The stories of..... SWEG!!!

Unspeakably Stupid

Story #15:

Unpleasantville

(All names have been changed for the usual reasons.)

For one year, I worked as a web designer at a newspaper. This paper, which we'll call The Daily News, was in a little logging town, which we'll call Bumpkinville, about 40 miles north of the town I live in. The drive was mostly a stretch of 70 MPH freeway, so my commute was only about 35 minutes each way. Now, driving to Bumpkinville was like driving through a time machine that took you back 40 years. So it was a lot like the 50's there, minus the good parts. Remember the movie "Pleasantville"? Well, this was Unpleasantville.

Bumpkinville, being a logging town, had paper mills. Four of them. So the entire town always smelled like an old person's armpit. Therefore, anyone with any ambition or brains tended to get the hell out of there, meaning the city was basically made up of retired people, most of them nearly deaf from working in the mills for years without ear protection, and uneducated idiots just too stupid for life in the big city 50 miles to the south.

I was hired as part of the three-person Internet Department at the paper. It became clear early on that my boss, Kirk, knew nothing about the Internet. He had been the paper's owner's son's best friend all through school, and after stints as a Marine, a firefighter, and a financial controller for a southern California airport, Kirk wanted to move back to Bumpkinville. The owner's son offered him a job as Online Manager despite Kirk's complete ignorance of the Internet. After all, the owner's son was here on a free ride, so why not get his best buddy in line for the gravy train?

However, Kirk had one skill, sort of: The gift of bullshit. He could make the yokels actually believe that he knew what he was doing, despite much evidence to the contrary. He could lie all day long without stopping to take a breath. When he hired me, he told me that 200 people worked there. I found out later it was more like 110. One day, I asked him why the Advertising Department was still stuck with Photoshop version 4.0 on their machines while our department had 5.0. He went into a big speech about he really took care of things in our department, while the other departments were lax in this area. A few minutes later, I realized I had gotten it backwards. Advertising had 5.0, and we only had 4.0. When I told him, he gave me a blank stare, which is what he always did when he got caught in a big lie, which was often.

The other person in our department was a bright young girl named Karen. Being bright meant that she was overqualified for nearly any job in Bumpkinville, including this one, which was running an Internet Service Provider with 1800 customers. Since we were actually just an agent for a real ISP in the big city named Transport, and Transport was an incredibly unreliable provider, she spent most of the day on the phone with angry bumpkins. But she did her job well, and even went well beyond the call of duty at times.

Once, Karen agreed to represent our newspaper at a local "Safety Fair", manning a booth from 9 AM to 1 PM on a Saturday. Kirk was supposed to relieve her at 1 PM. He never showed up, so she was forced to stay there until the fair ended at 4 PM. When she asked Kirk what happened, he said, "Well, I looked at my watch and it was 1:30, and I figured you were out of there by then, so I didn't bother." This was typical for Kirk, an irresponsible, lying piece of human garbage with rich parents, who had basically spent his whole life avoiding education and actual work. I remember he always spent Thursday afternoons golfing with the owner's son before the new management took over.

Kirk was full of ignorant ideas befitting someone born and raised in Bumpkinville. At one point, he decided that we were going to "sell" our older, archived newspaper articles to the locals, like the LA Times does. He had me copy all the web pages relating to this from the LA Times website, changing the name of the newspaper to make it our own. He honestly believed the yokels would be willing to pay for past articles from our little turdtown newspaper. Naturally, that idea sank like a stone.