disastermagnet

Once again all my robots were broken so I had to wait for the vendor-provided technicians to fix the tools before I could get back to processing silicon. This had been happening a lot, but it didn't bother me because I was still pretty new to the bay, and so a break from the stress and confusion of learning a new high-pressure job was welcome.
What was NOT welcome was the opportunity for yet another run-in with the individual who I've come to call "dum-dum". Let me introduce Dum-Dum this way:
On loan to us, ostensibly, was a tech from the Oregon plant, and he had been busying himself around our chase all week taking on projects that nobody thought were truly necessary. But he did decide to work on the pneumatic tool we use to calibrate out diamond blocks, which I hoped would lead to the tool working better. It didn't, and worse, I had to put up with Dum-Dum beckoning and saying "He fixed it! Like, he fixed it! I'm all 'look, he fixed it!'" over and over again. As a sidenote, hey California, can we stop talking like this? Right now? Cuz that would be great.
But back to Dum-Dum, who finds himself in the crosshairs of this wildly unfocused assault. In case you're wondering, the damn tool wasn't even fixed, but that didn't stop this fool from crowing about it for the rest of the night.
He loves to drift over to my bay where I'm struggling to keep the robots up to production so that we can move product and blather at me about the most inane bullshit. Stuff that would be reasonable conversational material in the hands of someone more intellectually gifted than a warthog suffering from radiation induced brain damage; he's having a house built, he was in the Navy stationed in central japan, he plays guitar and wants to start doing music seriously, etc. But this guy.....
I've started playing a game with myself when he comes over to chatter at me: I challenge myself to see how many basic questions I can ask him to get him to go "....ohIdunno" in five minute increments. So far, my record is 14. And what's scary is that every time he says it, it's the same articulation: the rise and fast swooping fall of his intonation, the brief outward flick of his thumbs that doesn't quite turn his palms upward, that slight shake of his head to the left as his shoulders jerk upward. And he goes blank for a second as though his brain is loading the "...ohIdunno" script , like he has the reaction automated because he's constantly short on rather important information.
Let's talk about his house for a second. Really, not much more than a second, because I still don't know anything about it. I know that they're laying the foundation right now, that he'll be moving in at the first of the year, and that the house is 1100 square feet. Yes, they're laying the foundation now, and he thinks he's going to move his wife and 2 kids into the house in 2.5 months. Is he getting a basement or a crawlspace? OhIdunno. When are they scheduled to start roughing in the plumbing and electrical? OhIdunno. Is he having the exterior sided or painted? OhIdunno..
You get the picture.

So 2 nights ago I see out of the corner of my eye that familiar dum-dee-dum-dee-dum walk that tells me that it's time to start loading some questions into my conversation cartridge to fire at him to try and beat my record. Lucky for me, I'm not the first person he happens upon. I hear him tell the tech next to me that he's got a brand new sound program that's going to let him make music on his computer. Okay, fine. But the killer comes when he starts talking about how he's going to start making music and selling it. Not by going through a label but by doing it himself "cuz that's the only way you make money".
Wowzers! Thanks for the tip dum-dum!
He doesn't even detect the sarcasm when I say "Woooow. I'll look for you on MTV".
By the way, the details of his master studio are as follows:
The program he got , entitled OhIdunno. costs 50 dollars. He'll be running it on an OhIdunno. computer, by plugging his OhIdunno. model guitar into his OhIdunno. brand soundcard. And then, he'll be rich. Nothing to it!
Finally I say "listen dude, go on MySpace music and check out your competition. There are a lot of people out there doing it for free, and doing it well"
And that blank look drifts across his face for a sec and I'm actually expecting that familiar reaction, but instead he says:
"making music for free?? what's the point?"

God help me.