Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Office Lobbies As Proof The Human Is Not Smart

My office building has a lobby with marble floors (buffed nightly) that become extremely slick when they get wet. So every time it rains, they put mats down on the floor and security harasses people to put their umbrellas in brand-new plastic bags that the building provides.

It reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld's routine about motorcycle helmets:
There are many things you can point to as proof that the human is not smart. But my personal favorite would have to be that we needed to invent the helmet. What was happening, apparently, was that we were involved in a lot of activities that were cracking our heads. We chose not to avoid doing those activities but, instead, to come up with some sort of device to help us enjoy our head-cracking lifestyles. And even that didn't work because not enough people were wearing them so we had to come up with the helmet law. Which is even stupider, the idea behind the helmet law being to preserve a brain whose judgment is so poor, it does not even try to avoid the cracking of the head it's in.
We could just make our office building floors all-weather to prevent head-cracking falls. But instead, we continue make them completely impractical for any inclement weather, then come up with devices to help us enjoy our head-cracking lifestyles, buying mats and drilling for oil to turn into plastic bags which can then use keep our umbrella drippings from hitting the floor and prompting head-cracking falls.

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