MELLIPOP: NOT A GENIUS, REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD TO THE CONTRARY

OK, so I was bored and uninspired last night, so - in lieu of having anything remotely witty or eventful to post on Mellipop - I sought to boost my flaccid self-esteem by doing a totally kosher on-line IQ test.

I wanted to feel clever and superior, see. I needed external reinforcement to support my own innate claim to uncontested genius. Plus, it was multiple choice. I had it in the bag. What I didn't actually know, I had at least had a 20% chance of successfully guessing.

I couldn't possibly fail. I was going to yank that fucker right off the scale. Bell Curve my arse! They'd have to create a whole new paradigm of intelligence to process my score.

So it turns out that I am only marginally Above Average.

I clocked 116. The average is 100.

According to their IQ scale, I am neither Gifted nor Genius, which completely fucks with my self-concept. If nothing else, it means I’ll need to have new business cards made up.

It was the goddammed puzzles that did me in. I have no spatial intelligence. This confirms the testing done on me as a “volunteer” psychology undergraduate. Essentially, I’ve been denied genius status by a series of puzzles, dice and triangles. These things mean nothing in the real world, for at least three reasons that immediately spring to mind: 1) We do not live on the fucking set of Tron 2) No-one uses IUDs anymore 3) Mr Squiggle never did return to our screens following that unfortunate pedophilia scandal in the late 80’s.

Fucking puzzles.

And the bollocky number series questions. What is WITH those?

Q: What do the following set of numbers have in common?

4859 5949 3850 0184

A: Nothing ! Everything ! Who the fuck cares ! I just made the fuckers up, you morons ! For all you know it could be my fucking VISA card number !

The thing is, Numbers are to Religion like Statistics are to the Bible*. You can manipulate numbers in an infinite variety of ways, to support any harebrained theory you could ever care to devise. Numbers don’t mean anything – they are completely arbitrary and random!

And - more importantly…. This skill will not help you survive. This skill will not make you the much-sought-after conversational centrepiece at dinner parties. This skill will not get you into bed with the ladies. This skill does not make you a genius. It may in fact reveal that you are a dribbling autistic.

The only numbers that ever really matter in life are:

Number of sexual partners you have ever had :
** (a lady never tells)
Number of your “call in case of emergency” person:
02 9671 ****
Number of days before debt collectors turn up on your doorstep: 47
Number of times today you wish you hadn’t said what you actually said: 14
Number of minutes before your partner comes home with cigarettes: 36
Number of beers left in the fridge: 0

Being a seasoned psychology undergraduate/drop-out from way back, I know how shonky attempts to measure human “intelligence” are. But it still pisses me off that there are people out there scoring HIGHER than me. And some of those fuckers are just guessing! Guessing!

Sigh… I guess you can’t argue with standardised testing. I’m categorically, quantifiably, AVERAGE. Even though some anonymous internet IQ arbitrator told me I was Above Average, the fact that it would deign to use the word “average” at all is depressing enough.

I’m special. I really am.


* The grammatical form of this pointlessly inflammatory statement is taken from the IQ test itself (used satirically, in this case).

Genuine sample question: Water is to Ice as Liquid is to…?

a) Solid
b) Dogs Bollocks
c) Venereal Disease
d) Beer
e) I don’t know