Moments ago, I got a call at work from someone who had been in previously for some purposes or other involving a friend of his who had business with us. He initiated the call by introducing himself and asked if I remembered him (since I came into work at six, and he was here very late night, the answer would be NO, and irrelevant to the datum he was actually after), and once we established that he was wasting my time and his, he got on to inquiring about his friend. Who was not here. The building was empty except for me and possibly some coworkers, but definitely no people who did not work here. He then asked if I liked The Who. I did not and cut off further lines of discussion by pointing out that absolutely no one with the name of his friend was here. Further yammering on his part made it clear he had called the wrong place! I quickly understood where he had been trying to call because the 411 operators are congenitally defective sub-humans who can only mimic speech and definitely not higher brain functions, and make the mistake so often that the other place's phone number is taped on our phone. After I explained the problem, he babbled some more, so much so that he completely did not hear my repeated offers to provide him with the number. When he finally got around to asking for assistance, it was a request that I, in my having-nothing-to-do-with-the-telephone-service-industry capacity, transfer his call to the other place, which was equally unrelated to professional telecommunications in any way. We are not even branch offices of the same company, and when I worked at a CVS years ago, no one was actually stupid enough to ask if I could transfer their call to the other CVS in the same town, despite calling ours by mistake all the time. So really there is no excuse for such a stupid request, and it was not even phrased in a "I know this is a long shot and probably not possible, but since I'm on the phone with you I may as well ask" manner. When I explained that was not possible, I offered yet again to give him the other place's phone number (the place where he believed his friend was stranded incommunicado and desperately in need of a ride, remember), he then started hemming and hawing and looking for writing materials, BECAUSE HE COULD NOT KEEP A TEN DIGIT PHONE NUMBER IN HIS HEAD FOR THE EIGHT SECONDS HE WOULD NEED TO DIAL IT! It gets worse. When he could not find writing materials, he told me not to bother telling him the number, and he would just call information again. That's right. He was so mentally-incapable that rather than take a chance on being able to hold a ten-digit number in his brain for less than a quarter of a minute, he decided to take his chances with the same people who steered him wrong in the first place. I was going to ask him how he was going to write down the number THEY gave him (or how he dialled OUR number when they gave it to him the first time) before I recalled this mouthbreather probably paid the charge to be connected directly, that I (and I assumed every sane person who is fluent in the native language of the country in which they are called information) ignore when the recording offers you that option after you get a number from information.

Mankind has reached its nadir. Unless we find this guy named "Patrick" and sterilize him before he reproduces, there is no hope. He might be hard to find, but very recognizable if you do spot him. He's probably somewhere in Bergen County, NJ trying to explain to the little white man who lives in the crosswalk signal box that he needs to come out and let Patrick cross the street, because Michael is stuck at Rivervale, and does the little man like Queen or is he more of a Led Zepplin fan, and how does his roommate, the red hand, feel about old rock bands?