In thousands of years of recorded human history, there have been so many great minds who just cause us to stop and marvel in amazement. Then there are the other minds that cause us to stop and marvel in disbelief: There are some people who are just so stupid, it really makes one question how they are able to even get around in life without falling apart. Here, Redditors share their stories of the dumbest people they ever met.
1. Fly Me to the Moon
A girl in my class asked the professor if other countries have moons, too.
2. Money Talks
I had a guy at work once tell me that Benjamin Franklin was the one hundredth president, as evidenced by his being on the one hundred dollar bill.
3. Not Understanding the Gravity of the Situation
One girl in high school, let's call her "Lisa," honestly thought that gravity didn't exist and the reason why we didn't just float away was because of our weight. Took about ten minutes to explain that gravity gave us our weight. She then proceeded to ask if gravity could, in her words, "Break like a pencil." After explaining this impossibility, she finally stopped talking.
The very next day, she confused Newton with Al Gore. No joke. She was really nice, though.
4. Give and Take
I know a guy who thinks that this special herbal tea that he drinks negates the negative health effects of his pack-a-day smoking habit.
5. Getting Closer to the Sun
I know a guy who vaped mercury on a dare. It did not end well for him.
Wikimedia Commons, Tavo Romann
6. Ask Me Anything
A girl from my high school physics class once asked "If the speed of light is 3*108 m/s, what is the speed of darkness?" Then, later that year, she asked, "If China is 12 hours ahead of us, why didn't they warn us about 9/11?" I can't make this stuff up!
7. The Bear Necessities
I know a girl who wrote a whole academic paper about how polar bears only live in Poland.
8. Not-So Covert Operation
When I was 19, I waited tables with a girl who didn't know how to tell time. She was 18, fresh out of high school. Now, she wasn't like mentally challenged or anything, she was just really, really dumb. She also went to the kitchen and asked the cooks how to roll a joint. She explained that she had all the stuff, but couldn't roll it. Our boss was RIGHT behind, and had to have heard her. The cooks told her to shut up. She did stuff like that all the time, and she sat people at the wrong tables, messed up orders, and forgot her schedule, and would be late/miss shifts a lot.
9. Made for Each Other
My old roommate's boyfriend. He spent the better portion of dinner/movie stating how food has too much preservatives in it now, and that's why there are trees that have been petrified. Petrified trees, because of preservatives in food. Also, you can't eat "Bucky Balls" (or any magnet in general) because your body works off of electrical currents, and if you ate a magnet, it could disrupt them.
She was also pretty dumb, spent an entire night sobbing about being pregnant, gets an abortion, and then makes a point to call out people on Facebook for discussing the topic, saying things like, "I could never do that to an unborn child, every child is a gift. Nope, I don't miss either of them, not even a little bit.
10. A Rookie Error?
I remember proofreading a paper for a freshman student who my roommate happened to have a big crush on. It was on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, but somehow this freshman didn't seem to understand that it was satire, which would have probably been explained in lecture. The opening lines of the paper are burned into my memory. "Eating children would not be a good thing to do. In fact, we could even say that it would be bad."
11. Taking the Good With the Bad
I used to work with the nicest person I've ever met, but he was also the dumbest. Even though he had been at our restaurant for over a year, he still couldn't do anything successfully besides washing dishes without someone watching over him. He just could not figure out how to do anything on his own. Someone (usually me) would have to watch over every little thing that he did to make sure that he was doing it right. It would have been frustrating if he wasn't the nicest darn person on earth. He was always so happy to see you and did everything with a smile on his face. Luckily, he could wash dishes like an absolute beast. I'm not exaggerating when I say that he could wash dishes faster and more effectively than anyone I have ever met. In fact, that's why he was often asked to do other stuff: he was always finished his regular workload extremely fast. His wife was normal and all of his kids became doctors or engineers. They were all crazy smart. And he was sooooo darn nice!
12. What About Animal Crackers?
My friend legitimately had no idea that fish, the food, came from actual living fish, the animal. She decided that she wasn't going to eat it anymore when she found out. After that apparently traumatic incident, she would text me at all hours of the day and night, asking if whatever food she was about to eat was from an animal or not. I literally had to coach this grown woman on what meat products come from what animals. She still doesn’t believe that tofu isn't from an animal.
