The Bozo No-Zone

Jim, a friend of mine in Florida, was once besieged by a confederacy of dunces. These problems crop up from time to time, when Darwinism stumbles and the ratio of flapping jaws to thinking heads gets too high. The result is usually a lot of wasted time in a lot of ways. Jim, desperate to reclaim his schedule from the bozos, finally regressed to his military training.

He drew a line of defense at his office door. Jim resolved that for a period of one week no idiots would enter his lair, nor would he accept any phone calls from them. “At first it was difficult,” he later observed, “because it’s a reflex to discuss business with people who want to discuss business.” Jim surmounted this problem by drawing up a list of known idiots. “Bozos, morons, bores, and dingbats, by no means mutually exclusive categories, all got blacklisted,” he said. “I kept the list on top of my desk. It didn’t say ‘idiot list’ at the top or anything, so there was no harm in keeping it in plain view.” Like all solutions crafted out of desperation, this one had some drawbacks.

One fly in the ointment was the fact that his secretary—er, “administrative assistant,”—was blacklisted. “But there was a silver lining to that,” Jim noted. “I soon figured that typing my own correspondence and making my own phone calls was quicker than dealing with her. She became obsolete. I eventually let her go, which saved a bunch of money. As far as the phone goes, I screen the calls through my answering machine.” Business projects, like tables, stand on several legs, and this proved to be the biggest shortcoming of Jim’s strategy.

“Sometimes, no matter how you slice it, you’ve got a lukewarm IQ smack dab in the middle of a project and if you lose the bozo you kill the entire project,” he observed.

Jim hasn’t yet devised a way to split the difference and craft a plan that keeps the overall benefits of bozo blocking while saving the occasional project that would get sacrificed. So he’s resigned himself to doing business as usual most of the time, while throwing up the gauntlet a few times a year when his time and temper are getting tested. When I think of the time I’ve wasted because of the bozo factor, I can see the merits of Jim’s approach. So, for a week, starting August 1, I’m screening out all dingbats. I telephoned Jim to ask if he had any last minute advice before I gave the experiment a try. I got his answering machine, though. Maybe his machine is broken. He never returned my calls.

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Housekeeping notes: I have received a lot of e-mail from readers in July, but I am on vacation so it is taking me longer than usual to respond. Today’s column was originally published in the Saipan Tribune in 1998.

(Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. E-mail him at Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com.)