Here’s the deal. I can understand it if you are dumb. Really, I can. However, if you are not dumb, and not many of us are; don’t go out of your way to be an idiot.

A few weeks ago, I was out with my wife and the in-laws at a restaurant. We were talking and eating when I noticed something out of my peripheral vision. The people who were being helped at the register up front had been there for a really long time and were being very difficult (and hence dumb). I listened in on the conversation and it went something like this:

“So you had two Big Macs and a McNugget kids meal, do you want any french fries or…” said the girl in the McDonald’s visor.

“Don’t you mean freedom fries?,” interrupted idiot number one, wearing a letter jacket from a school I won’t disclose.

“Uh, yeah sure, so do you,” said the obviously unamused employee.

“Do we what?” said idiot number two, who was also wearing a letter jacket.

“Do you want any freedom fries?” said the employee, rolling her eyes.

The idiots then proceeded to scold and ridicule the poor defenseless McDonald’s employee for rolling her eyes at the word freedom. It was sad, really, to watch as the employee had to sit there and take their taunting because the manager was nowhere to be found and ‘the customer is always right.’

The worst part of this whole ordeal was that there was a small child with them at the time; hence the McNugget kid’s meal. I found myself thinking, “Is this what that kid is going to find funny or cool when he gets older? Is he going to do the same thing when he is in high school?”

As anyone who reads this and knows me can guess, it took just about every last ounce of my mental strength and willpower not to stand up and humiliate him or her in front of everyone. But I didn’t. Instead, I am using their stupidity as an avenue to reach out and teach you a lesson. Making fun of someone in his or her place of work is not funny.

I watched a clip on youtube the other day that consisted solely of three guys making fun of Stephen A. Smith, an NBA analyst for ESPN, while he was on the air! The clip was a home video of these guys who brought a camera into the NBA draft and kept it trained on Smith for the duration of the broadcast as they continuously taunted him using his own catch phrases. The ultimate goal according to the creator of the video was to annoy Smith into a response of some kind. The creator actually went as far as to say “We realize we sound like idiots here…stupid stuff is much more annoying to the panelists.”

Honestly, the guy was at the NBA draft, a major sporting event, and what does he spend the time doing? Watching the draft to see who his favorite team takes? No. Booing his favorite teams rival? No. Doing anything remotely related to his favorite team? No. He is taking the opportunity to antagonize someone into a response. We had names for those in my house. They were Casey and Jacob, my pre-teenaged younger brothers.

The point I am getting across is this. Don’t heckle the person at McDonald’s, the guy on TV, or even the guy collecting the trash. The fact of the matter is that they probably do it better than you and if they don’t, you look like an uneducated jerk for trying to instigate a fight with them. If you want to have an argument with someone who intellectually up to par, contact me at [email protected], before you go and yell at the people at Starbucks for being “unpatriotic” because they label their cups tall, grandé and venti instead of small, medium and large.