13. Vive la Stupidity
I was working at a French company. We were working with a development team in Vietnam on some IT project at one point. The project manager they report to in HQ was French. They didn't like him, and he knew it. The Vietnamese team did some great job, and he wanted to find the correct words to congratulate them, hoping to smooth over their future relationship. He sent an awful "thank you" email: "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 expats in the Vietnam office told me they were hiding in shame for a full week after that...
14. From Sea to Shining Sea
A girl in an AP US history class laughed at me when I was talking about driving to Alaska from Oregon. She insisted that Alaska was an island because of how it is separated out on maps from the rest of the USA. I don't know if she was necessarily the dumbest person I’ve met overall, but it was certainly the dumbest thing I ever saw someone insist that they were right about.
15. Carry That Weight
I asked a temp at work to weigh a couple of lever arch files for postage. She came back and told me that they were 65 kg. I asked if it were possible that it was 6.5 kg, but she insisted that it wasn’t. We argued about it for a good 5 minutes. It wasn’t until I asked her how much she weighed (59 kg) that it finally twigged in her mind that these two small folders couldn’t possibly weigh more than her. Thanks for nothing, Karen.
16. Put Some Brain Power Into This Thought Process...
My sister in-law is an anti-vaxxer, and believes that her kid’s cerebral palsy was caused by vaccines. She apparently thinks that this has more to do with it than the kid having been born with 1/4 of her brain physically missing.
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17. Ancient History
I went to school with a girl who legitimately thought that 9/11 was done by Nazi Germany.
18. Not All People Are Created Equal (in Intelligence)
My college roommate was, without a doubt, the dumbest person I have ever met. She was writing a paper about segregation and could not grasp how "separate but equal" was a bad thing despite two people trying their darndest to explain it to her. After nearly half an hour, my other roommate and I just gave up and left the room.
I still wonder how she passed that class. And she once asked what the difference between legal and illegal was. She wanted to know "which was the bad one." This girl now teaches elementary school. Her poor students.
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19. Going Ape
I know a girl who genuinely believes that gorillas and giraffes are not real, and that the ones at the local zoo are just people in costumes to entertain the children.
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20. A Mid-Day Snack
A kid I knew in fifth grade, Stevie. One day, the teacher is walking throughout the classroom and his shoe gets stuck on some red sticky stuff. He looks at it, sees a short trail, and follows it back to Stevie's desk. He looks inside Stevie's desk and finds sticky red goo covering a piece of sticky red paper with "Good Humor" written on it.
Yeah, Stevie brought a popsicle back from lunch and put it in his desk so that he could eat it later...
21. Astronomically Stupid
A girl in my class in middle school genuinely thought that people had landed on the sun before. Her explanation for this belief was to insist that the Moon and the Sun are made of the same stuff.
22. Shake It off
I had a friend once tell me that drinking protein shakes means that my muscles are all fake.
23. Ay Caramba!
I live in southern Spain. I once met a girl from the USA who was here on some kind of exchange program. When I asked her how she liked 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 don't know why the flight was so long!" Then I told her that we were in Europe. She didn't believe me. Her reply was "Europe? It can't be! Everyone here speaks Spanish, so we must be somewhere near Mexico for sure!" She was in university. I still don't know how or why...
24. Calendar Girl
A girl in my sophomore year of high school thought that there were only six months in a year. She was really nice, but very surprised and confused when we tried to set her right on that matter.
25. Ready, Aim, Fire!
A guy I know had just purchased a new, high-powered BB gun. We had just finished shooting it in the backyard when he decides to point the barrel right at my face and pull the trigger several times. I tell him to stop being an idiot. He just laughs and says "Relax, it's not loaded!" Given that we were just shooting it, I didn't believe him... Then, the moron puts the barrel right in his mouth and POP! Shoots a BB straight through his tongue and into his uvula.
26. Moo-ving 0n
A girl in my art class in high school thought that there was just a part of the cow’s body called “meat.” When we explained that meat is the muscles, she freaked out and became vegetarian.
