When it comes to some people, their actions and ideas will never make sense. And yet, they always think they're in the right. From clueless relatives and unreasonable co-workers to ridiculous idiots and unreasonable classmates, these people are the most out of touch that the world has to offer.
1. Waste of Faith
A pastor of a small-town church insisted that members set up the parish hall and provide food and beverages for 125 people after every Sunday service. Here's the problem: the average attendance was 20 people. Week after week, month after month, tons of food needed to be disposed and large urns of coffee were thrown down the sink. All because the pastor was in denial about the reality of weekly attendance.
2. Off on the Wrong Foot
I will never forget the man who angrily told me, a wheelchair user with no feet and no prosthetics, to go down the stairs if I didn’t want to wait for the elevator.
3. An Extended Stay
I'm a nurse. The saddest, most in denial people I ever dealt with were the parents of a 35-year-old woman in a vegetative state. They refused to transfer her to a more suitable facility, even though she’d been in the same ward, barely conscious for over 20 years after suffering brain damage. They believed there was no reason to transfer since those facilities were for “lost causes,” which their daughter wasn’t.
They truly believed that their daughter was going to make a full recovery, finish school, get married, and be totally fine. It was heartbreaking.
4. Rich in Ignorance
In college, I had a ditzy roommate from the most sheltered part of Long Island. We met an exchange student from Switzerland, and I swear to god, my roomie said this in complete seriousness: "Wow, I didn't know people actually lived in Switzerland; I thought there were just banks there!" Oh honey.
5. Doing As I Say
A woman who I knew a few years ago had a job, but she was convinced that she was destined to be a huge movie star. She never did any acting though. She also told me about the married man who she had slept with, “he loves me, but he can’t leave his wife.” She actually did stop sleeping with him, but they still hung out.
6. All Checked Out
My cousin was spoiled and sheltered for her entire childhood all the way through college. Then her parents stupidly cut the leash without any preparation and released her into society. The results were disastrous. She quickly got in trouble for bouncing checks all over town. My mom picked her up and asked why she was writing bad checks everywhere.
My cousin was under the impression that as long as you had checks in your check book, you had money in your account. She didn’t understand that you deposit in a number and then can spend or withdraw up to that amount.
7. Not Enough Hours in a Day
A girl at my work always complains about not making enough money because she makes $200-$300 a paycheck. But she is always the first to leave early, shows up late, and constantly makes other people cover her shifts. She asked how I made $600-$800 a paycheck. I told her it was because I worked more hours than her. I was working her shifts!
She truly didn't realize that if you don’t work as many hours, you’ll be paid less.
8. Gimme, Gimme, Always Get
My sister grew up with everything handed to her. She was always a brat but one day, she took it to the next level. She literally cried when she got her first car because it wasn't the color she wanted. Now, she's married rich and can't fathom why I can't take off work whenever she wants me to. She says stuff like, "I wouldn't ask my boss for a week off; I would tell him I’m taking the week off."
9. Retail Therapy
My old "boss" was a 26-year-old girl who got to play with her mom's 4 million dollar company. Once, she told us we were all going on a group outing for bonding. She took us to an outlet mall four hours away and told the rest of us that she was going shopping and she'd see us later, which meant don’t follow me. Every 2 hours she'd tell us she was going to unload all of her bags to the huge rented van and would group text us that we can meet her there to unload as well.
We all get paid under $50k. We had nothing to unload. By lunch, she had proceeded to fill up the van. She then asked me where all my new stuff was, and I said I was trying to budget at the moment. She went, "Take out a credit card and go shop! That's the American way!" By 9 pm, her bags were taking up seats. People had to sit with her stuff. She spent $30k that day, and the rest of us spent about $70. We were tired and bored and cold. To this day, I still believe she thinks she did something nice for us and doesn't understand how polarizing and not at all team bonding that was.
10. Had to Be There
I work with a girl who is a flat earther and denies the existence of space. When the topic came up and I disagreed, she asked if I had ever been there. Obviously, I haven't. I told her I’ve also never been to Japan but that doesn’t mean it doesn't exist. She complained to management about my intolerance of her beliefs.
11. Perfectly Capable
I heard someone say out loud that, “My parents paid for half the down payment on my house, pay for our landscaper, housecleaner, child day care, car insurance, and give my wife and I a monthly allowance. We’re completely self-sufficient human beings who even try and give other friends financial advice.” The worst part? She really believed it.
