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I don't know if it was the heat or the humidity or holiday hangovers or what, but it seemed like I had a significant Asshole Encounter every single day last week. At home, at work, online, even in the parking lot of the supermarket, there was no let up from it. The jerk meter was up to 11 and I never knew where the next one might materialize.
It finally reached the point where I had to ask myself if *I* was the asshole. You know how sometimes you just don't recognize your own unpleasantness until you just can't escape the reality of it any more? I sat in my den last night, watching the torrents of the "This American Life" TV series I'd downloaded, and one of the episodes was about people behaving extremely badly at a hot dog stand in Chicago, and that's when the moment struck me.
(more after the jump)
Sadly, the Showtime site doesn't have a video clip of the hot dog stand segment I can link for you, but you can probably search your favorite torrent site for it (or send me an e-mail and I'll help you out). Because if you could see this for yourself, you would start to question your own degree of assholish behavior, too.
It doesn't help that I live in eastern Massachusetts, which has such a high density of assholes in the general population that the official state symbol is a jumbo tube of Preparation H. We cultivate obnoxious behavior here and burnish it to a high sheen. As a consequence, even people who are not assholes by nature have the ability to switch it on in a moment's notice, because you never know when you're going to have to deal with someone who lives that way 24-7-365, and you have no choice but to fight fire with fire.
After I was finished watching the show, I was just surfing around online and pondering all of this when I just happened to stumble onto this online quiz: Are You An Asshole? No, really. Strictly coincidence. It was like a sign. If you believe in signs.
The quiz is actually part of a website plugging a book about assholes in the workplace and how they impact organizations. To that end, the quiz followed the precepts of the book and the questions were mostly about how you interact with people in the office, but some of it is very generalizable to whether or not you're a jerk in the rest of your life, too.
Is this what you see when you look in the mirror?
I scored an 8 on a scale of 0-15. Leaning towards being an asshole, but not totally unbearable. I suppose if you lived somewhere where people were basically nice (wherever that might be), an 8 would seem pretty bad. But since I live in a state where the residents pride themselves on being called "Massholes", I was actually encouraged by that score. I'd be willing to wager that if you could get everyone in Massachusetts to take this quiz that the overall average would be more like a 10. Maybe a 12 in places like Newton.
While that was reassuring, I'm still left scratching my head a little bit and feeling not a small amount of dread at the week ahead. It's more than a little exhausting to have to view every possible interaction with someone as an angry confrontation, and I am a very confrontation-avoidant person. I have been thinking about going out for my lunch today and finding myself almost physically uncomfortable about going over to the plaza where the supermarket is; the guy who wanted to beat me up because I took "his" parking place probably won't be there again, but there's a better-than-even-money bet that there will be some other asshole on site.
I wouldn't last a minute and a half at that hot dog stand in Chicago.
I just thought I'd let you all know how my lunch hour went:
Nobody was waiting to punch my lights out in the parking lot, as predicted. I went into Papa Gino's and ordered lunch and when I went to sprinkle some red pepper flakes on my food, some ASSHOLE had unscrewed the top on the jar and the whole container spilled all over my lunch, rendering it inedible.
I'll bet they scored 13 on the quiz.
Posted by Brian [URL] at 06/ 4/07
This test if bogus. There is no way that I deserved the score I received. Is there a play at home version because I'm sure I can get a higher score. I'm feeling very competitive - as only a true asshole can.
Posted by Karan [URL] at 06/ 4/07
Hmmm
I scored 0...
Posted by Bridget [URL] at 06/ 4/07
We can't all be as perfect as you, Martha.
Posted by Brian [URL] at 06/ 5/07
Hm. Only a 4. Obviously there's some unexplored potential here.
Posted by Tony [URL] at 06/ 6/07
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