27. Saving Face
I was working at a grocery store over a decade ago. This one kid was new and the manager asked him to “face” the store when he asked what he could do. “Facing” in this context means you make sure that 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 that one of the workers was just standing out in the parking lot, facing the store. I will never forget that!
28. Family Planning
One time, my now ex-girlfriend was watching Maury Povich. It was one of those paternity test episodes with the classic "You are NOT the father!" moment. She turns to me and says, "If we ever have a baby and I found out that I'm not the mother, I'll kill you!" I was totally speechless at this stupidity. Thankfully, we didn't end up reproducing…
29. A Powerful Moment
My friend Sara and I were once driving around in her car (in the late nineties), and her car battery died. We were only a mile away from my house, so I walked there, grabbed my car, and headed back. I parked and lifted her hood. She asked what I was doing. I told her that I was going to connect the jumpers, because her battery had died. This girl looked right at me and said, "My car runs on gas, not batteries!"
30. Does Not Compute
A girl at my school was using a calculator on a math test and accidentally typed in the problem wrong. She then proceeded to write “syntax error” as her answer on the test.
31. Eye Don’t Understand
In my college psych class, a girl asked, "Is eye color a behavior?" I had no idea how to react to that…
32. Stupidly Transmitted Dollars
Back in high school, a guy named Kevin was arguing with me, and anyone who would listen, saying that STDs are prevented by having intercourse. After about a minute of explaining to him what the word STD meant, I decided to just say, "let's agree to disagree" so I could finally move on with my day, even though he couldn't have been more wrong. But he didn't let it go. He pulled out a $50 bill from his wallet and bet me that he was right. After he looked it up, the crowd mentality forced him to pay up. Smart move there, kid!
33. Tropic of Cancer
A friend of mine thinks that cancer is a fictional illness made up by Big Pharma to scare people into taking medicine.
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34. Double Whammy
I had to explain to a girl that penguins were not a kind of fish. I then had to explain to another girl who I told this story to why the first girl was not correct. Am I the crazy one here??
35. Beliebe in Me
My ex roommate's boyfriend. He was 22, he actually idolized Bieber, One Direction, etc., and did everything he could to be like them. He was also homophobic, probably gay because he often wore his girlfriend's clothes from Forever 21, and refused to get a job because "the band is totally gonna make it!" He also pushed his girlfriend down a set of stairs, and was so in love with himself that he took mirror selfies, posted them on his Facebook, then sent them to his Facebook page that he made for himself.
Absolutely the worst person I've ever met. To make sure he didn't come to the house, I actually convinced him that our building was built on an ancient Indian burial ground, and that strange things did happen from time to time. He never came back.
36. Identity Crisis
I overheard a girl in my class say, "Wait, I thought pork chops came from chickens!" My friend had that comment made into a T-shirt.
37. Losing It All
I had a roommate who was about 6 months late on rent. It's a 10 month lease and we're in month 8. They're threatening to sue us. He got a tuition refund. $700. (2 months rent). He goes to play poker with it, despite our constant pleas not too. DOUBLES UP. He shows us the $1,400 (because he's dumb like that). This is Saturday night.
Office is closed Sunday. I go to work Saturday night, and then work a long shift Sunday, feeling good. Monday after classes, he comes in. First question, "did you pay the rent?" Bumbling stumbling excuses, "I paid off some credit card balances and some other money I owed my parents." "So how much did you give the complex?" "None."
Blew my lid, almost punched him right then and there. I will bet every penny to my name that he went back to the tables Sunday night and lost it all. Somehow he came up with the money though...
38. Them’s Fightin’ Words!
There was a guy who wound up wanting to fight me because I was explaining to him that "calamari" was Italian for "squid." He insisted that people do not ever, ever eat squid. This man also insisted that all zebras in Africa are extinct, despite my ability to show him photographic evidence to the contrary. Despite his ability to look it up.
