Mai Brane Hertz

[shanmonster]

I just spent about 45 minutes on a call with a sweet, doddering, little old lady who kept asking me the same questions over and over again. I sometimes wonder how people of a certain intellect can live as long as they do. Natural selection has been outfoiled by social assistance, I guess.

By the end of the call, she had somehow convinced herself that the reason rooms were cheaper in July of next year than in June was because it's hotter in July.

I didn't give her that idea, and after forty-some minutes, I wasn't prepared to disabuse her of the notion.

Comments

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

"Natural selection has been outfoiled by social assistance"

Precisely. Not only are more and more dim people living beyond their childhood years (when first experiments with fireworks and wild animals in the woods used to take care of most of them), they are breeding and then plodding on into a long, fuzzy senescence. I suppose it's not a bad life as long as you remain unaware there's anything else.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

If she was asking you the same questions over and over again, she might have been plenty smart when she was younger and suffering from Alzheimer's now.

[shanmonster.livejournal.com]

That is true.

She was a very nice lady, but oh, what a test of patience.

Still, the leap of logic doesn't seem like an Alzheimer's thing, but one of absolute incomprehension to real-world stuff.

as soon as I pick up the call...

[duhastbees.livejournal.com]

"Are you all's on drugs?"
"Excuse me?"
"The last technican I talked to 'spaced out' in the middle of the call, and I think he was on drugs! Are you all's on drugs?"
"...sir, to my knowledge, none of our technicians are on drugs."
(ironically enough, I WAS on drugs, and so were 70% of my tech-supportin' co-workers.)

[ex-dragonfis12.livejournal.com]

We have this one lady at my work, who has now been there 15 years. Everyone wishes she had long since retired, least of all the customers. Every day, she wanders down to the children's books department (I work in a bookshop, can you tell?) and spends several hours dithering over which books to buy for her grandchildren, then usually puts most of them back. She seems to take several more and longer breaks than everybody else. And then she spends her time reading magazines at the counters, until she realises that some poor soul has been standing in front of her waiting to be served. For some reason, she always seems to end up with the customers who are most in a hurry. Or perhaps that's just because that's the way they end up by the time she's finished serving them? Her supervisor says it's much easier on everyone just to let her be than to try and alter her routine...

Note to self: Cultivate eccentricity so you, too, can get away with this sort of behaviour when old...