An Introduction To Dumb:

Most of the time--nearly all of the time, in fact--my customers are great. They're polite and respectful, or at the very least not unduly rude, and they don't dawdle during rush hour, and don't make ridiculous demands. Most of the time. At the fast food joint, for instance, I might serve 200+ customers in a shift, and of those, no more than five or six would make my life difficult. That means only 3% of the people who eat fast food are jackasses. (Sometimes there would be a much higher proportion, of course--but hey, sometimes the universe likes to take a shit on the corporate drudges of the world.)

The one exception to this rule was at the riding centre. I won't name it, for various reasons, but it mostly catered to tourists, showing them the beautiful Australian countryside. It was probably my most physically hands-on job, and also the one were I was most often run off my feet. There are several reasons for this, but largely it was because during any given hour, there would be

• 20 horses on the trail
• 10 horses involved in lessons
• 30 horses being readied to go out for trails/lessons
• a whole herd of ponies for the kids

That's sixty large, often dangerous animals that I had to handle, not including the customers.

Oh yeah, the customers. If we're gonna talk about large, dangerous animals, I can't leave them out. Maybe it was because I took the 'intermediate' trail (the automatic spot for people who hadn't ridden with us before but claimed they had prior experience, and actually much, much closer to a 'beginner' trail than to an 'advanced' trail) but I dealt with riders who

• demanded a riding crop for a horse that responded to voice commands
• when given a riding crop, flailed it around and sometimes hit other riders with it
• tried to ride with spurs on
• tried to 'vault' onto the horse (i.e. mount from behind the horse)
• took off their helmets halfway through a ride
• took off their boots halfway through a ride
• let their horses eat while riding
• let their horses roll in the river (often with the rider still on board)
• stopped paying attention to the guides and went off on their own
• tried to get their horses to charge down hill
• dropped the reins halfway through a ride
• undid the saddle girth because it was 'getting in the way'
• let their horses kick and bite other horses/people
• ran their horses off short cliffs or into trees

I present you, ladies and gentlement, with pure stupid.

Does anyone know about the thirty second rule? The one from the Big Chill? If not, well--it's hard to explain, so here is a practical example. Now, while some trail rides are filled up with people on their own or in pairs who're just looking for a ride, a lot of the time they're group bookings of five to ten people. And the staff at that centre could tell, thirty seconds after picking up the phone, if the group was going to be stupid.

Some warning signs in the very first phone conversation included:

"We're all very experienced riders," especially when repeated more than twice throughout the conversation. Good riders don't feel the need to assert their skills more than once.

"We were raised in (insert rural area here)"--people seem to think this gives them automatic riding skills. It doesn't. Oddly enough, when it's not tourists, it's rural or semi-rural people who toss out this line--city slickers know better.

"I've/we've been taught by the best instructors in the country!" This is never, ever true. You know how we know? Because we know exactly who the best instructors in the country are, and when we ask these people who exactly they were taught by, they stutter and stammer or get all defensive or state some name that we've never heard of.

"I've been riding my whole life." I have nothing against a little hyperbole, but this--especially when paired with one of the other warning signs--basically translates to "Quick! Give M a lunge whip!"

There were more--we had a list of them stapled to the desk next to the phone--but those were the most common ones. They showed up all the time, and they almost always indicated a group of people who would be at best severely exaggerating their own skills. At worst, it signalled a pack of lying, manipulative twats, who would completely ignore any instruction or regulation or safety in favour of pretending to be John Wayne. I especially hated it when a small group of morons got shunted in with some of my regulars. I loved riding with my regulars, showing them the cool half-hidden trails that led through rivers and thick forests--but I couldn't take them there when there were dumb riders in my group, because the dumb riders would try to do a Nazgul impersonation or some other kind of fuckwittery.

There will doubtless be several posts detailing the exploits of these fuckwits (somehow they managed to keep coming up with new and different ways of being stupid--this always astounded me,) but this is, for now, an introduction to them. And an acknowledgement, too; while there is a vast quantity of stupid in the world, most people are not part of it.