39. Unpolished Knowledge of the Facts
My brother's girlfriend: "Did you know that Poland was the only country not affected by World War II?" I had no idea where to even begin with that one…
40. Quarterly Interest
I was working retail at the time, and this lady walked in and asked me to tell her when it was a quarter after 10 AM, as she needed to catch a bus. We were slow, so I obliged. 10:15 rolled around and I told her, so she dropped her stuff and ran out to get to the bus. Five minutes later, she comes back in scowling. She then lectures me on how to tell time. "How much is a quarter? 25 cents! So why would you tell me a quarter after 10:00 is 10:15?? It's 10:25!!"
41. And What Did You Answer?
Someone once asked me if Japanese was a real language. In high school. Twice.
42. Leaving This One Over
I had a boss who told me that she never kept leftovers from her meals, because “that was how polio got started.” Whatever that’s supposed to mean…
43. Peanut Allergy
I knew a guy who injected himself with peanut oil, hoping to slow the flow of blood to his brain and keep himself in a constant state of “high.” He's dead now. Not from the peanut oil, but from an overdose a few years later. I guess some of us could have seen that one coming…
44. Hail to the Chief
I was driving around with my sister, who is a year older than me, during the time of the 2012 election. She saw an Obama-Biden sign on someone’s lawn and said, "So that's Obama's last name? Biden?"
Wikimedia Commons, Daniel Schwen
45. Time Is of the Essence
My sister in-law once called me to ask, "How long is 90 days?" I awkwardly replied "...3 months?" She said "Thanks" and hung up. Glad I could help, I guess!
46. French Fried
A friend of mine thought that France was in Canada. Need I say more?
47. Summer Laughin’
I worked with this girl last summer who was beyond dumb. At first it was amusing, but then it just got really sad. We were talking about Nelson Mandela being really sick and she said, "Well I sure hope she'll be ok, her music is so good!" She also struggled to answer when asked what her boyfriend’s name was. Which, when we found out his name, was incredible. She said, "I can't really pronounce it, so I just call him Mike. He spells it like M I C H A E L."
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48. On the Job Failing
We hired a girl a couple of years ago. I told her where the manager's office was during her first day on the job. On her second day, she asked me where the manager's office was again, so I walked her to the door. On the third day, she asked me where it was yet again. At this point, it was pretty obvious that something was wrong. Our manager chewed out the girl who trained our new recruit for not teaching her the job properly. In response, the trainer pulled out her phone and showed the manager a picture of the new girl wearing the uniform backwards, saying, "Look at this. This is untrainable." The new girl got fired about three weeks later for stealing the product: she thought she just got it for free whenever she wanted as an employee.
49. All Out of Spite
I worked very briefly with a woman who showed herself to be both an idiot and a jerk. Her grandmother died and she and her relatives discovered that the man she'd known as her step-grandfather had never even been married to her grandmother. She bragged about the family kicking him out of the only home he'd known for three decades because, "If he wasn't good enough for my grandma to marry, he's not good enough for us."
He was an elderly man who lived as this woman's husband and had everything taken from him out of pettiness and spite. It showed me how stupid she was, and I was right. She was fired a week later.
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50. The Milk Is for the Baby
I'm a doctor, and I saw a patient who was concerned because she was still lactating, despite the fact that she stopped breastfeeding her twins two years ago. She said: "sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find my husband sucking on the breasts. He says he's trying to drain the milk for me." I had to explain to her that breastfeeding her husband will lead to continued lactation.
51.Never Coming Back
I used to hang out with this girl at her house when I was 14 or 15 (I am also a girl). One day she came out of her parent's room with something in her mouth. At first, I didn't realize what it was but once she sat back down on the couch, I saw that it was a… marital aid toy. In her mouth. And it was turned on...I kind of flipped out and asked her what the heck she was doing.
She said her gums hurt, so she was massaging them. The bad/sad/disgusting/weird thing was that she didn't even know what it was. She found it in her parent's room one day and thought it was for your teeth/gums so she just kept using it regularly. On top of that, her parents knew she used it for that purpose because they walked in and talked to her while she had it in her mouth.
I didn't go back.
52. The GOAT: Kevin
It's not uncommon as a teacher to have students who are a bit behind the curve in certain aspects, but 99.99999% of the time they are keen on something. They might not understand how to identify a noun or what "theme" is, but they somehow know how to make a mean plate of nachos. You learn pretty quick to not judge fish for their tree climbing ability, you know?
