Too Certified To Read Or Listen?

Don’t you just love certified idiots? Meaning, people who have adopted their certifications as their actual identity, but couldn’t pass their certification exams upon a minute’s notice if their lives depended on it. Yep, too certified to learn anything more or listen to somebody else. That’s exactly like a person saying that they’re too sick to go to the doctor. They are no longer the person that their driver’s license says they are, they are now the random unintelligible upper-case letters in their email signature, and can’t be bothered to listen to anybody else without the same pseudo identity.

No matter how many times you tell them how they are using a tool or a program the wrong way and remind them that there is documentation on it that they should read, they continually drive that tool or program off a cliff. Did you read the documentation as you have been repeatedly told? [crickets] Did you update the program as you have been repeatedly told? [crickets] Is there a boycott against listening to me, or do you think that you’re just too certified to ever have to read the fucking manual and learn the correct way to use something? [Mental implosion and brain bleed ensues]

If you think that you’re too smart to listen to somebody else and learn the correct way to use a tool or program, then you are 100% unqualified to be using it and you should stick to using things that bear the Fisher-Price brand name. If it’s a program that I wrote, please, take your sippy cup and and Crayons and go home. There are plenty of other people in the world who will use it the correct way, you aren’t my target audience. There are some people in this world who have no idea whatsoever, what the hell they’re actually doing, and most of them are really good at that. Move along, go get a clue.

Here’s the biggest problem with certified idiots…They put all kinds of effort into studying and cramming for the certification exam, but never put a fraction of that effort into the topic of that certification after that. In most cases, they forget the majority of that information they crammed in a day or two. Bounce a complicated question off of them sometime. If they can’t answer it on the fly, remind them that it was on their certification exam. Predictably, they will actually admit that it’s not something that they’ve had to deal with since their exam and they have forgotten it by now. They actually believe that’s a valid excuse for being a clueless poser!

If you have forgotten that info by now, that means that you certainly couldn’t pass the exam again on a minute’s notice. So why the hell do you put so much effort into telling people that you’re certified in that area? That either makes the certification worthless, or proves that you’re really not as smart as you say you are, or both. [I’m going with both] This is why I don’t bother learning anything until I actually need it. Plus, as Groucho Marx once said, “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member”. I have absolutely no desire to become a member of that poser club.

Here’s the beauty of not being a certified idiot. I actually know my skills far better than these idiots THINK they know their own, because I actually use mine every day. A person couldn’t even possibly study and certify their way into my level of experience. If I’ve been doing this shit longer than you’ve been out of diapers, you should probably eat some humble pie and accept that you aren’t really as smart as you think you are. Take my word for it, the guy who actually wrote the program knows what he’s talking about. You couldn’t write something half as good on your best day.