When it comes to intelligence, not all humans are created equal. While a person's stupidity can often be annoying to deal with, one thing's for certain—at the very least, there's never a dull moment...
1. Not A Thundering Intellect
One time, I went on a date with a woman who I realized was not too intelligent. We got into a strange conversation about thunder and lightning. She said, "What if the clouds were moving quickly when they hit each other?" She paused and I asked her to continue. "That would be the loudest thunder ever." I need more information.
She said, "Yeah, you know how when clouds smash together, they make thunder...because they're hard." For real guys, I'm seriously not even joking. It turned out she was baked, as she later confessed to being stoned. Either way…hilariously stupid.
2. Not The Brightest Star
A friend of mine, a medical student at that, was somehow under the impression that the sun is visible at night as the brightest star in the night sky. I had to explain to her that the sun isn't visible at night because it's on the other side of the earth, and that's the whole idea of night.
I have no clue how more than a quarter of a century of education managed to lead up to her having that impression.
3. Like A Fine Wine
I worked at a restaurant, and one day after I delivered drinks to a table this guy asked me, "Can you aerate that for me"? There was just one problem. He wasn’t drinking wine. He wanted me to stir his apple juice. Technically his word choice was applicable, I guess, but really, dude? He had a straw ready in his hand and he could have aerated that juice himself.
I admit it took me two seconds of staring at his serious face before I reached for a straw, unwrapped it, and stirred his drink. I did it all without breaking eye contact with him, and he was satisfied. Also I think about him now every time I stir or shake my chocolate milk to make it frothy.
4. I Had My Bubble Burst
When I was young, we lived near a small private airfield. My mother told us that if we waved to the airplanes as they passed by, they would throw us bubblegum. We were the idiots waving like goons at all the small planes overhead for far too long. When we asked her later why she told us that she said, "When you have kids, look at the trust and belief in their eyes and see if you'll be able to resist messing with them."
5. On The Chopping Block
I once worked at a printing shop and we have large cutters for paper. This thing has a huge blade that is wicked sharp and can chop through 1,000 sheets of paper like they're butter. There are several safety devices on it because of this. A new dude was starting and I was showing him how to use the machine.
You have to key it off, set the paper and guides, turn it on, lock down the paper, then close a lid and push a button on the left and right side of the machine so that there is no way you have a hand in there.
This guy immediately starts trying to figure out how to bypass the safety controls on a machine he's never used and will absolutely separate his hand from his body in an instant. So I ask him why on earth he would want to risk chopping off a hand or finger. His response, "I'm smarter than a machine". That guy was a complete idiot!
Freepik, senivpetro
6. What SIDS You Say?
When my daughter was born, we had to see the hospital pediatrician who was an older southern man before we could switch to our usual one. We're in a tiny exam room and he's going over the do’s and don'ts for new parents. So, he asks us, “And I assume she will be sleeping in a crib in the nursery?” We respond by saying, “We have a bassinet set up beside the bed to make night feeding easier.”
Then he interjects and says, “She can't sleep with you!” But we tell him that, “She won't be in the bed. She has a bassinet beside the bed.” He says to this, “If she sleeps in the same room, there will be too much carbon dioxide and she'll suffocate. That's what causes SIDS.” After a short pause, we say, “...then isn’t this exam room unsafe?”
We later put in a complaint with the practice and the hospital. That's some ridiculously incorrect information to be spouting off at people, especially parents who take everything a doctor says as gospel. I can't even find the logic in that.
7. His Lie Left Me Sore
My dad told me that canker sores, or “ulcers” as we called them, came from telling lies. He said this to me a few times. In third grade, when the teacher asked if anyone knew why we get them, I raised my hand and proceed to spout out, “My daddy said they come from telling lies.” My teacher's awkward silence and lack of eye contact let me know it was my papa who sat on a throne of lies!
8. Granny, You're So Wrong
My grandmother thought that if you kept cooked rice for long enough, it would spontaneously transform into maggots. She was incredulous when I tried to explain otherwise, and wanted to know how I could be so sure.
9. Road Rage
Just last night I was coming from the movies and I had to get onto the highway and this car was exiting. They stayed at their speed and I slowed down because there was very little opening to merge and you're supposed to yield to the ramp. I looked over, into this guy's car—and my blood ran cold.
The driver was looking down at his phone. Then he finally looked up and notices that he was running out of real estate to exit. I lay into my horn because they've basically come to a crawl. It was infuriating. Get off your phone!
Flickr, Virginia Department of Transportation
10. I Couldn’t Brush This One Off
When I was young, I once asked my older cousins if they also hated the burning after-taste when you swallowed toothpaste. They looked at me with matching expressions of horror. My cousin told me, “Don't swallow toothpaste. You only have like three chances. After that, you've had too much of the chemicals, and you'll be a goner by the time you turn 21."
I was horrified and said, "But I've accidentally swallowed toothpaste in heaps." They grimaced and said, "Oh gosh, I hope not." Several years later, it suddenly dawned on me that they were obviously making it up.
11. Maybe Consider Take Out?
I dated a girl from work in my first year of college. On our first "date," we decided to just make something simple at her place. Being “rich” college students, we settled with mac and cheese and some drinks. We get into the kitchen, and she says, "Okay, honest question. When boiling water, do you get the pot hot first, then add the water or the other way around?"
Yup, she didn't know how to boil water. I just don't know how someone makes it through life not knowing how to boil water on the stove.
12. The Truth Stuns
I had an otherwise very intelligent high school English teacher admit to the class that up until she was in her early twenties, she thought that unicorns lived in New Zealand. Apparently, that's what her parents told her as a kid. She found out the truth at a dinner—with her friends who were educators.
Freepik, stocking
13. Dino Dinner
Working at a museum where the main attraction is the dinosaur exhibit, we sell a lot of cheap products aimed at children. And we sell a lot of them, especially "Dino Eggs". A grandfather (I presume) and his granddaughter (once again, I presume, and hope) came into the shop, which is always busy, always cramped. And he picked up a Dino Egg for her.
He handed it over, and paid quickly. "No bag, no need". It was a lovely, simple transaction. But just as the till drawer had closed and I was pulling out his receipt to hand him, I saw him in the corner of my eye—and when I realized what he was doing, I was horrified. He tore open the packaging of this "egg", smashed open the lovely plastic shell took take a big shard to his mouth.
He began to chew, turned slowly to me, and only then did he think to ask, "Is this edible"? "No," I gasped, "No, sir. That—that's not edible. You really shouldn't eat that". The little granddaughter's face sank further watching her grandpa spit out bits of plastic into her broken dinosaur egg. It was a fake dino egg designed to be immersed in water so that the rubbery dino toy on the inside can "grow and hatch".
I gave him another. Well, I gave it to his granddaughter. Best to keep it away from him, he was clearly ravenous.
14. No Hablo Español
About ten-ish years ago I was hanging out with one of my sisters and we ended up going to her friend's place. While we were there, my best friend called me. He's Mexican and I was learning Spanish at the time, so I answered my phone in Spanish.
My sister's friend got angry and shouted, "YOU DO NOT SPEAK MEXICAN IN MY HOUSE!" I told him, "I'm speaking Spanish," expecting to get in an argument and possibly be kicked out. The dude calms down and says, "Oh, ok. Sorry".
That rendered me confused and completely speechless, until my best friend asked, "Bro, did I just hear what I think I heard?" All I could say was "uhh... Yeah..."
