#412 Caution Stupidity

So I’m thinking at some point our educational system must have failed us. Everybody likes to blame the lawyers but someone has to be responsible for the stupid people that cause the accidents that attract the lawyers to begin with. And end up subjecting the rest of us to an endless parade of warning labels, warning brochures, and warning instruction pamphlets.
You know the ones I mean. Every time you buy a new appliance or tool the whole first few pages of the instruction manual are dedicated to how to plug the damn thing in, and riddled with warnings about how you shouldn’t use you new appliance while you’re in the shower or while you are sleeping. I literally had a warning notice with a handheld hair dryer that I bought, that cautioned me to not use it while I was sleeping. Man. I hope my subconscious got the message, cause if I’m sleep-walking sometime and I decide take a shower, I sure hope I don’t use that hair dryer.
So as I said, I’m thinking that in order to save paper, and in order to save trees, and perhaps save our planet when those tress suck all the greenhouse CO2 out of the atmosphere, maybe we could encourage the schools to offer a required course on basic appliance management. You know, safety tips. Elementary things, like don’t put your radio in the bathtub, try not to operate a chainsaw when you’re drunk, don’t fly a kite in a thunderstorm. Basic commonsense things that every kid should not advance to the next grade not knowing. Kind of a practical WASL—Washington Anti-Stupidity Learning.
Students could be given basic, practical, lessons in appliance management. Along with a list of who to call for questions and assistance. How to call a plumber instead of twist that nut. What to do when your hair drier starts sparking. Stuff like that. Students could watch horror films and see graphically and vividly how Freddy Kruger and others use unsafe electrical appliances to effect murder and gruesome mayhem.
It would sure save a lot of ink and paper. And it would possibly mean that I wouldn’t get the warning label I got the other day when I bought a lamp. That’s right, things have come to a sad pass in this country when you get a safety label on a lamp. I think I know how to operate a goshdarn lamp. But no. It turns out this lamp had a polarized plug. You know, where one side of the plug is wider than the other and it only fits into a plughole when you match up the wide plug to the wide hole. Duh. If I can’t figure out something as simple a plug in a hole is it going to do me any good to print out a 200-word warning label? Aren’t the chances good that a greater challenge than hole matching would be reading a whole sentence?
America, ya gotta love it.