Recently I happened to see a new Ice Age movie: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Well done, with nice and cute characters, but stuffed with absolutely stupid jokes. What a disappointment!
They are our children who are supposed to enjoy this cartoon; and its nice and cute characters are making our inexperienced children think that the characters’ stupid and ugly jokes about farting, about snots, about genitals, are real humor. Humor is a reflection of intellect, and this implies that palming to our children such rubbish off as real humor, the cinema-guys are impairing kids’ intellect. Children’s brains harmed by a cartoon. Sounds terrific, however per se it’s true.
What’s worse is that this harmful stupidity is not necessary. It is not that “We have to provide stupid jokes because they are more natural for an average person”. No human being is by nature predisposed to stupid jokes. To nicotine, to alcohol or to drugs – yes, there exists congenital addiction to these harmful things, but for stupid humor – never; for this misfortune there can be only acquired addiction. Why cultivating it? I could now turn to the questionable path of discussing some conspiracy theories about somebody’s sinister plan to stupefy the society, but I would rather avoid it. The authors of such movies are not members of some evil organization like Ian Fleming’s SPECTRE, neither they are just silly people. Quite to the contrary, I am sure they are nice and clever. Nevertheless, once these nice and clever guys do a silly thing: They decide to produce a movie jam-packed with stupid jokes.
Unfortunately, it’s not that this situation with Ice Age is exceptional, rather not: It just shows an example of a very common thing in our life. Absolutely normal people sometimes strangely tend to show unexpected stupidity in personal life, in common life, and in business. In business such unexpected and unnecessary stupidity, exposed only once, can destroy serious deal.
For several years we used to do a lot of challenging and interesting work for our customer from Boston, MA. Project to project, task to task it was good working atmosphere: Comfortable though exacting. Such happy times lasted until one day the customer decided to hire a new employee for a newly started project. It was a challenging project about developing own BPMS from the scratch, and the new employee was supposed to be responsible for providing our team with all the necessary contacts, information, etc. Vacancy was published, several guys applied, and one of them has been chosen. He was nice and clever, no hint of evil omen, absolutely. As we are in outsourcing software development business, the guy said he needs to visit our premises to get acquainted with the developers. Okay, it was not the first time our customers visited us, so we arranged everything as usually: Meetings, discussions, sightseeing. The guy was reasonable and friendly, he was planning a lot of activities with us, and after several days he said good bye and returned back to Boston. In a few days our customer forwards me the report by this guy. Report is saying that we are a team of unprofessional developers and shameless cheaters; that the project will never be done, and the customer is just wasting his money. Like thunderbolt. I was perplexed and just answered to the customer “No comments”, because what could I comment? Best comments were our previous successful projects. The customer reacted in his own way: The guy was fired, the information about his strange behavior spread among a lot of software companies, and a lot of doors slammed in the guy’s face immediately and forever. Justice was done, but what wrong had been with this guy? Why? He had great prospects, he was moving forward, and suddenly he does something that not only closes these particular prospects, but also makes him persona non grata for hundreds of his colleagues and potential partners. I can only make a try to formulate his sudden stupid decision, it might sound something like: “The project is promising, and it is on the way. Why not throw out the current team then to replace it with my own one?...” Just my guess, but I cannot find any other more or less plausible explanation. Anyway, though explanation seems plausible, the action itself still remains stupid. Like a nice and clever guy has kind of instant brain blackout, and here we are, with all the disappointing consequences.
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