15. The Apple Fell Far From The Tree
When I was very little, every time I went to visit my grandpa, he would take me out to the garden to pick an apple from his apple tree. Four years after he had passed, when I was 16, we were sitting around sharing stories about him, and I said, “Hey, whatever happened to that apple tree?” My family laughed and finally exposed the truth.
It was just a regular tree, and he would go tie a few apples to it with string before we went over. Looking back, it was a skinny little tree, with big perfect red apples in it.
16. Fowl Understanding
I used to manage a retail store that sold teen clothing, so as expected, I primarily had teens working for me. One employee came to the back room while I was on break and asked what I was eating. Somehow the topic turned to how I should’ve brought chicken for lunch because she wanted chicken. I told her I was vegetarian and therefore don’t eat meat.
She tells me chicken is NOT meat. It’s “poultry,” and according to her, vegetarians can eat poultry because at the grocery store the aisles list “meat” and “poultry” separately so they’re obviously different. We argued for a couple of minutes before I finally told her to go back to the sales floor. She didn’t last at the job long, but MAN.
33. DIY Literacy
A woman came to the checkout and handed me a bag of mozzarella. She asked me what the ingredients were and if there were any chemicals in it. I turned the bag around and started to read the ingredients out to her. She grabbed the bag out of my hand, and angrily said, "I could have done that myself " and stormed off.
17. Here's How They Work
When I was 8 or 9 years old, I was riding to the store with my mom, who happens to be a teacher. I mentioned that I needed batteries for something that could either plug into the wall or use batteries. I told her that I needed electricity away from the wall. She said that batteries didn't have electricity and that they ran stuff on some completely separate force and that electricity only came from plugs. I argued with her for a while, and at the end, she sarcastically said, "Why would I know? I didn't study electrical engineering". My dad is an electrical engineer.
18. Made To Order
I worked in a restaurant as a sous-chef and we had a line cook who just wasn’t all there. He was a nice dude, and he meant well, but just all the lights were off. He once made a simple salad and dressed it with a tremendous amount of grated parmesan cheese. I asked him why he did that.
His reply was, “I like it”. I explained to him that we make stuff for the customer in a specific way. He fixes the plate and it sends it out. The next order is the same salad, and the same thing happens again. And again aaaand again. What I kept telling him wasn't clicking. But believe it or not, that wasn't his dumbest moment.
I also had to explain multiple times that you don’t stick your hand in a blender while it’s blending. Multiple times.
19. She's A Rich Girl
When I was around eight years old, my family went to Disneyworld and shared a hotel. On the floor was a vending machine. At the time, I had a habit of looking through the coin slot of vending machines to see if people had left behind their change. On this trip, I hit the jackpot. Every time I passed the machine, there would be a few coins waiting for me—every single time.
I ended up with almost $6.00 during that trip. I thought the machine was broken. Many years later, I was telling this story to a friend of mine, and my dad started laughing. He then revealed the truth, which was that my grandmother would put the coins into the slot before I had the chance to look.
20. It’s One Or The Other
A guy I knew was really stupid. I got really sick this one time I was spending the evening with him and had to throw up several times in a short period. He got angry with me, so I’m like, what the heck? When I found out why he was mad, I was stunned. It turns out he was convinced that the only reasons there are for people to throw up is because of drinking too much or being pregnant.
Since I was sober, he refused to believe I was not pregnant. He seriously almost got angry when I refused to admit that I was pregnant. I was miffed this idiot didn't catch the stomach flu that was what made me throw up. And yes, one would think that he had met sick people before, even been one, I don't know what was wrong in his head.
21. Do Not Disturb
This reminds me of a guy who reserved a room for 2 weeks. He had the do not disturb sign on the door the whole stay (this is actually pretty common for longer stays). A couple weeks later, I get a call from the guest absolutely furious that we charged him for a 2-week stay when he only stayed at our hotel for two days.
I ask him who he spoke to at check out, thinking maybe one of our employees made a mistake and just didn't properly check him out. The truth was even more hilarious. Long story short, he didn't notify anyone that he was checking out, he just left. I had to explain to him that if you have a room reserved for a length of time and leave earlier than you had registered for, then you actually have to let the staff know.
Even if the do not disturb sign hadn't been on the door the whole time, we are still not just going to guess that a guest checked out and rent their room to another person. He tried filing a chargeback for the remainder of the stay, but did not get his money refunded. As this was midsummer, we were turning people away daily due to being sold out, and that room sat empty because he expected us to psychically know that he left.
22. A Baffling Concept
My Hungarian grandma—as do all people of that age in Hungary—swears by this. In the summertime when it's super hot outside, all the windows and doors must be shut at all times, lest there be a "huzat", meaning cross-air flow. Yet no one has air conditioning.
If you ever hear about deaths in Europe due to heat waves, I'm pretty sure the majority of those are people who are like my grandma and just die from overheated houses where air currents are kept down.
23. Across The Pond
I grew up in the UK and moved to the US, and I had the following conversation:
Her: “What language do you speak where you come from?"
Me: “English”.
Her: “No, I mean what actual language did you speak as you grew up?"
Me: “I grew up in England and they speak English there”.
Her: “You don't understand, we speak English in America, what language did you speak before moving here?"
Me: “Bye”.
24. The Parent Trap
When I was little, I was just TERRIFIED of burglars. My mind was just wrought with fear over someone breaking into our house. My parents would always try to ease my worry but to no avail. Until one day they came up with this lie to make me feel safe. By our front door, there was an outlet with three switches. Two of them controlled outside and inside lights but the third didn’t seem to connect to anything.
I always asked them, “What does the third switch control?” My parents decided to tell me that it detonates devices buried in our front yard. My dad decided to build upon the story and said that one night he buried a ton of devices under the ground in the front yard and if a burglar stepped in the yard, a signal would go off. He would then flip the switch making the devices detonate and destroy the burglar.
It was definitely a really weird and intense lie to tell a six-year-old, but I never worried about burglars at that house again.
25. Consider The Lobster
I was a cook a few years ago. On a particularly busy night, we ran out of lobster mac and cheese. This one waitress could not understand how this was possible and just kept nagging and nagging in disbelief. I got annoyed to the point that I told her the reason for this was that there was a shortage of people with small enough hands to milk lobsters’ tiny nipples, hence a worldwide shortage of lobster milk to make that dish.
I had to come clean with her when she started telling this to customers and they demanded to speak with a manager.
26. I Kid You Not
I was once talking to someone who was afraid of those "How many squares do you see"? puzzles because she thought that you could "go too deep" and it would damage your eyes and make you blind. I wish I was kidding.
27. Shrinking Theory
I worked at a hat store, and a guy asked if he could shrink his hat by microwaving it. I said no. He came back two days later to return his hat...after microwaving it. Problem was, there was a hole in the front of it because Brewers hats are made with metallic threading. Yep, this dude microwaved his Brewers hat and blew a hole in it.
28. Truth Teller
I got into a philosophical sort of debate with another student in high school on a band trip. He was sitting next to me so I overheard him say, "The only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth," like it was a mind-blowing revelation of wisdom straight from the cosmos.
At face value, I thought he was just being facetious or ironic so I chuckled, and he got offended. He ranted for like 20 minutes in completely nonsensical circles and legit did not see the contradictions he was making the whole time. After five minutes of trying to point it out, I was just like...okay buddy.
29. I Should Have Ditched This Concept
There were these ditches dug along the roads so that plowed snow had somewhere to go in the winter. So, naturally, they collect water and are really marshy and grow reeds. I used to think you could sink into them as one would sink into an actual marsh. My sister, who was three years older than me, decided to mess with me—and boy, she did not hold back.
