On a Scale from Idiot to Complete Jerk

by Alison Hughes

  Observations: Cut to the middle of the night, when I wake in a sweat to hideous screaming. Gus is snoring in the bunk above me. His parents are snoring in the room down the hall. The wailing and screaming go on and on. I am almost convinced that two people have broken into the house just so that one can murder the other.

  I shake Gus awake. He listens for a second, mumbles “It’s only Scooter” and puts his pillow over his head. Only Scooter. After screaming (At what? At who?) for about four hours, Scooter pounds up and down the stairs, plays hockey with a jingling cat toy up and down the hall (a game that apparently never gets old), barfs up a disgusting hairball, has a hissing/spitting fight with the dog and scratches endlessly on the bedroom furniture. He sits on my head for what’s left of the night, batting at my hair.

  Conclusions: I am so completely professional that even though Scooter cost me a night of sleep, and my eyes are crossing as I type this, I still don’t think he is a jerk.

  This is interesting, because during the night I called Scooter many, many names, including “jerk.” Turns out I didn’t really mean it.

  Again, animals don’t really mean to be jerks. They’re either acting on instinct or doing things randomly or for fun. They’re batting a fun ball or pawing at a fun face or biting an ankle just for fun. They haven’t decided to be mean. They haven’t planned.

  Final conclusion: Pets can’t be jerks.

  B) Wild Animals

  Perhaps there is something about pets being relatively tame (even if they’re badly trained) that prevents them from being complete jerks. I wondered if wild animals, animals that play by nature’s rules, behave differently. We’ve all seen the nature shows with the disturbing footage of the lions that deliberately target the weakest, slowest antelope (and despite our fevered, incoherent mental urgings to “Run, GO, just RUN!” usually get them), and the ugly hyenas that move in and bicker over the disgusting remains. That is nature. That’s how it works. Can we possibly see elements of jerkitude in that?

  Now, much as I would have liked to track a bear, cougar or wolf for this project, I was limited by time, availability and personal safety. So I studied another, more common (though still wild) animal.

  CASE STUDY #14

  The Garbage Thieves

  You might be thinking, “Garbage thieves? Who cares who steals garbage? It’s garbage.” True, but these thieves scatter and smear the garbage they don’t actually want to eat all over the driveway, and I have to clean it up, so, yeah, I care.

  Subject: Magpies

  Laboratory: The end of our driveway, Monday evening (garbage collection Tuesday morning)

  Experiment: This was a very spontaneous case study. I came into the living room to see my mom looking out the front window. “Those jerks are ripping up the garbage again,” she said. Jerks? I was on the case.

  Observations: I slip out the door very quietly to observe the magpies. They couldn’t care less that I am there—those week-old carrot peelings and moldy pizza crusts are obviously good eats. While I watch, they really attack the bag, using their huge beaks and gnarly claws to toss out old tea bags, used tissues, apple cores and ancient spaghetti.

  As the mess on the driveway widens, I call, “Hey, stop it!” The magpies turn their heads slightly, stare at me with their cold bird eyes and turn back to vandalizing our garbage. “Stop it,” I repeat, remembering that even though I have no killer beak or wicked claws, I am still way bigger than they are. I walk over. They hop away, but only a few hops. Casual, assessing hops. “Are you serious?” hops. Then one of them shrieks AA-AA-AA, which is probably something like “get lost, loser” in magpie. Although, come to think of it, that’s the only sound they ever make.

  “GO. AWAY,” I say, stamping my feet and waving my arms and trying to look bigger. They look at me in disgust and fly a few feet up to the roof, where they sit looking down at me. AA-AA-AA. They call their friends, and several other magpies settle on our roof, AA-AA-AA-ing their heads off. The second I move away from the garbage, one of the birds flies in, which is humiliating and annoying.

  I am pretty much surrounded by big, aggressive, determined birds. I stand there staring them down and defending our garbage for several ridiculous minutes. Then I realize that they are just waiting for me to give up. It seems like they know I have homework and hockey practice. And garbage cleanup.

  They fly down and settle into their interrupted garbage picking before I’ve taken maybe six steps back to the house, which is the first time I think, “These birds are real jerks.” The second time I think it, I’m picking up old hot-dog buns smeared with ketchup and laundry lint and trying not to gag.

  Conclusions: This was the hardest case study of the whole project. All the others seemed to point to some obvious conclusions, but even though both my mom and I described the birds as jerks, were they really? Or were we just using the word jerk unscientifically?

  I did some research (research within a case study? Is this guy an out-of-control science geek or what?) and found that magpies actually have very big brains behind those creepy, cold eyes. Like, monkey-smart brains. Recognize-yourself-in-a-mirror brains. Figure-out-how-to-use-a-twig-to-get-a-longer-stick-to-get-food-out-of-a-box brains. Planner brains. But even though this kind of intelligence rivals that of some of my classmates, apparently magpies are considered to think at the level of a young child. Of course, it’s humans, not magpies, who are doing the measuring. Anyway, conclusions:

  Like small children, magpies probably can’t form the intent or do the planning required for true jerkish activity. I’m saying “probably,” not “definitely.”

