Stupid People are Everywhere

As a teenager and college student, I worked at a couple of tourist places. One of the first things I learned at 16, working as a tour guide in a cave is that stupid people are everywhere. I don't mean slightly stupid people, I mean absolutely nonsensically idiotic.

Me in high school... the very figure of authority

In the cavern, there are many places that have chained off areas that say do not enter and areas with railings. I cannot tell you how many times people would try to cross these barriers, and rarely were they children. More often than not it was grown adults that were the problem. They would blatantly and obviously crawl under or over barriers... and they always got caught.

I would shine my flashlight on them and tell them they needed to come back on the pathway. They would look at me from the other side of the barriers and say, "I am not breaking any rules" or defiantly "You can't make me!" Usually, this resulted in a threat that we would have the police called because damaging the cave is a criminal offense.

One day a man, in his mid-30's or early 40's, decided to climb over the railing. I politely asked him to come back onto the trail. He rudely refused and then started to get belligerent. We were near the end of the tour and he had been quite frustrating all along.

As a 16-year-old, it can be quite difficult to maintain authority in a dark hole in the ground with rude people. As I was starting to get frustrated and was about to radio up that they needed to send someone down to escort him out, a woman comes up and says angrily, "Let me deal with him!" And she walks up to the barrier where he is standing and whacks him with her purse. With an evil gleam in her eye, she says "If you don't come back over here and behave I will take the car and go home without you." Then, she turned around and walked away. Turns out they were married and she was not happy with him. He came back over the barrier and was silent the last 10 minutes of the tour and apologetic as I was locking the gate on the way out.

A life lesson from that day...  as a wife take control of the situation when your husband is being a moron and if all else fails, whack him with your purse. It is a lesson, that as a wife, I am glad to have learned. One additional gem is that stupid people are everywhere.