Do you know what I’m not good at? Making decisions. Well. Making good decisions, anyway. Ever. Give me two options and I’ll pick the stupid one. I could get a reasonable night’s sleep – or I could stay up late and be knackered and irritable tomorrow. I could cook real actual food, or I could have a sammich. Or biscuits. Or subsist purely on haribo. I am not what I would describe as a wise person. By any stretch of the imagination. But questionable nutritional choices and exotic sleep patterns aside, if I’m quite honest, I can recall scores of pretty terrible bigger decisions which have had wider repercussions and lead to quite epic quantities of fail in life more generally. In fact anyone with whom I share even the briefest of acquaintances with will probably be able to reel off a fair sized list.
Bob here, sometime companion of Dilbert, is not really about the decisions. He is what is known in the trade as a tool. Arguably worse than failing to make good decisions, he pretty much fails to make any decisions at all. Ok, here he seems to have chosen to eat his Blackberry all of his own accord but that’s not exactly a moment of triumph. Usually he plays the role of dumb henchman quite excellently with a dedication to passively carrying out orders. I almost started to attempt to justify him by suggesting that being somewhat lacking in initiative is not an actively bad thing in itself – however, there are definite grounds for arguing that following other people’s bad decisions is an equally tragic decision failure on your part also: you are complicit in their jackassery.
In some respects I guess I could substitute myself in the place of the bad decision dinosaur right here. Not an avid reader of cat and girl, perhaps I should refrain from passing judgement too harshly on the poor chap but nonetheless he makes my point. I’d be the one who says, “Sure, Boney, you can take Russia” and “I believe it is peace for our time“. Oh yes, that’s me – devoid of perception and lacking in foresight and better judgement. However, I would even go as far as saying that often the issue can not be put down to lacking foresight. I can recall plenty of instances whereupon I have been in such a position as to accurately perceive the consequences of my actions, judge them as undesirable and yet still persist to make decisions which ultimately secure these ends. I mean, nice going right there. Surely that requires a special kind of stupid? Or is it uglier things like indiscipline or plain old weakness of character? Perhaps it is a similar character flaw to following the bad decisions of others as well. Perhaps Bob and the BDD aren’t too different afterall.
Slightly more generously, perhaps I might even be favourably compared with another prehistoric patriarch of webcomic stardom – namely T-Rex of dinosaur comics. He’s naïve and boisterous, occasionally witty and sometimes even quite sweet. Often his ever present companions foil his ever more ludicrous schemes but generally he learns some form of life lesson from his musings and dialogue within those six strikingly similar boxes.
I guess my point is that although undeniably loveable the best thing you can say about these guys is that they are stupid rather than malicious (perhpas in contrast to the dinosaurs found here). They don’t intentionally harm anyone but often manage to in the course of their generally self interested (…if that) existence. That is the category in which I would like to place myself, the box I want to tick: my plea against the charges of ill treating those around me. I might be lacking in initiative, sensitivity or consideration but I am not malicious.
I had almost settled with that position. But you know what? It’s not good enough. It’s not enough to say, “Well, I meant to look out for ice bergs…” or at least, “well I had nothing against the guy I ran over, it’s not like I meant to kill him – I just needed take a call” – sometimes one has to take an active interest in specifically avoiding the bad stuff [Edit: contrast to my last post much?] rather than simply deciding not to aim straight for them. If we’re heading for problems because they seem to be the default then observing this and failing to change course has to be a problem in itself. The reason why any of this came to mind is that earlier I made a very small decision. I believe it was perceived as rudeness and I probably came out of the situation looking like the bad guy – but knowing that the alternative was all different kinds of ugly for everyone involved, to allow that to happen has to be seen as worse. I’ve got it wrong before. I got it right today.
