Not My Best Post

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

To a fault (ask my wife), I'm pretty stingy with words like "most" and "best" and "least" and "worst." In the majority of cases, I'm with Napoleon's brother Kip: "Like anyone could even know that." One thing I find interesting about the Olympics is that it's one of the rare times in life that you can use absolutes and have a little bit of credibility. For example, I can say with some degree of confidence that Usain Bolt is the fastest person in the world, given that he was facing at least a subset of the best in the world and made it look easy. Even then, it's hard to be sure there isn't another Nanu out there, just waiting to be discovered by Tim Conway and JJ's dad from Good Times.

I bring this up because this past week, I spent two days in a room filled with people much, much more intelligent than I am, but a number of them were not smart enough to recognize that they were not the "most" intelligent people in the room/world. As annoying as it is to be around someone who thinks they have all the answers, imagine spending a few days with about 10 of those people together. It was like being in a room full of Alex Trebek clones, all talking literally at the same time.

I think at the start of the two days, we should have made everyone sit down and watch this documentary I watched not long ago on Nikola Tesla on The History Channel. First, I learned that he was not just some obscure scientific figure from The Prestige, in which he is played by David Bowie (an appropriate choice, I suppose, since before seeing that movie I thought Tesla was just an 80s rock band). In reality, he invented (if I remember correctly) alternating current, thanks to which we have small power lines instead of ones with the small-tree-trunk-circumference direct-current ones Thomas Edison came up with (see, even Edison wasn't the "most" anything). Tesla also invented our car ignition system, wireless electricity, and Fantasy Football (OK, not that last one).

Of course, this works both ways. It's also reassuring to know that I am not the dumbest person in the world. I don't know how close I am, but I know that I'm at least smarter than people who write on bathroom stalls, the first person who did the butterfly stroke, and people who think their friends back home could beat Michael Phelps. Given how complicated life is becoming, I actually question how those people get by in life (well, the butterfly stroke guy was probably eaten by a shark a long time ago).

For example, going to the airport and catching a flight used to be fairly mindless. You bought a ticket, threw your junk in a suitcase, walked through a metal detector, and then got on the plane. As I flew to-and-from the aforementioned meeting, it occurred to me that you need a fairly well-thought-out strategy now to maneuver through the whole process. I'm not complaining, because I'm a big fan of not dying, but you do feel sometimes like you're in the middle of some reality show challenge.

Packing, for instance, used to be basically a physical activity; you were only worried about stuff fitting, and most of the time the answer to that was to put your full body weight on the front to enable you to zip it up. Anything you didn't want to lose you threw into a carry-on, and the only thing you had to think about there was not packing anything inherently dangerous like plutonium or a pipe wrench.

Then, of course, someone tried to make a bomb out of Gatorade, and not long thereafter the price of oil went up, and now we're stuck in the difficult position of not being able to pack much in a carry-on but having to pay for checking anything. I really hope we are winning the war on terror, but they are winning the war on luggage.

Before we had the beverage bombers, we had the shoe bomber, and the only people who appreciate that idiot are the people who sell those little foot covers. It's not that I hate taking off my shoes that much, but between that and removing my belt and whatever else has a trace of metal in it, I feel like I'm being led in to see a mob boss or something. It's actually worse on the other end, because you end up with about four of those plastic trays full of clothes & electronic equipment and not a lot of time to try to put your life back together before you're either pushed out by the people+stuff coming up behind you or are late for your plane.

Once you get through, it doesn't get that much easier. If you are like me and sometimes need to get online in the airport, the good news is that a lot of airports have free wi-fi. The bad news is that most airports only have about one power outlet per terminal. You have to scope those out pretty quickly, because you have to compete with the cell-phone-chargers too. To the credit of the Portland airport the other day, they actually had a whole area with desks and power outlets. I suppose people like me are a bit like smokers (except with a different problem), so it was nice of them to create a little area to help me satisfy my apparent work addiction.

Speaking of work, that's another part of life that requires a lot more intelligence than it used to. I'm not talking about work itself of the fact that you have to use computers (you can get that "Video Professor" guy to help you out with that) - I'm talking about passwords. Security at work has tightened up, too, so just using your dog's name as your password for life doesn't work anymore. You have to have a "strong" password, meaning that it has to consist of a certain combination of numbers, letters, special characters, Morse Code, and smoke signals. It would be bad enough if you had to come up with a password like that once in your life, but most places make you come up with and remember a new one every few months. I'm running out of remotely memorable ones, so soon I'll probably lose my job and have to find employment that doesn't involve Windows.

Thanks to filling my head with all of those passwords, I think I'm starting to slide a little lower on the intelligence continuum. First, driving to the airport from my meeting, I decided not to trust my little GPS device and ended up wandering around the back streets of suburban Portland for a while. Then a few days ago I accidentally drowned my cell phone. Unfortunately, there aren't absolutes when it comes to dumb things either, so I know that those aren't the "dumbest" things I've ever done and that there will be many "dumber" things to come.