I thought this was the rule when I was teaching until I met Kevin. Kevin isn't his real name, but it doesn't matter because he can't spell it anyway. Kevin was a student of mine during my last year of teaching. He came to my classroom with very little to show for his academic past. He had moved a few times and thus was missing a lot of typical test scores that we use to try and ballpark their ability.
I thought, "That's fine. I'll just do some one-on-one with Kevin and see what's up." One-on-one with Kevin was like conversing with someone who'd forgotten everything in a freak, if not impossible, amnesia incident. There was no evidence that he had learned anything past the 2nd grade....and now he was in 9th grade.
Flabbergasted, I figured we needed to get more serious with this. If he was going to be in my class, I needed to know why and how. I decided to meet with him, his guidance counselor, his parents, and another teacher to see what was really going on. This is where it all became clear. It was by some incredible fluke that his family hadn't been wiped off the face of the Earth years ago.
Odds are his entire heritage was based on blind luck and some type of sick divine intervention that saves his family every time a threat presents itself. Kevin was the genetic pinnacle of this null achievement. Even my instructional lead, a woman who could find a redeeming trait in a Balrog, failed to see any reason this kid or his family should be alive today.
So here's a list of events that made it abundantly clear that god exists and he's laughing uncontrollably:
- Kevin frequently forgot when/where class was. On more than one occasion, I had to retrieve him from other classrooms.
- Kevin ate an entire 24 pack of crayons, puked, and then did it again the next day. This is 9th grade. I have no idea where he got crayons.
- Kevin's dad wrote tuition checks and mailed them to me...his English teacher. This was a public school. When I gave it back to Kevin, voided, to give to his dad with a brief note explaining that this is a public school, Kevin got in trouble for trying to spend it at 711 after school.
- Kevin was removed from the culinary arts program after leaving a cutting board on the gas stove and starting a fire....twice.
- Kevin threw his lunch at the School Resource Officer and tried to run away. He ran into a door and insisted it wasn't him.
- Kevin stole my phone during class. I called it. It rang. He denied that it was ringing. (Not that it wasn't his, not that he did it.....no, he denied that the phone was actually ringing). He tried it three times before the end of the year.
- Kevin called the basketball coach a bad name during gym. Basketball tryouts were that afternoon. Kevin tried out. It didn't go well.
- Kevin's mom could never remember which school he went to. She missed several meetings because she drove to other schools (none of which he ever went to).
- Kevin tazed himself in the neck before a football game.
- Kevin kept a bottle of orange Kool-Aid in his backpack for about 4 months. He thought it would turn into alcohol. He drank it during homeroom and threw up.
- Kevin stole another student's iPhone....and tried to sell it back to them.
- Kevin didn't understand that his grade was dependent on tests, quizzes, homework, classwork, and participation. Kevin finished his first semester with a 3% average. He tried to bribe me with $11.
- Kevin spit on a girl and said: "You should get out of those wet clothes." The girl was the Spanish Student Teacher.
- Kevin didn't know dogs and cats were different animals.
- Kevin tried to download adult videos onto a computer in the library.....at the circulation desk....while he was logged on.
- Kevin asked a girl to prom (he was in 9th grade and freshmen don't go to prom) by asking for her phone number and then texting her his address.
- Kevin got gum in his hair, constantly.
- Kevin regularly tried to cheat on assignments by knocking the pile over, grabbing one before I had picked them all up, and then writing his name on it wherever there was room.
- Kevin had several allergies, but neither his parents nor he could remember what they were. They were very concerned that "the holiday party" (it's high school, we don't have those) would have peanuts. When they finally got a doctor's note....he was allergic to amoxicillin.
- Kevin and his parents took a trip to Nassau (how the heck did they even get airline tickets?) and forgot all their luggage at home. I didn't believe him when he told me until I talked to his mom, who told me 1st thing when I saw her at the bi-weekly meeting.
- Kevin's grandfather apparently died in a chainsaw accident. I can only assume God was looking the other way that day.
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