narcissists, mostly. But some are just mildly disappointing because they could have been better.

Let me explain.

My knowledge of work is limited to Sarkari jobs. My dad worked a Sarkari job. My mum worked a Sarkari job. I entered government service myself aged twenty-six. It’s all I’ve ever known. All I know about jobs is Sarkari. 

Sometimes I ask my sister what her job is like. I think she gets confused because I seem nosey. And it has never really occurred to me to explain to her why I am asking her about her job.

So I asked my friend Atu what her job is like. I ask her what our other friends do. After some point she said: Esther I think most jobs are admin and business. I think I annoyed her. But I also think she’s probably right. 

And this is just the organized sector.

I’m mentioning this because I meet people all the time who seem to think they know how to do my job. They don’t. You can know 70-80% of a job if you’ve held it too at some point in your life. But even then, there are factors like time, place, people, government… variables that change entire equations. You cannot cross the same river twice.

There is a quip in Mizo that says the best parenting is done/known by childless people. Which I feel is true. Not for the worth of the words but the weight of sarcasm. 

You can know of certain jobs and what they might entail. Especially when it comes to someone doing it wrong, it is so easy to announce exactly what had not been done right. Or at least that the job had not been done properly. Hindsight is 20/20, as the Americans say. Very easy to even suggest ways – however wrong and/or inapplicable – to solve problems. But the truth is that unless you’re on the desk, signing off documents that can condemn you to kingdom come, you have no idea what it takes to hold down a job and/or run an office.

My point being that you can walk a mile in someone’s shoes and still only begin to understand what they might be going through. Even twins in the same household have different lives. Presuming to think you can do a better job than someone who’s already doing their job is high-level pride and mind-boggling narcissism, sprinkled with a generous helping of stupidity. 

Yes, people holding public office or highly visible celebrities have a certain degree of accountability and responsibility to the public, legally binding accountability for the former, in fact. But aside from that, I believe it is misplaced entitlement to berate them for every single thing they do wrong. Unless they are doing more than 60% of the things wrong, shut up.

Also it is possible they just want to feck with you. Because they don’t like you.

So yes, while these people are not malicious and only just dumb, they are incredibly infuriating especially when you’ve been dealing with some frustrating people for a long time on the daily.

You know the types. Like the people who just prefer to hear opinions in bass. They are disappointments in my soprano.

Then there are the people who cannot cut it, not because they can’t, but because they won’t learn. Unchecked stupidity annoys me like little else. People have different abilities and strengths but we can all learn. Some people just refuse to and spend endless Tuesdays in a string of Februarys making excuses. They will try to bullshit their way into the Pearly Gates too. I hope St Peter denies them entrance.

The list goes on. The liars, the deceivers, the two-faced-ers, the cut off the nose to spite the face-ers, the prefer pretty words to good work ones, the can’t-stand-by-their-words ones, the I am this but they do that ones… People just overwhelm you with their amazing and uncanny knack to be just irritating. Or underwhelm you when you expect them to be something and they just fail to reach an ever-increasingly lower bar.

Sometimes, in a row of Thursdays without end, people just whelm.