Elon Musk and a Duck walk into a bar

Back in 2003, when I was working for the duck, I collected a ton of business cards.

Wait. What? You didn’t know that I worked for a duck?

WHICH duck?

Well, that would be this mothereffer right here:

See, after the tech bust, I was one of a gazillion people laid off from their extremely lucrative if poorly-defined positions. I did…something for a managed web-hosting company called Digex, who got bought by MCI. Soon after the life-sized cutout of Shaq showed up in the lobby, MCI started asking really invasive questions, questions like “what exactly is your role here?” That was usually followed by such exclamations as “we pay you how much to do that?!?” And, then, finally, with them asking for their keys to the server room back.

So then I was unemployed, and looking for a job during the aftermath of the 2002 stock market crash was…ill-advised to say the least.

But one thing you can say about a duck is that they are always hiring.

And so, I got me an insurance license and set about to pounding the pavement in search of people who might wish to be paid cash (which is as good as money), if they were out of work.

It was a miserable failure. The same people who couldn’t afford to hire me also couldn’t afford AFLAC. Who could have seen that coming?

But, to get back to the original premise, when I was working for the duck, I collected a lot of business cards, and one day I picked up one in a salon which proudly proclaimed that its bearer was a “cosmotogist.”

This sent me into a small tizzy. Was she a cosmotologist? Likely.

Or, and go with me here, a cosmologist?

Unlikely.

But whatever she was, she was not, in fact, a cosmotogist, which was not then and remains to this day not a thing.

And what bothered me about that was that I didn’t understand how you could be a thing, and not know how to spell the thing that you are. Boggled my already-tired brain.

And this brings me to Elon. And a similarly brain-boggling question.

How can you be the head of government efficiency, tasked with chopping the fat and making the government run smaller and leaner…when you don’t really understand what the government does?

Cause while the government does occasionally fund non-profits, typically through grants and reimbursement for services, they most certainly do NOT fund the ACLU:

And what’s interesting is that this seems to be fairly common knowledge. Everyone I mentioned this to said basically the same thing: “defund from…where?”

So, just like you should be able to spell the thing you want to put on your business card, one of the critical prerequisites of being put in charge of a thing should be that you have passing familiarity with that thing. If that were not the case, I could reasonably be put in charge of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, when I neither know what sort of seafood needs to be marketed in Alaska, nor how one might go about marketing it.

I guess what this very long, very circuitous story amounts to is this:

Elon Musk is a moron.