  Further research into their behavior (their morning screeching, their destructiveness, their bullying of other birds) might move them very, very close to being legitimately labeled jerks.

  CHAPTER 13

  You Be the Jerk!

  I think we’ve learned a lot from these many, many typed pages. Wow, thirteen chapters (fourteen including the concluding one), nine scientific illustrations and fourteen case studies! I’d call that impressive.

  In this chapter, we relax and kick back with a little skill-testing fun (and hopefully some bonus marks). This end-of-report exercise is called “You Be the Jerk!” You know something is going to be fun when it ends in an exclamation point!

  Many normal people can spot jerkish behavior when it happens and even unconsciously rate it on their internal Jerk-O-Meter. But to truly grasp the many elements of jerkosity, you have to put yourself in the jerk’s shoes. You have to think like a jerk in order to understand jerkish behavior, if not the jerks themselves. This exercise may appear fun and simple, but it really illustrates the immense scientific value in being able to predict jerkish behavior. Because (and this is really a profound question), if you could anticipate the way a jerk might act, could you prevent it or at least avoid it?

  Normal people attempting this exercise may not do very well, which is probably a good thing. Other people may get top marks, and, well, you jerks know who you are.

  You Be the Jerk! Quiz

  So the idea here is pretty simple. You pretend to be the jerk in each question and select the kind of idiotic or jerkish things you might do in a given situation.

  1) You’re an adult looking for a parking spot in a crowded lot. You:

  (a) park properly between the lines in a normal spot

  (b) squeeze into a spot that’s too small, so the people next to you have to climb through the back of their van to get in and out

  (c) whip into an empty spot just ahead of an older, slower driver who’s clearly aiming for the same one and who technically was there first

  (d) park at an angle using up two spots, because you don’t want anyone touching your car

  (e) pull into the disabled parking spot even though those big signs are hard to miss

  2) You’re a junior high student. You see a kid you know up ahead with a Red Wings ballcap on. You:

  (a) catch up with him and have a good-natured talk about favorite t
eams

  (b) yell “Red Wings suck!” but in the kind of conversation-opener way that junior high boys understand

  (c) ridicule his choice of team to the point where it isn’t funny at all

  (d) flick the cap off his head just to see him flail to catch it

  (e) pick the cap up and fling it into a nearby tree

  3) You’re an office worker. You don’t bring anything to the office party, but you:

  (a) compliment everyone else’s cooking

  (b) pretend you’ve helped in other ways by rearranging furniture or bringing some music

  (c) stand around and eat the food everyone else has brought, including all of the smoked salmon dip

  (d) talk loudly about how wasteful staff parties are

  (e) laugh about how much money you saved by not bringing anything

  4) You’re a parent waiting to pick up your child from school. You:

  (a) park quietly down the street where parents are supposed to park

  (b) park in the bus zone right in front of the school so your little darling doesn’t have to walk six more feet

  (c) run your car for the full half an hour that you wait, so that the grade-three teachers have to shut the windows to keep the exhaust fumes out

  (d) light up a cigarette just as your child gets in the car

  (e) flick the cigarette butt (and your breath-freshening gum wrapper) out the car window on your way home

  5) You’re a grade-two student. At “sharing time,” one of your classmates is telling a new joke she learned. You:

  (a) listen attentively because you also like a good joke

  (b) sort of listen, but focus more on picking some old gum off the bottom of a nearby desk

  (c) get into a scuffle with another kid on the polka-dot mat because you consider the blue dot your own personal property

  (d) yell “BO-RING!” as the joke teller launches into it

  (e) if you’ve heard the joke before, blurt out the punch line before the joke teller gets to it

  6) Your school’s fire alarm goes off. The school is evacuating onto the front lawn (like that’s not going to be a scorcher of a place when the fire really takes off). Anyway, you:

  (a) file out in single file, quick-walking in an orderly fashion

  (b) break into a trot and jockey to butt into the front of the line

  (c) two-hand push other kids in the back to get to the nearest door

  (d) scream “Fire! FIRE! We’re all going to DIE!”