She told me that kids have been lost by sinking into the marshy ditches and that there were trolls who live underneath who ate them. She said that after a girl had been lost, they lowered a bag of chips into it, and they could hear the trolls crunching and munching on them.
30. Chemistry 101
I was in a lab with my group doing an elementary chemistry experiment during my freshman year in college. A girl in our group got very concerned for our safety when water started boiling and exclaimed, "DON'T BREATHE THAT IN—IT IS HYDROGEN"!
Apparently, she did not understand basic states of matter.
31. He Was Missing More Than Just His Toppings
I worked at a Subway. We were out of lettuce, which was a problem for this one guy whose entire enjoyment of his sandwich revolved around lettuce. I told him we didn't have any, so he asked if I could go in the back and cut more up. I told him we don't cut it up and that it comes already shredded and packaged and reiterated that we had no lettuce anywhere in the store.
That's when his face turned red. He gave me an annoyed blank look and asked, "How can you open your store if you don't have all your product"? He couldn’t understand that we ran out of items because people like him came to eat the food and that we weren’t about to close the store over a missing topping.
32. Snake Charmer
I have convinced my co-workers that snake oil is real. They are wanting to buy some from me to get mad gains. I haven't sold them any yet because we're moving into winter and all the snakes are hibernating so all the snake oil I have is being saved to keep up my family's health. But come Spring time, when the snakes wake up, I'll have some more.
I'm banking on them forgetting by Spring.
33. This Idea Shouldn’t Have Taken Flight
I was pretty smart and could deduce some pretty complex things. Well, I figured that in order to turn, there were weights inside the long wings of airplanes that could move from one end to the other. When going straight, the weights are in the middle, and to turn left, the weights shift to the left, into the wingtips, and so on. It was so dumb to think that, but I would like to believe that such a design could actually work in practice.
34. American Pi
I was in high school, 2007-2008 school year. I was a senior. One of my friends in their junior year starts telling me about this guy they know. Tells me this guy has argued against his entire chemistry class, including the teacher, for ten minutes out of a 50-minute class. Why? He was convinced that pi was bigger than mol (6.022E23), "because pi goes on forever."
This same guy was tasked with using a ruler in class. He was having some trouble figuring out the ruler. It turns out he realized that he didn't know how many inches were in a ruler. So what did he do? He got the brilliant idea to measure his ruler with a second ruler so he could figure out how many inches are in a ruler. Spoiler: He couldn't figure it out.
35. Just A Pretty Face
A friend of mine in his late 20s is a sweet guy but is overweight and balding and quite frankly, not very attractive in the face. Well, one day he lets us know that he has met a girl and she might be the one. Well, I've met some of the jewels he's hooked up with in the past so I wasn't expecting too much. I finally meet this girl, and she is drop-dead gorgeous and has a body that is incredible.
I talk to her for a while and she is super friendly and outgoing. I'm stoked for my boy! He found the best he's ever going to find. The night progresses, and the new couple starts talking about their plans for an upcoming trip to New Mexico, and she starts telling us how excited she is because she has "never gone to another country before."
I laughed a bit and realized she was dead serious. My friend just looked at me and shook his head. That’s when I knew that he knew she was dumb as a rock, but she was his dumb rock.
36. Birds Of A Feather...
I work in a restaurant and we don't always hire the best and brightest.
Now, this girl had already "locked" herself in a cooler—one that you push the door to get out of—so my expectations weren't high. But she still managed to top herself.
When discussing prep for the day, I was complaining about running out of chicken. She said something to the effect of "just use the turkey". I told her that it's not right to use a different meat and not tell the customer. Her reply was "Chicken and turkey come from the same animal".
I didn't even take the time to explain it to her. I don't even want to know where she thinks we get bacon from.
37. Lacking Brilliance
I used to work at a fine jewelry kiosk in a mall. Our jewelry included gold bracelets and necklaces bonded to sterling silver, sterling silver rings with cubic zirconia gems, gold engagement rings with diamond chips clustered together rather than one large diamond, etc. I had a lot of regulars, and this one particular woman would come in often.
Every time for every item that she was interested in, she would ask the same blood-boiling question: “Is this real”? I explained what “bonded” meant and how we didn’t sell diamond rings for $25, but that the rings were indeed certified sterling silver with synthetic gems. I gave her information like this repeatedly, day after day, and she would follow up every explanation with, “Okay, but...is it real”?
38. Electrical Problems
I was a TA in high school for a regular high school. I think it was a world history course. So not honors, not "Academically Enriched," but not quite eating your own poop either. Anyways, I get to class and the power is out, so of course everyone is going nuts cause...it's dark, I guess?
So the teacher still wants to lecture and the kids all groan. That is until one yells out, "Let's watch TV!" YAAAAAY!! Everyone starts chanting, "TV! TV! TV!" I'll never forget the teacher's face as he looked at me. His eyes filled with disappointment about the future of our country.
Unable to realize that no electricity also meant no television. Sad.
39. Her Lie Left Me Cold
My sister once dramatically exclaimed, "My hand froze off!" She said this while running her hand under warm water after a ski trip where she had lost a glove. I was terrified and hid in my room for an hour. Later, I came out, and her hand was back to normal. I asked her how she got her hand back. She said, "Your hand just grows back if it's frozen off. You only really lose it if you cut it off."
I distinctly remember telling my teachers and schoolmates that my sister grew back her frozen hand. I was only seven years old, but even when they tried to tell me she was messing with me, I just assumed my teacher was dumb and didn't know what I did.
40. Intelligence Questioned
In high school, there was this one girl in my history class who went for an IQ test once for a very strange reason. When I found out why, it bowled me over. So, we wrote a history test in class, and a week later we got our tests back. This girl failed miserably and she decided it would be a smart idea to tell the teacher about her IQ test.
She told the teacher that he can't give her an F because, "she scored 70 on an IQ test, so she's not allowed to fail." The worst part is, she genuinely believed an IQ test would give her a pass on failing tests, so she failed EVERY SUBJECT that year. I still talk to her on Twitter now and then, turns out she's a flat-earther now.
41. Beyond Gullible
When they were kids, my friend told his gullible, older sister that marshmallows came from trees—mallow trees—in the marshes.
He never told her that he was joking and she believed this well into adulthood.
42. Counting Chickens
I used to work at a grocery store deli. We had one customer who left me totally speechless. She asked me: “The eight-piece chicken...how many pieces are in it"? I said, "How many pieces are in the eight-piece chicken? Um. There are eight pieces in the eight-piece chicken". She was very polite and replied, "OK, I'll have that, please"! So, I packaged it up, and she went away happy.
43. Photograph Politics
My adult sister is a very liberal Democrat who constantly wants to argue politics with anyone who will listen. One day I was showing her some photographs I had recently taken on a trip to Washington DC. She looked at a picture of the Capitol Building and said, "Oooo, that's a pretty building. What is it?"
I blinked a couple of times before saying simply, "That's the Capitol Building, Sis". "The capitol building?" she asked. "What do they do there?"
Freepik, freepik
44. This Story Was All Fluff
I was picky about food. One day, I proclaimed loudly that I didn't like marshmallows. Then, someone told me that marshmallows were used to make Rice Krispie squares, so I informed my mother I would not be eating Rice Krispie squares because I didn't want to eat marshmallows. Until I was an adult, she made sure to warn everyone I would come into contact with—whether it was other parents, my teachers at school, basically, every person who she could get to—that her Rice Krispie squares were made with sugar glue.
I was 18 before I learned that was a lie.
