Lunch today was a special case of dealing with the most special of special education students and saving my friend from having to deal with him. I walked in to my friend helping one of the regulars, a normal looking kid, at the LAN center I work at set up an email account. He was setting up this account as a gmail account which is a pretty simple process for most people taking mere minutes of time if you have a brain larger then the size of a walnut. Unfortunately this was not the case for our intrepid 14 year old hero of this story.
When I walked in we had already arrived to the setup your email page and he had gotten as far as putting his name in the top 2 fields. According to my friend getting to this point had already taken 17 minutes of time. The reason for this is that it had taken him 7 minutes to type in the words www.gmail.com. I believe my cat could get that typed into the web address field faster by randomly mashing letters on the keyboard until it got it right. Of course this would be after it took a 4 minute nap on the keyboard during this process. The next 10 minutes of putting his name in was also a daunting task for him. Apparently his memory of who he was had flown off into space and he had to be fired via a rocket to gather the letters and bring them back to earth to place them into the fields so that gmail could know who he was.
Now after this whole process is where I show up with my KFC in hand so that I may have a peaceful lunch watching my buddy shoot some stuff with Terrans on Starcraft 2. Instead I walk into Apocalypse Braincells, a place where neurons have been nuked by stupidity. At this point he is stuck on creating an email handle and asks us what that means. I tell him that he needs to create an email address that he would like to use. The first one he made was declined because it was already in use and he had to ask what does he do now, not realizing the obvious answer is to try another email address. I had to point this obvious fact out at this time and also point out that the text on the screen tells him exactly what to do in these situations, a fact that is constantly lost on him through the entire process. Finally we arrive at a suitable email address that he can use.
Next comes time to create a password, which he asks how to do that, again not reading the words on the screen telling him to make a password with 8 or more characters. I ask him to read what it says on the screen. He repeats what it says and then with a serious look asks if the password has to be 8 characters or can it be 1 character. I had to explain to him that really 8 characters long really does mean 8 characters long. This explanation causes him to pause for a couple minutes while he thinks and then asks what characters it should be. I told him he should come up with a password that is personal to him and he again asks well what characters should I use. Finally I realized what he was getting at by looking down at the comic book he had next to him at the computer. In his mind 8 characters meant that he had to come up with 8 different comic book or video game characters to make his password. This is where face meets palm Captain Picard style. I had to explain to him that a character was like a letter/number/symbol on the keyboard. This causes me to think that really this kid is just a 99 year old in a 14 year old body, like maybe aliens swapped his brain with Old man Gary down the road or something. I mean don't they teach this shit in computer basics in grade school these days?
Finally we get past the password stage after 8 minutes of painful explanations and its off for the secret question round. Fortunately this section was multiple choice, but then requires an answer to this question. He chose the question of what is your mothers phone number. He looks at me dead serious when he is typing and asks if he needs to put spaces in the phone number. At this point I am getting a bit annoyed and ask him if he has seen phone numbers in a phone book and how those look. His response is yes they have dashes in them. I of course had to inform him then he should make his phone number look exactly like those. His response was "Oh yea". At least this section only took 4 minutes of excruciating pain to complete.
