As the sympathetic examiner handed me my Mensa IQ test results, I had a sense of how the Pakistani cricket team must feel about Aussie umpire Darrell Hair. The difference, of course, was that the examiner wasn’t the stupid one.
A few days earlier I had attended a local get-together of this international organisation for people with an IQ in the top 2% of the population.
The evening speaker at the meeting at Old Eds in Johanesburg was a herpetologist (an expert on snakes, not a disease you’re likely to pick up in a scrum, as I first thought). In the bar afterwards, Mensa member Audrey Blaauw, a winsome fifth-year medical student, asks me: ”So what are you going to write about?” ”Eh, that Mensa people are normal like the rest of us,” I mumble.
”You can call me anything but normal,” she laughs, her tongue only partly in her cheek. Her statistician husband and fellow Mensan, Garth Zietsman, has an IQ of 185, the highest of any male in the world. He looks normal and drinks beer like the rest of us.
This is not a dating club for pointy-heads, he assures me. ”Well … it’s a social club for intelligent people and many dates and some marriages have resulted. But I wouldn’t say dating is Mensa’s main function,” he observes drily.
Zietsman joined Mensa in 1987 ”because I wanted to know what very intelligent people were like”.
”The main thing is congenial company,” he says. ”People suddenly get your jokes and can tune in to your thinking. It’s hard to exaggerate what a relief that is.”
Jokes? Surely high IQs and humour don’t mix?
”I don’t know where that comes from. Intelligence aids humour quite a bit — in particular wit — and there is a considerable amount of laughing and wisecracks in Mensa,” explains Zietsman. ”My good jokes are utterly unrepeatable in print but how’s this for a lame one? What do you use to give a cat a pill? A caterpillar.”
Fellow Mensan and bookshop manager Ronel de Freitas, married to a fellow-member and mother of four gifted children, had a clever cop-out: ”You probably don’t get it …”
And the stereotype that highly intelligent people aren’t practical?
”I find I can work out how to do practical things just fine if I apply my mind, but initially I am very slow and make mistakes,” concedes Zietsman ”I get quite good rapidly, though. Unfortunately I have so little interest in practical things that I’ve acquired skills in very few of them.”
Can he fix a plug? ”An electrical plug? Sure. Bathplugs are low maintenance and don’t need fixing except for the silly little chains that keep on coming loose.”
I had my excuses lined up in an appropriately multi-choice way while driving to Centurion for the test to see if I could join: I’d missed my industrial strength morning coffee; I was blond before I went bald; and like JZ, there’s a conspiracy against me.
But there was still enough of the Marxist in me to want to pass, to be able to say like Groucho: I refuse to join any club that would take me as a member.
Mensa clearly rejects what Groucho’s German great-uncle, Karl, said: ”We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour.”
Well, make that two hours, the length of the multiple-choice test.
The first half focuses on numerical agility, the second half is more verbal.
Towards the end I am reminded of a recurring nightmare I have in which I have to convince the Cabinet of my worth as a journalist and always, just as Essop Pahad starts grilling me, I look down and have no pants on.
I had a similar sense of dread when the examiner told me there was five minutes left in which to finish 10 questions — each exponentially more difficult. I looked down, and my brain was gone.
It didn’t take too long for the examiner to confirm what I knew: I won’t be able to put ”Conehead” on my CV.
As part of Mensa’s 60th anniversary, it will be holding special IQ testing sessions across the country tomorrow. For details visit www.mensa.org.za