Idiots I Have Known

By Wendell Blue

They say that dead people don't feel pain; it's those around them that suffer. The same holds true for idiots. In the course of my life I have had many close encounters of the idiotic kind. This short work details a few of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wendell Blue
• Release date: Jun 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310933899

Wendell Blue

Wendell Blue is a retired teacher of English as a Second Language. He taught for over 35 years at various schools and universities in the United States, Latin America, The Middle East and Asia. While serving in the Peace Corps as a young man, he realized that he enjoyed living abroad. As a result, he has lived nearly his entire adult life abroad, teaching English wherever people were willing to hire him.

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Idiots I Have Known

By

Wendell Blue

Copyright 2016 by Wendell Blue

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Table of Contents

Chapter One: My Hometown

Chapter Two: Academia

Chapter Three: Idiots Abroad

CHAPTER 1: MY HOMETOWN

"In my little town, I grew up believing God keeps his eye on us all ..."

Like the words in the Simon and Garfunkel song above, I also grew up in a small town with the same belief. Observing my fellow citizens in this hillbilly-infested small town, though, I could not help suspecting that there were times when God would simply have to avert his gaze in horror and disgust. He might even feel like plucking out his eyes.

I left my hometown 40 years ago, so many people have been forgotten. The memory of some, however, still rings fresh because of things they said or did. The following characters have kept their place in my aging mind after so many years.

Eric

In order to pay for college I worked at different low-paid manual labor jobs during summer vacations. Some of my co-workers were other college students trying, like me, to earn money for university expenses. Others were simply locals stuck in lousy jobs as a result of bad luck, bad genes or a combination of these.

One summer job I shared with these unlucky ones was on the local golf course. A young man named Eric belonged to the bad genes group mentioned above, forever doomed to work in dead-end job due to a lack of functioning gray matter.

One afternoon as Eric and I chatted while busy with one of our mind-numbing spirit-killing tasks, we discovered that we had both been previously employed in another dead-end job. As it turned out, we had both been employed in a warehouse, unloading box cars. That job had been torturous for me, but Eric had enjoyed it and found it a challenge. And there had been no bigger challenge or source of pride for young Eric than the one he told me about that afternoon.

In his words, One day I unloaded a whole boxcar full of Kotex and didn’t get a hard-on wunst!

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