45. Jumping All Over
My wife wanted to meet an old friend from school she hadn't seen for about 20 years. We went to dinner, and he brought his wife along with her to kids. He had met her just two months prior and she worked as a "male entertainer" (her words). He was white, she was black, and he spent the whole night trying to start fights with people for "making prejudiced comments about their relationship behind their back," even though no one was.
When we finally got into talking, he told me about nine "jump points" that exist to get off the Earth. I thought to myself "Oh boy, a Flat Earther. I've never met a real one before." But no, that's not what he was talking about. That would have been so much better than what he was talking about. He said there are nine jump points on Earth that are essentially wormholes to other planets, and that there is one in New York City that goes to Mars.
He also informed me that the American government has already colonized Mars and is hiding it from the people. And he was dead serious.
46. Not Accurate At All
In 5th or 6th grade, I was having a conversation about space travel with a friend. She began to tell me how amazing it was that we broke through a solid layer of earth so quickly when launching. I was confused and began to explain to her that the atmosphere isn't solid. She persisted in her argument. Then suddenly, I realized what she was saying: She thought that we lived inside the earth. She even drew me a diagram to explain which consisted of a circle with stick people walking along the inside perimeter.
When she thought I didn't understand, she said, “You know, like a Wonderball”.
She was so surprised to learn that we actually walk on the outside surface of the earth. She also thought gravity was like those carnival rides where you stick to the wall which is at least more accurate.
47. A Hostess And Meteorologist
I work as a hostess at a fancy restaurant. We open our patio (which is visible from the front entrance) around lunch. There is an upsettingly large number of people who come in from outside and ask, "Is it hot out"? I usually just answer that I’m not sure and would have to step outside to check. So, I exit through the door they just came in, stand outside for a moment, and come back to tell them the weather.
48. Up In The Air
This was during my exchange year in the USA. I came from Germany, and in class, we had this thing where I introduced myself and everyone asked questions about me and my country. So this one girl raises her hand and seriously asks, “Do you have airplanes over there?"
I was completely stunned by this question and had to calmly explain that I actually flew there by plane...but to this day I'm not entirely sure if she maybe just trolled me. I mean, you can't be THAT uneducated?!
49. Switched At Birth Sham
I had always had an inkling that I was adopted, and my older brother played into that a lot by making fun of me and telling me that I was. I also was the only member of my family to look Mexican, and people always thought I was, while my family was half white and half Indian. When I was young, we moved to a new city a few hours away.
The people who owned the house before us had a maid service and that company gave us one month free to see if we liked it. The maid that worked for us was a young Mexican woman named Juanita. My brother very cleverly came up with the lie that Juanita was my birth mother and that she had an affair with a very famous person.
Since this person couldn't have the public image of cheating on his wife, he paid her a lot of money to put me up for adoption. He continued, saying that my parents had found out about Juanita being in this city, and we moved there so I could be closer to my birth mother. I believed this story for two years!
Shutterstock
50. Absolute Train Wreck
When we hired a girl a couple of years ago, I told her where the manager's office was her first day. On the second day, she asked me where the manager's office was, so I walked her to the door. Then on the third day, she asks me where it is again. After, our manager chewed out the girl who trained our new recruit for not teaching her about the job properly.
The trainer pulled out her phone and showed the manager a picture of the girl wearing the uniform backward and said, “Look at this. This is untrainable." The new girl got fired about three weeks later for stealing the product because she thought she got it for free because she was an employee.
51. The Stomach Wants What The Stomach Wants
I work at a small outdoor restaurant that sells wings and fries. Nothing else, just those two things (as far as food goes). About a week ago, a man walked up to my counter, took a menu, proceeded to read the entire thing in front of me, and then put down his menu to ask, "Can I get a cheeseburger combo"?
After taking a minute to wipe the baffled expression off of my face and telling him no, we only sold wings and fries, he said, "What about a hot dog? Let me get a hot dog"! My mind was blown after that conversation.
52. One Giant Misconception
I got into a conversation with one of the office secretaries who happens to be married to my boss. I made a comment about being grateful for the weather we had on this continent. She asked what I meant, so I explained mistakenly thinking that she was confused about the continent's weather. Nope, she didn't know what a continent was. She didn't in fact know that the continents were separated. She was in her mid-30s and believed that we lived on one giant land mass.
53. Playing Telephone
My friend once couldn't find his iPhone in his house, so he rang it from the landline. His iPhone rang…while sitting on the table in front of him. He picked it up and obviously, there was nobody on the other line. He screams upstairs to his parents, with one phone in each hand: "Who is ringing me?"
I just sat there facepalming.
Freepik,master1305
54. They Told Me A Historic Lie
When I was a kid, my dad got these little arrowheads from some gift shop and put them out in our backyard. He told me that Indigenous people used to inhabit where our yard was and that if I looked around I could find different things that were left behind. When I found those arrowheads, I almost squealed with delight. I thought I had discovered artifacts from Indigenous civilizations in my backyard.
I told people about it every now and again and was pretty proud of it. I bragged about it to friends, teachers, and even people at the local historical society. I really felt stupid for believing it for as long as I did. I should have realized sooner that it clearly wasn’t true based on the fact that the explanations about them were too far-fetched, the placement of them was obviously in places where a kid would be able to find them, and that the concept wasn’t told to me before or after that one afternoon.
55. Might As Well Be Worlds Apart
I live in southern Spain, and I once met a girl from the U.S. who was here on some kind of exchange program. When I asked her about how she was liking Spain so far, she said, “I’m loving it. I just don't know why the plane took so long to get here. I mean we are just a bit BELOW MEXICO. I really don't know why the flight was that long."
I told her that we were in Europe, and she didn't believe me. Her reply was, "Europe? It can't be. Everyone speaks Spanish so we must be somewhere near Mexico for sure!" She was in university. I still don't know how or why.
56. Shift It
Back when I did tech support, I received a call from a customer with a peculiar keyboard problem. It seemed that he was having trouble with the shift key. When he typed a letter with the shift key pressed it gave him the upper case letter, but when he typed a number, it didn't do that. Didn't do what? Type the upper case number. I had to break it to him gently.
57. Face Palm Moment
My wife, who was 26 years old at the time, saw a video of a car engine exploding and was shocked that it could do so. I jokingly said, "Well—it is a combustion engine".
I got a confused look, then spent over an hour teaching her about how engines work. She assumed engines generated power by passing gasoline through it like a water mill. She blank-faced when I asked why wouldn't we just use water, and where does it then go, and wouldn't one tank last forever?
58. Paper Pusher
I worked in the records section of a government department. An outside worker injured himself and could no longer perform manual work. So, my Manager decided he could help out in the records section by doing some filing. He is illiterate and can neither read nor write. Huge mistake.
Years later, we had over 80,000 files with wrong paperwork attached that we were still trying to clean up. The Manager knew this man could neither read nor write and told us later said, "How bad could it be?".......bad.
59. It Was A Twisted Deception
When I was about four or five years old, I was a really anxious kid. Even though we lived in an area where tornados were rare, but not unheard of, I was really fixated on the possibility of a tornado coming to destroy our house. So, to alleviate my anxiety, my dad told me that those spinning attic vents you see on houses were "tornado stoppers.”
He said that they spin the opposite way to a tornado and cancel it out, with an effective range that went to the end of our street. I accepted this at face value and didn't question it until many years later when I looked at our roof and noticed we didn't actually have a spinning-style attic vent. My dad had just assumed we had one and neither of us had bothered to check.
