jennings rampage

This is seriously why I bought an iPhone: to wave Wikipedia in people’s faces.

Meaghan and I spent last weekend in DC, where we expected the highlight to be the “Monuments By Moonlight” trolley tour. The tour sucked.

I know what you’re thinking, Internet friends: “how could riding around our nation’s capital in a frickin’ trolley be anything short of a delightful way to spend an evening?” Well, the problem was right behind the wheel, and his name was Clarence.

Clarence got on the express bus to riding my nerves by repeating everything he said three times. Everything he said, he said three times. We heard everything he said three times in a row. He had a bit of folksy charm as he narrated the tour — he shared an anecdote about a “stinky flower” he liked best in the National Botanical Garden, and a schoolteacher on the tour chimed in with the genus and species and history of its taxonomy, and we were all charmed.

Our first stop was at the FDR Memorial, which Clarence told us was his favorite. FDR was the right man for his time, he said, and no one could quarrel with that. Clarence went on about how he had polio but the press didn’t report it because it was wartime, and how after he left office Congress passed the 26th Amendment that limited the President to two terms.

Wait a minute. I’ve watched enough West Wing to know the 25th Amendment was the one that handled succession of office in the event of temporary incapacitation of the President, and that was fairly recent. I was pretty sure that the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. I knew that the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition, so if I had to guess, I’d say that the 22nd Amendment limited the President to two terms.

So when we stopped at the FDR Memorial, instead of taking in the waterfalls and whatnot, I got on the phone to a friend of mine to hop on Wikipedia to confirm all of this. And I was exactly right — Clarence was looking for the 22nd Amendment.

Meaghan was worried that I would make a scene armed with this information, because she knows that I’m capable of making a scene when I’m armed with information. I assured her that I would be discreet and courteous to our tour guide, and I imagined Clarence would be grateful for the opportunity to correct his error.

When we got back on the trolley, I approached the front and gave Clarence the chance to diffuse this whole situation by asking him to repeat which amendment he was looking for, and he again claimed it was the 26th.

“See, that bothered me a little, because I was pretty sure the 26th lowered the voting age to 18, so I called someone to look it up.”
“Who’d you call?”
“Uhhhh, a friend of mine. She looked it up on the Internet. You’re looking for the 22nd Amendment.”
“The Internet? Where on the Internet?”
“Wikipedia. It’s the 22nd Amendment.”
“Well… I’ll have to look it up when I get home.”

No you won’t, you son of a bitch, I JUST TOLD YOUR ASS. What do you need to look up? You need to go to the fucking National fucking Archives and look for yourself? I JUST TOLD YOUR ASS. You got the wrong fucking amendment, asshole. Just fucking admit it.

I was a little annoyed. And where was my fucking genus-and-species schoolteacher on something as basic as the fucking amendments to the goddamn Constitution? Come on. And then a little later in the tour, Clarence got off on a tangent about there being a female Beefeater for the first time, and how the Beefeaters are the guards of Buckingham Palace, but then some British guy discretely and politely corrected him and told him the Beefeaters guard the Tower of London, and that fucking Clarence didn’t say he needed to independently verify THAT SHIT.

That’s what you get for giving me a comment card.