  (e) lie when they find out that it was you who pulled the alarm in the first place

  7) You’re in gym class. It’s the swimming unit, so you:

  (a) enjoy the harmless aquatic exercise and the break from the smell of the school gym

  (b) crowd up against other kids in line for the slide, because other kids probably don’t mind that when they’re nearly naked

  (c) tell the scared kids that there have been reports of a shark in the deep end

  (d) dunk other kids unexpectedly when the teacher isn’t looking so they get that raw, bleachy-burny feeling in their nose, mouth and throat

  (e) dive deep and pretend to be the shark, targeting the scared kids’ legs

  8) You’re the teacher in the gym class above. You:

  (a) pretend that the swimming unit is actually going to be fun for more than, say, three strong swimmers

  (b) enforce the pre-swim shower rule, then keep kids shivering and blue-lipped on the side of the pool while you explain obvious safety measures for half an hour

  (c) let the lifeguards look out for potential drowners while you text your boyfriend

  (d) make everyone do endless lung-inflaming lengths

  (e) make everyone go off the high diving board (even those kids who might be afraid of heights or depths or sharks)

  9) You’re a kid at recess. When the bell rings, you:

  (a) return promptly to the school and change into your indoor shoes so as not to muddy the school’s floors

  (b) return promptly to the school, smearing muddy streaks all the way to your classroom

  (c) steal the ball the other kids were playing with and run into the school

  (d) stash the ball in your backpack before they can find it

  (e) when the other kids tell on you, lie to the teacher and then the principal about what happened and accuse the other kids of bullying you

  10) It’s picture day at your school. You:

  (a) smile nicely for both your personal picture and the class picture

  (b) mess up your picture so you can miss class again when the retakes come around

  (c) smile nicely for your picture and then make loud rude noises so that the kids getting photographed after you jump and look alarmed in their pictures

  (d) smile nicely for your picture, then open your mouth hideously for the class picture

  (e) smile nicely for your picture, then make rabbit ears on the two kids beside you in the class pictures so that they look back years later and think, “What a jerk”

  You Be the Jerk! Scoring Key

  Here’s the cool part about this test—you grade yourself! Or not, because it’s just for fun. Sweet, I know.

  This is how it works, for all you try-hard keeners who’ll actually take the time to do it. You may already have guessed that the answers in the quiz generally go from being normal (a) to being a complete jerk (e). We give each letter a number rating (see the chart at right)—the higher the number, the bigger the jerk. If you selected more than one answer to a question, add ’em up (which will pretty much guarantee complete jerk numbers).

  CHAPTER 14

  Drawing Some Conclusions

  (and a Cool Pie Chart)

  It is important, apparently, to have a concluding paragraph at the end of any project. Even though you might be sick of the topic and have said everything that can possibly be said about it, teachers love the concluding paragraph. They tend to dock marks if you don’t write and write and write a decent-sized, multi-sentenced concluding paragraph. They like the wrapping-it-up, making-it-all-sound-sort-of-finished aspect of conclusions. This is, apparently, why concluding paragraphs are seen as important for essays, reports and projects.

  But instead of lamely and boringly recapping the entire project, cutting and pasting all the conclusions I made during the other chapters and summarizing the massive amount of research I’ve done, I think I’ll do something different.

  Even though I’ve already written two concluding paragraphs (see above), I still have one last scientific diagram that is very, very conclusive.

  Scientific Illustration #9: The Very Last One:

  The Elements of Jerkish Behavior

  We have seen in this project many different examples of jerkish

  behavior. But though the behavior of jerks is as varied as that

  of non-jerkish people, jerks have several things in common. My

  research has revealed certain elements that are common to

  almost all observable jerkish behavior:

  Can you end a project on a pie chart?

  Probably not.

  My concluding and very final observation is that as long as there are humans on this planet, some of them will be jerks. There were, there are, there probably always will be jerks. We know them when we see them, and scientific studies such as this one can take us beyond gut reactions and help us identify, classify, understand and avoid jerkish behavior.

  As for the jerks themselves, I don’t think science can ever fully explain why jerks behave as they do. It might be a combination of genetics, intelligence, upbringing and opportunity. Or there may not be any reason at all for why a jerk acts like a jerk. There will be those non-jerks who wonder if society has done something to make jerks so angry, annoying and motivated. Have we, the caring non-jerks, been guilty of misunderstanding jerks? I speak for science, and for pretty much anybody who’s ever met a jerk, when I say nah—it’s all on the jerks.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks
to the wonderful staff at Orca, especially Sarah “Giggle-Snort” Harvey for effortlessly channeling her inner thirteen-year-old boy while editing, and Jenn Playford and Chantal Gabriell for bringing their formidable and playful creativity to the illustrations and design. Thanks also to another creative soul, my sister Jen, for appreciating and encouraging all the story ideas I throw at her. And finally, thanks to my children, Kate, Ben and Sam, for their keen jerk-radar, which I think will serve them well.

  Alison Hughes is an award-winning writer who has lived, worked and studied in Canada, England and Australia. She was introduced to the world of jerks as a young child when her swimming instructor pushed her off the diving board into the deep end/shark tank. She has been wary of jerks (and deep water) ever since. She lives with her family in Edmonton, where snoring dogs provide the soundtrack to her writing.