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60. It’s Different For Boys
My ex-sister-in-law is hands down the dumbest person I've ever encountered. There's literally a plethora of insanely stupid things she's said over the years, but I'll use the one that almost made me slap the taste out of her mouth. I had my first son back in 2001, and while I was pregnant, she asked me if I was going to breastfeed. To which I replied that I was.
She then asked, "even if it's a girl?" and I said of course. She then proceeded to tell me that it's perfectly fine to breastfeed boys, but doing so with girls is creepy and could make the child a lesbian. Because "they get the feel of a breast and will remember it and want that sexually." To say that I was stunned by her thought process is an understatement.
I asked her what she thought people did before formula was invented, and she said "cow's milk." And before bottles were invented it was a "rag soaked in cow's milk."
61. One Stop Shop
A customer walked into our tiny bike shop jammed packed full of bikes. Bikes are hanging in the window, off the ceiling on the walls, all over the floor. There is not a square foot of space in the shop that is not occupied by a bike or various parts of one. This still led to the cringiest interaction of my life.
Him: "This is the bike shop right"? Me: “Yes”. Him: "Do you guys sell bikes or fix them"? Me: “Both”. Him: "If I brought my canoe in could you fix it"? Me: “Is canoe the name of your bike or is it a boat"? Him: "It's just a canoe for the lake. Do you guys fix them"? Me: “What? No, we're a bike shop”. Him: "Oh".
62. We're Done
A girl I was dating was complaining to me about all the ridiculous things people believed or asked when they came into her place of summer employment.
We were having a perfectly good time until I got to one of mine, and said, "Sweet, merciful Judas. People who complain about evolution being taught in schools are almost as bad as the people who think that the earth is only a few thousand years old".
She got quiet and I immediately realized why. Then I said, "So—if you don't believe in evolution, then what"?
"Oh, I believe in evolution, but I think God put us here and we have evolved slightly since then", she uttered.
Okay, whatever. One thing is okay, and eventually in school—she planned on becoming a veterinarian—she'll have to give in a bit.
"Okay, that's reasonable”, I only said that because she was cute, ”but what about the age of the earth”?
“I don't think there's proof that it's older".
Aaand—we're done here.
63. No Energy
This was in Earth Science, ninth grade. A girl starts asking the teacher about how your halo works. She explained that it's your body's energy reserve that swirls around you in ultraviolet light. Her question was about how your body keeps it from floating away. Half the class seemed to actually take her seriously.
(I think she meant Aura, but she used the word Halo. But it still would have been ridiculous pseudoscience either way).
64. A True Fairy Tale?
When I was a kid, about seven or eight, I asked my mother if Santa was real. She decided to tell me that he was not. I wasn’t too bothered and apparently felt that this made sense. I then asked if the tooth fairy was real, and my mother, overestimating my grasp of sarcasm, told me that the tooth fairy was, in fact, real. I figured that there was no reason she would lie to me given that she had just admitted to Santa being fake.
Later, my mother caught me explaining to other kids that Santa was fake, but that the tooth fairy wasn’t. Unfortunately, I believed in the tooth fairy for much longer than I care to admit.
65. Facing A Challenge
I was working at a grocery store over a decade ago. I wouldn’t call the kid dumb because he just didn’t know. It’s more of a funny thing. He was new, and the manager asked him to “face” the store when he asked what he could do. “Facing” means you make sure the aisles look nice and neat and that the product is pulled forward and visibly facing you as you walk down the aisle.
The kid couldn’t be found until someone told the manager one of the workers was just standing in the parking lot facing the store. I will never forget that.
66. Left Speechless
I work in IT. I got a ticket from a lady saying her screen is blank. I call, because I saw her in orientation and to be honest, she seemed to have never used a computer before (despite being 19 years old, and her title as a receptionist). Me: "Ma'am is your computer on"? Her: "I don't know, how would I check"?
Coworker next to her grunts and turns on the computer for her. Her: "Oh! Ok it's on, now do I have to type out my username AND password to log on"? No words could properly describe how I felt in that moment.
67. What An Eye-Opener
I didn't know pickles were made from cucumbers until my mid-20s. I thought they were two completely different vegetables and pickles were the pickled version of that vegetable. What an illuminating trip to the Gedney factory that was.
68. Lost At Sea
We're talking about the missing Malaysian airplane and this girl in my class says, "Oh, it probably got lost in Panama". And I was like, "Why Panama?" She gave me this look like I was an idiot and said, "It's in the Bermuda Triangle". Me and the other guy we're talking to both look at each other like..??
And the dude says, "Jackie...Do you know what the seven continents are?" Obviously, we're messing with her because of course she would know, but she replies with: "Duh. America, Mexico, Britain, North Africa, South Africa, Europe, and China”. We laughed and then we realized she was serious.
69. The Meaning Of "Gullible"
My dad convinced me that the word "gullible" was not in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I was probably six when he first told me. My mom and sister agreed with him at the dinner table. We had a dictionary on the bookshelf next to the table. I would look it up and find it. Then, I would forget and he would re-convince me of it at random intervals—sometimes a year later, sometimes six months later.
It was probably the fifth time that I looked it up when I finally stopped believing him.
70. Drowning In The Water Under The Bridge
I was working in a French company. We were working with a development team in Vietnam on some IT project. The project manager they reported to in HQ is French. They didn't like him, and he knew it. Even so, the Vietnamese team did a great job. He wanted to find the correct words to congratulate them, hoping to smoothen the future relationship.
He sent this incredible "thank you" email that said, “When we see the quality of your work, we can only realize how sad it is that we lost you guys as a colony." The French ex-pats in the Vietnam office told me they were hiding in shame for a full week.
71. Barbeque Cell Phone
I used to work in a phone shop. I had someone come in asking why their phone wasn't working properly. It was visibly scorched and melty. I asked why it looked that way. They said it came up with an error message, saying it had been too cold. This was not an error message I had heard of before, but I know phones can bring up errors for being too hot, so who knows.
But that wasn't the real issue. It's what he did with the phone that shocked me. He had put it under the grill to heat it up. The grill. Their first point of call was to cook it. I told them that's why their phone wasn't working, and no, it was not covered under the guarantee.
72. Try Not To Giggle
This morning at breakfast, my best friend—who is truly an intelligent woman, explained to me that the percentages on milk cartons indicate how much of the content is actually milk. So 2%, for example, meant that 2% of the carton was milk, and 98% of it contained other liquids, such as water. I just smiled and nodded throughout her lecture and then calmly, through a tremendous giggle fit, corrected her.
73. Charged Up
I know a girl who had just gotten a new phone and didn't understand why it wasn't charging when we were out at a bar.
Her: "My phone battery is draining and I don't know why".
Me: "Because you're using it...?"
Her: "Yeah but it's supposed to have wireless charging, so why am I losing battery? Shouldn't it just stay charged forever?"
Me: "....."
74. There Was Not A Crumb Of Truth To It
My parents told me that eating the crust of bread for sandwiches or toast was important as it contained all the healthy nutrients I needed to grow healthy. I believed that garbage until I was 26, and I saw my wife cut away her crusts. I told her how she was throwing away the healthiest parts of the bread. I'll never forget the look on her face.
She looked at me dumbfounded and thought I was stupid. Of course, she corrected me.
75. Sniffed Out
I once knew this kid who was dumber than snake mittens and just about as useful. He came into our government class claiming that you could still smell the tea spilled into the Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party. My government teacher spent the next five minutes explaining to him that that was physically impossible.
