Part of one of my jobs involves calling customers all over the country, which is a fascinating anthropological study in itself. The people of this fine country are nothing short of a perpetual disappointment on an intellectual level, but unsurprisingly, there is a particular region where the communication skills of the general populace are proportionally more primitive and grunt-and-expletive-centered and the people are even more monumentally boneheaded than the rest of the nation. This is, of course, The South, but before we go tearing apart a region that has effectively already been dumped heavily upon by the hairy ass of God, let’s look west a bit, to the glorious ingrown dingleberry of America, Arkansas.
Arkansas has been described as the only thing keeping Mississippi from being the worst state in the Union, and I heartily agree. The first time I ever met Arkansasians, I was on a bus in Virginia, I mean way out there in Virginia. Like, “There’s all y’all’s French fried pertaters” Virginia. These three enormous lugs with balloon-like faces, covered in freckles, teeth all askew, pile on the bus and sit down across the aisle from me, all laughing and spurting some incomprehensible pidgin of long moans, a peppering of basic English words, and straight up swamp sludge. They proceeded to alienate half of the people around them, who held onto the image of “proper Southerners,” elicited not so much as a blink from the rest, and then they turned to me.
“Ey-u felluh, yuh fruhreeuhnhurr?”
Now, I’m from New England, and we say some stupid shit, but at least it’s cohesive shit, not diarrhea. I was ill equipped, but again, being a New Englander, I was too damn stupid to just smile, nod, and ignore.
I begged his pardon, and asked that he repeat himself.
“I seeyy, yew fruh ‘run hurr?”
This time I got it! “Are you from around here, sir?” I felt excited at my accomplishment. Excited enough that I responded, and was sucked into an excruciating exchange that resembled what over the course of history had evolved into modern conversation, but again, mostly belly laughs at how “faggy” I probably sounded, what with clear diction and above [Arkansasian] average vocabulary, but mostly they wanted to talk about “muddin’.” Now, it turns out that this is what most knuckleheads call “Four Wheeling” or “Off-Roading,” but in Arkansas it seems to be a catch-all activity: It’s what you do on your day off, it’s your Friday night, it’s your instead-of-school-every-day, it’s where you meet Arkansasian woman and create Arkansas subhuman frogspawn together. And then you go home to your hovel or trailer, and drink beer. But you drink while “muddin’” too.
That bus ride gave me the first bad taste in my mouth for this state-sized genital wart fucking up an otherwise fairly pretty face of a country. This was years ago, and having been generally isolated from exposure to it for so long, I gave them the hindsight benefit of the doubt.
Fucking. Mistake.
Hell, don’t take my word for it, Glenside will tell you the same damn thing! Quick excerpt of his experiences with these Great White Apes:
“I used to do inbound telesales and one of our products was advertised on a radio station out of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The thing about being a telesales representative is that you make your money not on the original sale, but on all the upsells and add-on programs (most commonly they're magazine subscriptions). Of course you always know that not every credit card will be accepted when it gets run through the system, but Arkansas... Christ. Apparently not a single person in Pine Bluff, known to the locals as "Pie Bluh," knows what the hell a debit card actually is. At least 8 out of every 10 sales were made only after the customers would ask us, "Can you hold on and not run that there card until later/tomorrow/next week so I can go down to the bank and put money on my card?" I'm not sure how they think debit cards work, but it's not supposed to be a card you go and "load money onto" to buy things. I remember one week, I had sold about 80 add-ons--an extra $160 added onto my commission check--but given that Pie Bluh is home to America's biggest group of mental and financial retards, I only got paid on 23! 57 credit cards rejected on one agent alone? No way. The ad was yanked immediately.”
I’m sure one day the idea of banking will catch on there, but I’m not sure it will catch on with the people there now. I propose a colonization strategy in which we either displace these people or bring in some new blood somehow (actually, upon considering the displacement, the only place I’d wish them upon is the Inland Empire of California, but if we did this, we would literally be creating Mike Judge’s Idiocracy). God bless anyone who volunteers for this program, you’ll really be giving it all for your country.
Here are some other fun facts about Arkansas:
-The State Motto, as far as I can gather, is “Do What Now?” Every time I ask these people a question over the phone, this is the response I receive. Perhaps they perceive my call as an outside threat from a foreign invader, as my strange “accent” seems so alien to them, and they feel the knee-jerk need to assert their Arkansasian-ness. You can just say "Excuse me," you fucks.
-Computers have recently created quite a stir in the region, and from my studies I have concluded that many Arkansasians greatly covet these machines, though they are generally unsure as to what exactly they might do, other than show pictures to people that know how to navigate the mysterious symbols on the slab in front of the screen. Talk of email, however, generally takes the conversation in a very hostile direction. One step at a time.
-The Arkansas has an aggressive and active state Congress, who don’t shy away from tackling the big issues that face every Arkansasian. In 2007, the state legislature officially declared the possessive form of the state's name to be Arkansas's.
-Arkansas is generally a sweaty boring mess in the summer, and in the winter the people remain sweaty, boring, and messy. It is stormy, rainy, tornado-prone, and statistically one out of 6 days in Arkansas will feature a thunderstorm. So fuck off about it being rainy in the Pacific Northwest.
Are you a traveler? Then you know better than to be here.
Are you an Arkansasian? Of course not, because you’re reading this on the internet!
Dear nuclear activists, I found a safe place for all of those spent fuel rods…
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