Dumbest Man Alive – follow up.

In the mirror

Dumbest Man Alive – follow up

This is a follow-up to my column written May 13 where I wrote that I must be the dumbest man alive.

In response to what I wrote, I must have received thousands, or hundreds....OK,  two very kind notes from readers that told me I couldn’t be the dumbest man in the world, but could easily be number two.

Actually, both my daughters wrote loving notes to me telling me how smart I always made them feel.  I know the notes were from them because they were addressed, as usual, to “Dear Sir or Madam”.  I read their kind remarks many times so as not to miss any nuances to what they wrote.  I did not want to make the same mistake I did with one reader’s letter.  I thought it was an invitation when it was, in reality, a restraining order. 

That blog post that I wrote where I questioned my own intelligence was inspired by my frustration from trying to get my lawn tractor fixed.  My wife, the fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler, and I live in a rural area and we have lots of acreage around our house.  I purchased a riding lawn tractor in order to mow the grass quickly.  The drive belt kept slipping off of the mower deck and it eventually broke.  I do not have an owner’s manual because I bought this mower second hand, naturally, to save money.  So being a modern, tech savvy guy, I went to the Toro Lawnmower website to look up the part and find out where to buy it.  I could not find any numbers on the website that matched the serial number or model number of my mower.  I was getting angrier the longer I searched. 

I even wrote to the “Contact Us” address on the Toro website for some help, although I knew it would be days before I would get a response.  I told my wife of my dilemma, and that I could not find ANYTHING that remotely matched my mower on the Toro website.  “Toro?  Why are you looking on the Toro website?” she said in a perplexed voice.  “You have a Troy-Bilt” mower”.   Duh.  I had just wasted hours on this wild goose chase and worse yet, I knew that the Toro guys were gonna put my email up on the bulletin board as their dumbest question ever submitted. 

And the second stupid thing I did was to forget to include the Toro story in the very blog post which was inspired by that incident.  Had I included it, perhaps not even my daughters would have been able to overlook my folly.  No wonder both were so eager to get married and change their last names.

Again, thanks for the warm words of encouragement that I am sure you readers are thinking, but apparently are not sending.  I enjoyed reading all of the ones I did get, except one.  I definitely could have done without the note from the Director of Rusk State Mental Hospital, who sent me an Admissions Form.