This kid, after some deliberation, seemingly grasped the concept of time and relented on the topic, or so we thought. Not five minutes later, he said, "I bet you can still smell it when you're underwater," as certain as a man can be. Now at this point, we were juniors in high school and for the first time in my life, I was in utter disbelief that a person could have survived under the sheer force of their own stupidity up until that point.
Class was completely derailed at this point with the teacher trying to explain to him why you can't breathe underwater but to no avail. Bless his heart he tried. He said that he didn't want a student drowning because he didn't understand you couldn't smell underwater, but the kid was dead certain. After that year in class with him, I never saw him again. Probably drowned.
76. Colorful Questions
I used to work in IKEA in the section that sold wardrobes. Big behemoths of things. Normally around 6-foot long and 60kg in boxes. Customers would regularly ask me if it would fit in their car. After being polite the first few times, asking them about the size of their car and guessing, I then just started asking them what color their car was. The amount of people who'd answer unphased was amazing.
77. Fairy Tale Belief
Up until the age of 21 or 22, I believed a hermit was a reclusive person who lived in a tree. Not in a treehouse, mind you, which might have been somewhat more plausible, but the hollowed-out bark of a tree. I imagined them living in the woods, in gigantic trees with a small door in the bark and no windows.
It must have been something I read as a child in a fairy tale. All I can say is that I was laughed at a lot when this somehow once came up in conversation and I innocently started talking about this theory. I have no idea what I was thinking either...
78. Times Change
One of my classmates told me once that two countries could have an entire month of difference between their "local dates". For example, today is October 18th in Canada, but it is November 18th in France "because, you see, the Earth spins". We were in a science class and had been taught about the Solar System for at least six years.
79. A Haunting Tale
We were on our way to a volleyball game when my dad told us that there used to be a cemetery where the school now stood. They had tried to contact the families to move the bodies, but any that weren't claimed were still under the school, so the place was probably haunted. As fifth graders are chatty, especially with something as juicy as "the school is built on deceased bodies," his story made it around our school and the competing school pretty quick.
My dad got in a bit of trouble for that one.
80. Me ‘n My Moo
My friends were always convinced that my girlfriend was too dumb for me, but I always defended her saying you just had to get to know her. One day, we're attempting to do that over at my best friend's place, and we're all having milk and cookies. She remarks how fresh the milk is. I say, “Yeah, it's local so it's practically straight from the cow.”
She gets quiet then says, "Cows? I always thought milk came from pigs!" So, I say, "but there's a cow on the carton?" She goes, "I thought that was the mascot!" My friend just turned his head slowly and looked me right in the eye. I looked away.
81. Recreational Catnip
I worked at an independent pet store. We mainly sold dog supplies, but there was a small section of cat toys, catnip, etc. A newer, pretty gimmicky item we brought in was a line of catnip that was packaged to look like an illicit plant. It had “prescription” bottles and pre-rolls”. People usually knew these were catnip products.
However, on many occasions, I had many people ask the same hilarious question: "How does the cat take tokes on it"? Or, even better yet, "How can they even hold the lighter? They've got paws"? I never do quite know how to reply besides muddled laughter.
82. New Discoveries
My neighbor who lives downstairs is from India. He has been in the United States for 16 years now. He is a developer for a large corporation and makes a very good yearly income. We're good friends and we talk from time to time about life. When we talk about religion, however, I always discover something new that he has no clue about.
He once asked me why, if I believed in dinosaurs did I not then believe in God. He has also made the same remarks about galaxies after I told him that billions of galaxies exist.
Today, I informed him that the gas that powers his car comes from decomposed plants and animals from hundreds of millions of years ago. He had a good laugh and then told me that I will believe anything.
83. Eclipsed
I tried to explain that the moon and sun were not the same sizes, then all of a sudden I found myself having to explain that the sun and the moon were in fact different and not just one side fire, one side rock.
They all laughed at my crazy theories, then asked, if the sun was so far away, why is it in the same sky during the day (on Earth) as the moon was at night? They peed themselves laughing, and I just laughed with them. This was a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with my 56-year-old mother-in-law.
Sometimes the argument is lost, whether you are right or not.
84. What A Croc!
Growing up, I had some family that lived a town over. We would visit them often since they'd host all the family events because they had a big home. Going to their house involved driving over an area with a large pond that had a road built over it. One day, we drove over the pond, and I noticed a log sticking out of the water.
I asked my dad what it was, and since we had watched some Crocodile Dundee, he said, "It's a crocimagator." Even though we lived in Canada, where there aren’t any crocodiles, I believed him. Every time we drove past, that log was in the same place for years. At first, I doubted it, but I watched a documentary that said crocs or alligators could lay dormant for months on end and not move.
Hence, I believed it for years. Eventually, the log vanished. It probably sunk into the pond and I didn't think much of it. I just thought the crocimagator moved somewhere new. Then it hit me that I was an idiot.
85. The Paternity Is In The Tongue
My girlfriend at the time, C, lived with her friend, K who was not the sharpest tool in the shed. I would always be there hanging out and somehow, I got sucked into Days of Our Lives. I know, stupid, but hey, being forced to watch it weekly made me invested in the characters to a degree. So, in the show, Sammy and Lucas are star-crossed lovers.
They're not always together throughout the show, but they find their way back to each other. In this story of mine, they have been set back together, and they're still working things out. BUT, wait! There's a handsome, young Englishman named EJ who just moved into town. Sammy ends up having a one-night stand with him. Oh dear!
Two weeks later we find out on Days of Our Lives that Sammy is pregnant! We wonder whose kid it was. Then K pipes in and says, “This is so stupid.” I, knowing that this will be good, ask her, “Oh? why do you think that?" She says, “There's no tension. This is dumb.” Well, we had to know why, so I ask, “why is that, K?” Her answer was priceless.
She explains, “Well, they're going to know whose baby it is if it comes out with a British accent or not.” I put the TV on mute and say, “I'm sorry. One more time." K looks at me like I have two heads and says, "like this -standard cry- or like this -Disney stereotype of a chimney cleaner in London losing his wife to typhoid-.” I just go, “nope," and walk out.
86. The Combo Guy
I worked at Wendy's through high school and part of college. One day, a man in his 50s, wearing a bright magenta suit, walked in and ordered a burger. I asked him, "Do you want a combo or just the sandwich"? He asked me, "What is a combo"? I explained to him that it was a sandwich with fries and a drink, but somehow he didn't understand. He looked at me blankly, I started to get annoyed.
He said, "I want fries and a drink, but what is the combo"? We went back and forth on this for almost FIVE MINUTES. I don't even remember if he ever figured out what a combo was or if he ended up getting it. However, I remember seeing him two weeks later in a different city at my other job training political canvassers. He was wearing the same magenta suit.
I was in such shock that I just stared at him, saying nothing, thinking, "It's the combo guy".
87. We Can Make An Exception
Back in the mid-90s, I was trying to purchase a part that was difficult to find for a customer of mine. I finally found a place in New Jersey that had it. When I told the woman on the phone that I needed it shipped to New Mexico, she informed me that they didn't ship out of the country. I said not OLD Mexico—NEW Mexico. She countered with, “Yes, but it's still MEXICO and we only ship inside the United States”.
After a face-palm moment, I spent some time explaining that New Mexico was indeed a state, where it was located, and so on. Even after that, she said, "I've never heard of it before and I can't see why they would name a state after another country". I guess the fact that she was in a state named after part of another country escaped her.
I asked her to just check with someone else in the office. So she put me on hold for a while. But the very best part came last: When she got back on the phone she sheepishly said, "I was told that we can make an exception to our shipping policy for this order".
