After all, I was trying to read a newspaper, or compose a hilarious tweet about EastEnders, or dumbly gaze out of the window like a cow obliviously trundling towards an abattoir.
They have mostly sat dumbly, showing no sign of being capable of leading the country.
The Fed might have a total change of heart in 2017 when the next recession strikes (my astrologist has never steered me wrong) and the economy lumbers dumbly back to the zero lower bound like a wind-up toy ramming a wall.
And yet, in terms of its impact in Hollywood and beyond, the film of the year was a dumbly funny, frat-boy stoner comedy, which earned a limited release last month and might have been largely forgotten by now – if not for the fact that it was set in North Korea.
Merfyn knew what it all meant, and looked anxiously and dumbly from his father's face to mine.
It refuses, in fact, to do anything that will help its owners earn their living, just stands dumbly in its stall.
I went from admiring a colourful pair of Adidas Hamburg's (the fact I even recall the inane minutiae of the moment is disturbing), before I received and read the text - to being so shocked I held the yellow-and-green piece of footwear in my hands as dumbly as if it were a loaf of bread.
Panic seized me, and I ran through the mist and the snow to the top of the hill, and stood there a moment dumbly, with straining eyes and ears.
But watches have in fact done more than dumbly display the time of day for decades.
If this apparent fatality were confined to the economic world alone, he would have been willing to censure civilization, and take his chance dumbly, blindly, with the rest.