Finally we get to the final section of birthday. Now this is normally a simple thing for most people because we tend to know the month, day, and year we are born. His first response to this question was how do I put in my birthday? Me: "Did you read the instructions?" Him: "Oh"..........."so how do I put in my birthday?" Me: "You see how they have the date underneath the field in the example.....just like that" Him: "Oh ok. What number is the month for December?" REALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WTF!!!!!!!!!!! ARE YOU RETARDED KID??? WERE YOU EATING PAINT CHIPS BEFORE YOU GOT HERE? DID YOUR MOTHER THROW YOU IN A POOL FULL OF ASBESTOS WHEN YOU WERE A BABY? Shit I know they teach that shit in kindergarten or 1st grade or something simple like that. At this point I couldn't believe he wasn't walking around with a white helmet on. Of course my friend pipes up with the exasperated "12". Now if this was the only question he asked about his birthday we might be ok, but nope Einstein had more questions ABOUT HIS OWN BIRTHDAY! The example under the picture looks like this "01/01/80". What he ended up typing was "12/7/95". We promptly tell him he needs to add a 0 in front of the 7. The new birthday then looked like this "120/7/95". No we go 0 in front of the 7 to look like the example. We then get to see "1207/95". No you need the slash. Finally we get this right and we have "12/07/95". Sadly the whole birthday debacle was not over. He proceeds to ask "So I am 14 is 95 right". I am so annoyed at this point I blurt out, "I don't know when you were born, you and your mother know that information not me and seriously you don't know when you were born? Yes 95 is right right." After these 8 painful minutes of the birthday debacle I wanted to punt kittens and puppies, but not newborns because I don't need any other retarded children coming into the LAN center to make my day this painful.
If only it ended there. He has to put in the security word. At this point I am frothing at the mouth and may feast on this kids soul like a starving demon. Me and my buddy just end up reading it to him. He types it in very slowly while we repeat the letters 4 times for him. We get him finally to press the accept terms and conditions button and it seems he typed in 2 different passwords when it asked him to re enter the password. We told him he has to type the same password 2 times in the fields. He gets through this part a bit less painfully because I think he realizes we may actually kill him if he takes another 7 minutes to do this.
Finally the button is pressed and its time to verify he is a real person because gmail hates people. We have to verify his account by phone and give him the phone number to type into the field so that they can call him and give him a code to put in to finish the setup. My friend grabs the phone and gives him the numbers which he of course has to respond with "with spaces?" I say "do the instructions show spaces?" Him: "No" Me: "Then whats the answer?" Him: "No spaces." Yea about fucking time genius, Einstein ain't got nothing on you. Finally the phone rings with gmail giving him the code and my friend pushes the answer button and gives the phone over and the kid looks at the phone and hangs it up. WTF? Really are you that stupid that we just went through all of this so you can look at the phone and hang it up? He then states "I don't hear anything, is there supposed to be something, I pressed talk." My friend: "No you just hung up the phone, now press the button that says reverify." Him "What button?" Me and Friend "The big blue button that says reverify....No not that one, the big blue one. NO! THE BIG BLUE BUTTON." Apparently all the other buttons on the page looked more enticing the really big fucking BLUE BUTTON. We get him to finally press it and we enter in the phone number again. This time my friend keeps the phone and answers it, while I have to tell the kid he needs to type the numbers I say into the field. My friend starts giving the numbers and the kid is just staring at us like we are speaking Swahili to him. I look at him and go, "You need to type these numbers in." Him: "Oh." Me: "So start typing them please.....1 2 0 3 6." Him: "what?" Me: "1.......2.......0........3......6. Type it in. 1........2........0.....3......6" Him: "What?" At this point I gave up and just typed it in because this was going to be another game of bash the seal with the baseball bat....its really not fun for any party involved.
Yay email account created.....40 minutes after the start of wanting to create one. Sadly when the email account popped up he goes "What's this?" *Sigh* "Its your email account." Him: "Well where does it say my email account name?" Friend: "At the top of the page." Him with cursor in the middle of the page "Here?" Friend: "No at the top (points finger to the top where it is)" Him pointing mouse to another random spot on the page: "Here?" Both of us now: "NO at the top (both pointing to it). Now write it down and the password you used." Him: "Hey look I found a piece of paper." Congrats you moved up the chain primitive primate. Finally he writes it down and his password and gets up and informs us that its time to go make his Xbox live account at home.
We then both go "Ok cya later." knowing what is in store for his poor mother. Unfortunately it seems he was also going to bring his older brother into the equation since he goes "If I have any problems I will just ask my older brother since he has an xbox account." At this point we chuckle a bit and feel a ton of relief knowing that he shouldn't be bothering us anymore that day.
All I can say about this story is that the movie Idiocracy is no longer seeming like such a far off future for the human race if this is the examples we have in the youth of today.
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