88. Doctor’s orders
We had a gentleman admitted to the ER after suffering a Pulmonary Embolism. As soon as he arrived he began screaming and belittling the ER staff for no reason, claiming nothing was wrong with him and he wanted to leave. The consequences were horrifying.
We tried to take him into Critical Care but he refused to lie down and eventually just pushed a medical student to the ground and ran out the door. His heart stopped in the parking lot about 50 feet from the Ambulance bay.
Freepik,freepik
89. His Story Didn’t Ring A Bell
When I was five years old, my dad told me and my nine-year-old sister that telephone poles were actually trees that had been genetically engineered by the power companies to grow straight up into a perfect pole with two little arms on each side to hold the lines. It was just one of the many “dadisms” that he preached when Mom wasn't around.
One day, he brought my sister home earlier than usual from school. He explained to my mom that the principal had called him to come and pick her up. When she asked why he told her that a local power company worker had come to her class that day to talk about power line safety. The power company worker had asked the class, "Who knows how telephone poles are made?"
My sister raised her hand and proudly shared what my dad had told her. The worker laughed and said, "I think your dad lied to you." My sister's response completely threw him. She said, "I think you're a liar." We still quote her at family gatherings whenever we think someone is pulling our leg.
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90. Getting Steamy In The Meat Department
We played a prank on some chick at my work who honestly had the IQ of a toothbrush. She wasn't very good at her job, and we only gave her the simplest of tasks. Seriously, even a task like "wash the dishes" required many questions before even being attempted. "Where's the soap? Where's the hot water? Will the tap automatically turn off when the sink is full?"
One day, we decided to play a prank on her. We asked her to go to the meat department and get us a bucket of steam for cleaning...A BUCKET OF STEAM! She left the department, and about 10 or 15 minutes later, my buddy Rob phoned me up and said, "Dude.... Naomi is here" I start to laugh and say, "Yeah? And what is she doing?"
He says, "I can't explain it man...it's like...you have to be here. She's like, got the hose right, and turned on the hot water. She's spraying the hose on the ground with one hand, and with the other hand, she's trying to wave the steam into the bucket. My mind wants to be literally rolling on the floor laughing at her but....I'm not. I think you've broken me..."
I have never laughed so hard in my life. She did this for about 45 minutes before the manager called her back to the Deli.
91. Show Me The Door
This happened last week. A woman, maybe in her 70s or late 60s, was sitting on a Rascal scooter rolled up to the closed door on the corner of the garden center. She sat there for about two minutes, staring at the door and getting passed by about a dozen customers making for the actual entrance. Eventually, she looked at me, a bit miffed, and asked when the garden center was going to open.
I said it is open. The door is twenty feet to your left. She then sat there for another two minutes negotiating how she would maneuver her Rascal into the store as a dozen more people walked in and out of the obviously open doors. Mind you, there were about two hundred carts full of plants arranged in a corral that highlighted the pathway to the entrance, people were briskly walking by with carts full of plants, and never has anyone else that I've encountered been confused as to where the entrance was. This was one simply special senior.
92. Now That's Ditzy
A close yet ditzy friend of mine once proclaimed that she didn't understand how being a weather reporter could be a job since it was so easy.
After a bit of questioning, it turns out that she thought that the weather was the same every year regardless of the actual year. So if it was sunny on the third of June, then it would be sunny on every subsequent third of June after that. She had also been using this method as a way to decide when to go on holidays. I miss that girl.
93. I Don’t Know My ABCs
When I was managing a GameStop, I told a seasonal employee to alphabetize the wall. Three-quarters of the way through, he stops to ask me the dumbest question imaginable: He's wondering if P comes before or after V. He was a high school senior.
I reminded him that there’s a song about it, and his response was “Yeah, I just hum it after I get to M”. After that, every applicant was made to sing the alphabet song.
94. I Was Sunk By A Titanic Tale
My mom and I were watching Titanic when I was around four. She obviously didn't want me to see the love scene, so she covered my eyes as she forwarded through it. Her reasoning was wild. She told me that vampires come onto the ship and chase Rose and Jack away. I was terrified of vampires and dumb-little-me believed her.
Not only that, but I continued to believe her for the next three or four years, and was always scared of that movie because of those supposed vampires. In my mind, it had become a horror movie. It was only when I was at my best friend's house and her siblings had that movie on, that I found out my mother had lied to me. I felt so betrayed and as I grew older I was just confused.
When I asked my mother why she said vampires of all things, she said she panicked and couldn't think of anything else. To this day we joke about all of the vampires in Titanic.
95. Special Unit Of Measurement
My friend's brother is definitely the stupidest person I've ever met. I was always nice to him, but wow, he was not a smart guy. One time, my friend had bought a new 42" LCD TV. His brother comes in the room and starts making small talk. He said, "I just bought a new TV, too. It's bigger than that though." I reply, "Oh, you bought one, too? How big is it?"
He looks at the TV, measures it up, and says, I swear on my life, "Ah, I dunno, it’s like...5...dicks bigger." Needless to say, I totally lost my mind with laughter, and he winds up leaving the room because I can't stop.
96. Pasta Problems
I work at an Italian place right now. We call our Italian menu items by Italian names with English descriptions. I get a lot of questions, but I don't mind a hair because I get paid to talk about food. Not too long ago though, it sort of went slapstick. It's not that they asked a dumb question, but they kept asking it".
Pollo e penne"? "Oh, that's chicken and pasta with-" "Does it have meat in it"? "The chicken pasta? Yes, pollo is Italian for chicken". "Can I get the chicken but not the pollo"? "Pollo is just Italian for chicken, if you want chicken it's really good". "No, I like chicken but I don't want pollo". I kind of lost it for a split second.
97. Check, Please
There was this girl I was "chasing after" for about three months. I didn't know her name and never saw her again around campus. Then after the third month, I saw her again and asked her out.
I was a physics student and I was telling her about the cool stuff we learned in planetary physics. She said, and I quote: "How wonderful God is. He made the sun rotate the earth, in a perfect circle".
I laughed as if it was a joke. She was truly serious. I asked for the check and left.
98. All Booked Up
I went on a date with a nerdy girl, and all was going well. The capstone to the date was seeing Detective Pikachu. We were chilling in the theater a little early just gushing over Pokemon stuff. Trailers come up and one is for the Tolkien Biodrama, and I mention I might go see that one too when it comes out.
“...So what, he wrote a book". She rolls her eyes. I ask, "Not a fan of LoTR?" Her response was roughly, "I've only read three books in my life, and that was three too many". It turns out that the limit to how much she can stomach reading in a sitting was roughly the same length as a tweet.
The final nail in the coffin was her asking if it was wrong that she was getting turned on by the Ryan Reynolds Pikachu.
99. Soda Jerk
One time I was at my dad's house, and he and a friend were hanging outside chilling while I was playing with my plastic ninja sword. My dad never let me have soda. His friend left, and he went inside to do the dishes. I saw a 7 Up can on the deck table and sprinted towards it. I took a huge swig. It turned out they had been putting their cig butts in there.
It was horrible. I ran inside and threw up. My dad asked, “What happened, what happened?!” I lied and said nothing, but he figured it out. So, he came up with the most genius lie: He told me all the soda he buys tastes like that, even if they are unopened. I believed him for a few years until I was about nine.
100. No World Record Holder
I was walking through the mall with a buddy of mine a couple of years ago and came across one of those stands selling hats and t-shirts. My buddy turns to me and says, “You should buy me that hat because it says genius.” I look wide-eyed at the hat and reread what was written across it 3 or 4 times before turning to my buddy and saying, “Dude, the hat says Guinness."
