Go small or go home
by Kate Zimmerman for the North Shore News
MY husband and I are having an incompetition. That’s the best term I can come up with for an incompetence competition.
Of course, we aren’t having it on purpose — that would be competent.
Rather, it’s an ongoing, subconscious contest that involves keeping stringent track of the other’s gaffes and foibles and trotting them out whenever one’s own blunders are remarked upon. In this situation, comparisons to any of the Stooges, Clark Griswold of the National Lampoon movies, and George Costanza of Seinfeld are always apropos. As we age, references to the addle-brained, tongue-tied Aunt Clara from Bewitched and dear, senile old Grandpa Simpson are becoming more frequent.
I suspect that we are not alone in this contest. Perhaps you’d like to write in to me with your own tally, contrasting it with your incompetitor’s. (You don’t have to be married to have an incompetition with someone — but it helps.)
In our case, through my clumsiness a Tupperware container may topple down off the top of the refrigerator and into my face and I might rear back in a comical way and get whiplash. At that, Stanley might laugh. That’s when it’s handy to be able to yell indignantly, “Well, at least I can remember the names of our children!”
At times, I admit, these exchanges escalate into a bit of an Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? scenario, without the imaginary kid and the highballs. I wonder if that movie would have been less or more tart if the drunken couple had been exchanging barbs about memory loss and clumsiness, rather than failure and affairs. Probably about the same.
In any case, the other day Stanley decided to look into the fact that the water heater didn’t seem to be heating water. He hauled out a hardcover tome called How to Fix Anything and started leafing through it.
“Isn’t that the same book you used the time you ‘repaired’ the dryer and shortly afterward it burst into flames?” I said, efficiently chewing my gum.
“Shut up,” he said politely, turning to the index. “What do you call that thing, anyway?”
“A ‘water heater’?” I said, deftly lacing my answer with ridicule.
“Oh, I was looking it up under ‘hot water heater.’ I guess that’s redundant,” he said.
I pretended to try to stifle my snort.
“Well, at least I didn’t set fire to the kitchen floor,” he said — a low blow. That particular imbroglio (now six years old) will live on in infamy, and possibly in our insurance rates. “Or leave a candle going all night, like you did yesterday.”
“Well, at least I don’t absent-mindedly eat a fortune cookie with the fortune still in it,” I retorted.
“Well ….”
It’s lucky neither of us has any muscle tone or faint slaps might have been exchanged.
Ah, the wonders of married love. Perhaps you recognize it. And perhaps that’s why you are no longer married, gentle reader.
Like most spouses, Stanley is under the impression that I am a total idiot about certain things. He asked me three times, for instance, whether I had added water to the creamed corn the other night.
”No. Why would I?”
“It’s really watery.”
“I’ve been making creamed corn since before you were born,” I said, although I am a year younger than Stanley. “Green Giant is probably watering it down so it gets a higher profit margin.”
No doubt he filed that one away, to bring up later as proof of my frail business sense.
I see conspiracies such as Green Giant’s everywhere, particularly among the more dynamic-seeming corporations. Not so, Stanley. He is a trusting soul who thinks large, profitable companies are simply trying to serve us, not bilk us. (This, despite the fact that he has worked at many of these outfits.) It’s quite sweet, really, if sadly incorrect.
So as you can see, we’re a pair of dimwits. I try to comfort myself over this in the best way I know how — by casting aspersions on others. Donald Trump seems a likely candidate. Surely I would not want to be super-competent like “the Donald.” I remember fondly the days when he was famously referred to in Spy magazine as “short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump.” Back then we never had to watch him on television with his ludicrous pomposity and horrible taste, which have since been rewarded with even more success. Now the aptly named Trump holds super-competitions where high achievers debase themselves on international TV just for a chance to be his right-hand minion.
I watched for a few almost unbearable seconds this week. The show’s current group of highly-buffed money-grubbers had been assigned to come up with a new chocolate bar which, with typical Trump understatement, was to be named “The Amazing Chocolate Bar.” This had something to do with M & Ms and Mars bars, some of the least amazing chocolate one could consume, but never mind. If the short-fingered vulgarian wants to test the shrewdness of wannabe executives by having them invent chocolate bars, so be it. I guess I should have continued to watch in order to see these MBAs from Harvard (or wherever) prove their candy incompetence.
Demonstrating that even well-heeled brainiacs are incapable of certain things is key to the show’s mystique. What other raison d’etre could The Apprentice possibly have?
One-upping is, as always, the order of the day. These “reality” shows are nothing more than a chance for one person to smugly top everybody else’s performance and gain extraordinary fame from the experience. Whether you waltz into somebody else’s life and whip their children into shape or poke fun at their unflattering clothes and make them wear the things you like, it’s all about proving that they’re not number one – you are. It’s Darwinism in a world where the fact that you aren’t the fittest won’t prove fatal, just thoroughly humiliating when your friends and colleagues make it “Must-see TV.”
An incompetition, on the other hand, is not so much one-upping as one-downing. It’s what happens between the losers while the winners are off in Hawaii, drinking Cristal. It’s perfectly normal. So get back to your own incompetition – the upcoming holidays will provide plenty of opportunities. There are Christmas trees to put up, decorate, and then watch as they crash spectacularly to the floor. There are turkeys to cook with the bag of giblets still inside.
And may the most bumbling doofus lose. It’s a different kind of claim to fame, but it’s fame nonetheless.
Writing > Humour
