If there's anybody who makes you feel sick, it's the person who is a success. By success I mean anyone who can make money, or decisions, or their way in the world, or progress.
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| Yeah I know its not a motorbike, but it was the closest I could find - see later on |
Usually they only things they don't make are mistakes. Leastways, according to them they don't.
The average person is a bag of indecisive phobias, and usually has as much natural talent and purpose as a jellyfish without a sting. Or is a natural disaster area when it comes to making or mending anything. How many of us are the type that fixes a shelf only to have it fall down that moment it get dusted? And on to your foot, as a rule.
Or plants in the garden only to see it wilt and die before your eyes as if you'd sprayed it with battery acid.
And don't you hate the bloke who gives you a large bag of the reddest tomatoes you've ever seen, weighing about a pound each because he's got so many that he and his family will never be able to eat them all? You know, and he knows that your plants have got an average of three miserable, wizened, puny nubbins on each, trying hard to make up their minds whether they're tomatoes or greengages. And are going to end up as green tomato chutney, which is muck you can't stomach anyway, cos the only way they'll ripen to red is if you happen to cut your finger on the pruning knife and bleed all over them.
He's a success. You ain't. And you hate his guts.
When the car breaks down, do you get out, lift the bonnet and stare at the works trying hard to remember what the hell makes it all tick, with a mind as blank as a petrified eyeball? Is your first instinct to walk home and leave the bloody thing? Hoping that some mechanical Rumplestiltskin will have mended it during the night and all you'll have to do in the morning is get in and drive it away. That is, if you ain't lost the keys.
You're like that ? Well, don't worry. You're one of the great army of incompetents. The average bloke who can't knock a nail in without hitting his thumb or smashing the hammerhead in to the wall. It's these geezers who turn every quid they get in to a million, who can look a fierce Alsatian in the eye and make it back off with its rudder slotted between its rear legs , who can put the stars in the eyes of beauty with a few well chosen compliments, who don't admit that such a word as fate exists; they're the ones out of step. We're the naturals, the folk who, when they get a quid back a loser with it, if confronted by a poodle get bit, when trying the old Don Juan stuff with a bird are told "Get knotted, buster", and are ruled by fate and all the other four letter words in the language.
So, if you're a cesspit of despair and every other situation is a O one (Oh dear, what the hell am I going to do about that?) be comforted by Robbie Burns famous words - "The best laid schemes o'mice and men, gang aft aglae" - which translated into English means that even the super-beings who can't a put a foot wrong, even when walking through a field of cows suffering with diarrhoea make a cock up of things now and then.
A lovely example of this happened during the fireman's strike*. A unit of the army, who had taken over emergency firefighting, were called out to rescue an old lady's cat who had got stuck up a tree, which they did with trained efficiency.
Afterwards, having thanked her, they trooped out, got on their Green Goddess and drove off, running over the cat and killing it. Happens to anybody, don't it?
And should you think that only you are the ultimate in total incompetence, ponder on the guy who achieved an Everest peak in cock-ups, both metaphorically and literally, when having a bit of nooky in the back seat of the lady's mini. His back gave out and froze solid and no ways could he move, nor she.
In desperation she attracted assistance by pressing on the hooter with her right leg, which was draped elegantly over the drivers seat. Eventually they were freed by the fire brigade who got them out by removing part of the car.
The lady seemed less worried by the star turn being in full view of a lot of gleeful firemen than what she would tell her husband when he wanted to know how the back of his car got cut off.
Another example of making a cock-up of things actually happened to me when taking a motorbike test many years ago.
This I took on a moped, which you could in those days. A pass qualified you to ride anything from a 50c.c. to a 600c.c. which was a stupid state of affairs. But no matter, after riding god knows how many times round the block, first one way, and then the other to show that I could turn right and left, I was told to ride around till he jumped out and waved his arms and I was to do an emergency stop. I rode around for so long that I thought he'd gone home and forgot me, when he suddenly appeared waving his arms like a windmill in my path. I didn't know where he came from but I saw where he went. Straight back in to the cafe where he'd probably been swilling tea while watching me, with one tremendous leap to get out of my way as I shot straight at him at 30 because I'd put on the anchors so hard that I snapped both the handbrake cables.
Funny enough he gave me a pass, possibly in case I reported him for being in the cafe, which shows messing things up ain't the end of everything. After all, man's real genius lays in being incompetent. Most of us are good at it and if you're like me, with a head which is useful only in keeping your ears apart, don't worry you're doing a good job. Have compassion for those people who've got it all. They're in the minority. Gosh, I hate 'em. Don't you ?
Notes:
* That'll be 1977 Firemans Strike 1977
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