Yes, Guinness, as in the brewery.
101. Hot Dog!
My grandpa was a country guy, who liked to fish, hunt, and ride ATV four-wheelers. He also liked to lie to kids, and just let you think whatever nonsense he put in your head. When I was young, we traveled to our weekend property in the sticks. I saw a cattail reed out near the lake and asked what it was. He said, “What’s it look like? Those are hot dog trees!”
We usually grilled for dinner. My mom and I went to get stuff, and she asked if we had hotdogs. I answered there were plenty of hot dogs back home. We showed up and started unloading all the groceries. My grandpa was filling up the grill as my mom prepped the food. She asked where the hot dogs were. I went to get a pair of scissors and got my shoes on.
She was very confused and upset after I told her I had to go cut them down and that Grandpa showed me where they were.
102. Using Your Noodle
When I was waiting tables a few years ago this couple ordered two orders of fettuccine penne. Dumbfounded, I asked if they wanted fettuccine alfredo or penne alfredo. They responded "No no no, we want fettuccine penne". I tried to explain to them that they were ordering two different types of pasta, while asking what sauce they wanted. They had no clue what I was saying.
I ended up just giving them penne alfredo and when I went to check up on them they thanked me for getting the order right, exclaiming that the "fettuccine was off the charts".
103. Decode This
My 23-year-old girlfriend had no idea what Roman numerals were. She was designing a poster for an event I was hosting and asked me, “What's the code for this one”?
It took me a while to figure out she was talking about the event number at the bottom of all of our posters. I tried to explain how Roman numerals work and she just said she knew what they were and refused to talk about it—until she asked what the code was again...
104. Baby Babble
My wife and I had a baby recently (about two weeks ago). My in-laws are over for a few weeks for supervision/support so it doesn't become overwhelming. My mother-in-law keeps worrying about why he doesn't play with all the toys she got him. Are you serious? He's two weeks old.
He can't even focus on things yet. My father-in-law wanted to take him to the emergency room yesterday because he got an eyelash in his eye. Twitches. My in-laws are nice people, but I have no idea how they raised two kids.
105. Optical Delusion
I had a friend once who truly believed that magicians like Criss Angel and David Blaine had some kind of magical power or telekinesis or something along those lines. While watching one of those magicians on TV performing on the street, he argued, “How could this be fake? Look at all those people. Can’t fake all that. Has to be some kind of power or magic.”
I then have to ask him, “Do you realize that movies are fake? They fake entire universes, planets, cities, war, etc.” He didn't understand what I was getting at.
106. Vitamin D Supplement
I'm a physician, an eye doctor specifically. I will tell you that the longer I work, which is now 15 years, my standard for the "average" person's intelligence continues to decline. Thanks to the awful information filtering out there, I had a patient just last week who read that Vitamin D helps you resist lung infections and that he could get more Vitamin D by getting more sun.
So, he wanted to "collect" as much light as possible with his eyes. As a result, he stared at the sun for a solid 60 seconds and burned holes directly into his retinas. His vision is permanently reduced and there is no chance of future improvement.
107. Catching The Red-Eye
For as long as I can remember, my father had red eyes after showering. I didn't even think about it. Then one day as a teenager, a friend slept over and in the morning she saw my dad dressed and ready for work, freshly showered and red-eyed. Timidly, she approached and asked him why his eyes were red. His answer made me look at him completely differently.
He simply said "shampoo." She then, very carefully and as respectfully as she could muster, asked him why he didn't close his eyes when he shampooed. He laughed and said "What do you think, I'm an idiot? Closing my eyes in the shower! Sheesh!" My dad did a lot of things that embarrassed me...But that one was prettttty high up there.
108. How Do You Like Them Apples?
I asked my boyfriend if he wanted an apple. He said yes, so I pulled one out of the fridge and handed it to him. He looked confused. I asked him what was wrong…his answer still blows me away to this day. He asked me to slice it for him. He'd never eaten an apple whole before. He wasn't sure how to bite into it. He was 27.
109. Lab Mice Disaster
I went to a college where they had a lab and thousands of white mice that were used for experimentation to test medications. They were being treated well, but of course, a bunch of people from PETA started whining and moaning about it. The professors tried to ignore them and continue their experiments, but no, they keep nagging.
And then they did something REALLY stupid. One night, they broke into the lab and stole all the white mice. They brought the white mice out into the middle of the desert and set them free. Why is that stupid, you ask? Because white mice don’t normally live in the desert. They are all white, so this means they stick out like a sore finger in the desert heat.
ALL of the white mice got eaten by snakes and hawks or tragically died because of heatstroke and/or hunger within about two days. So the white mice could have had a peaceful death in a lab with little to no pain, but they ended up all dying horrible deaths in the scary desert because of people’s stupidity.
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110. No Trespassing
I had a friend, well, ex-friend, and we got into a massive, almost physically violent argument. I told her to leave my apartment and get out of the complex since she didn't live there. Her reply was so stupid, it’s unforgettable. She said "I don't have to! This is government property!" I was like… girl no...just no…I called the cops and they came and informed her the opposite. Ahhh, that was satisfying.
111. No Connection
A very grumpy high-society woman came to the store saying her brand new 3,000-dollar Microsoft surface bought by her husband was defective because she could not get internet when she was on the move. I quickly realized she was talking about Wi-Fi, so I tried explaining to her how Wi-Fi actually works. Boy, was that a mistake!
I told her that she could not use her Wi-Fi outside her house, but that she could share her smartphone internet connection. She would have none of it. She said I was lying to her and making fun of her. She even asked to speak to my manager, who then proceeded to tell her the exact same thing, almost to the word. She left screaming.
112. She’s Driving Everyone Crazy!
Every Friday, my mother goes grocery shopping. The store is a block away from where she lives and she usually drives there. On this particular day, after she finished shopping, she decided to walk back home. The next morning, she wakes me and my father up in a panic to let us know that her car has been stolen. The cops come, we fill out all the paperwork, and she gets a rental car for the time being.
That’s not even the best part. The following Friday, she drives again to the grocery market and parks the rental right next to her “stolen” car. Now, her car is a champagne-colored Mitsubishi Diamante—not such a common car or color. Nevertheless, when she sees it, she comments on how similar the car looks to hers, but makes nothing else of it.
A few days later, the cops call us to let us know that the car is in the grocery store’s parking lot just one block away from our house. Yea, that call was awkward, to say the least. I’ve got plenty of other stories about her, but this is probably the best one.
113. Special Agent Karen
This happened when my wife, son, and I went to H-E-B (the famous Texas-based Supermarket chain). When we got there, I took my son out of the back and put his carrying car seat on the truck bed. My wife was experiencing symptoms of seasonal allergies, so she was dabbing her nose and eyes with a tissue. When she has allergies, it can kind of sound like she’s crying.
I was making funny faces at my son and trying to get him to laugh. A random Karen appeared out of nowhere, walked over to my wife, and asked if she knew that a man was bothering her baby. And that's not all. She then went on to say, “Is he making you cry? Do you need me to call someone, honey?” I chose not to say anything out of sheer amusement.
I could tell my wife was pretty shocked for a second and then she said, “Lady, this is my husband and that little boy’s daddy”. The Karen was befuddled and didn’t really know how to extricate herself from the immensely awkward situation of her own making. She mumbled some kind of apology to my wife and fled the scene. Ahhh Karens, what would we do without them?
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