12. Star C-Listed Lover
I had a friend who insisted she was in a relationship with a C-list celebrity who she met once at a comic convention. She was...completely nuts. All the celebrity’s Instagram and Twitter posts were for her, and everything had meaning behind it. When the celebrity got married, she said that it was just for the media for them to live a quiet life.
When he didn’t do anything for her birthday, she had a breakdown. She went to therapy not long after.
13. No Can Do
My sister-in-law’s boyfriend made her move out, so she had to stay with us for a few days. We suggested looking for a place to rent near us, but she refuses to live in the "scummy" part of town close by. Instead, she wants a three-bedroom house with a backyard in the best part of town. She has no savings and doesn’t know if she has a job.
She was a part-time cashier in a supermarket but stopped working out of nowhere even though the supermarket is still open; she’s just not going into work. When I suggested that maybe she could not afford to spend $500k on a family home, she suggested she’d “just get a council house,” despite the huge waiting list!
14. Can I Have Some?
My parent’s neighbor thought that her backyard was too small for her sons to play despite the fact that houses there were larger than average. When she met my parents for the first time, the first thing that came out of her mouth was ludicrous. She actually asked them was, "Can you give me some of your backyard so my sons have more space to play?" Thankfully, they said no.
15. It’s Not What You Think
My step-brother got into a weird gnostic religious group and thought he could convert people by talking to them Socrates style. There was one problem. Instead of talking, he was more harassing people, and dude had no ability to carry out a philosophical conversation. Also, he assumed the workplace was a fine place to do this, so he got fired from a lot of temp jobs.
He would assume that it was because of a conspiracy and the fight against his weird cult. After losing another job, he got work in a restaurant as a waiter, where he assumed for whatever unimaginable reason that he had to bow after taking an order. When his supervisor told him to stop, he lectured the supervisor on proper waitstaff manners. Later that month, he wanted to propose to a woman who was over 50 who had shown no signs of being interested in him.
Luckily, his dad talked him out of that idea. Then he thought of joining the navy and converting people from inside. At one point, he believed that sun rays could sustain you even if you didn't have water or food. He wants to live a free life as a wandering philosopher rather than live as a working drone like everyone else, however he does believe the working drones in his family should support his noble pursuit while also chastising them for selling out.
16. Climbing Different Pyramids
My sister-in-law legitimately believes she’s a strong, independent businesswoman who owns 3 major businesses. In reality, she works for 3 multi-level marketing schemes. But what’s irritating is that I actually have a brick and mortar business that I’ve been running for 5 years now, and she’s always giving me her “business“ advice.
And she’s always pushing me to join her for these amazing opportunities. It’s so stereotypically obnoxious. She says things like, “OMG HON I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND THE GRIND!!” Yeah, I bet you do! This is all said while she’s wearing brightly horrendous outfits, all caked-on makeup, and smelling like decaying frankincense.
17. Approach with Caution
I worked on shifts with a guy for years who thought every single person was out to get him. I’ve never met anyone who had such a warped sense of reality. He would joke with someone, then go away for the weekend, stew on one thing, then come in on Monday absolutely raging over taking something the complete wrong way.
I’ve personally seen him go after two people and I’d heard about a third. The thing is he’s so dopey, everyone thinks he’s harmless and, “That’s just the way he is.” A guy I trained as an apprentice has just started on shifts with him, and he doesn’t take anyone being a jerk well at all. I think they’ll do well together.
18. A Trick Question
I went to a private international school in London as a teenager. Most kids there had parents working good jobs, but in-between them were some filthy rich kids with parents in the oil industry or something. In eighth grade, we’re talking about Easter break, and my friend from Belgium was talking about his family trip.
He was talking about how his family had decided at the last minute to visit over the break, but they had to drive there because there were no flights available. Then this Russian billionaire classmate of mine asked him, "Why don't you take a private jet?" She was so clueless and didn't get it even when we all started laughing at her.
19. A Capital Idea!
I used to work at Starbucks, where a regional manager told the board that instead of having merit-based raise changes up to 5%, she was changing the policy to only ever increase to a flat 2%. When she asked if people liked the new raise plan, I said actually no, workers would feel unmotivated without a reason to perform better than just normal. She replied, “well, your staff needs to realize working isn’t about money.”
20. Fast Acting Ideas
I dated this girl who believed her roommates were spying on her and that every time they had friends over and were hanging out in the common areas and laughing, it was because they were spying on her in her room. She also believed the government was spying on her and her parents directly. Our relationship lasted about a week.
21. Choosing Mutiny
One meanie of a boss got a new job. He proceeded to ask the three people who suffered most from his behavior if they wanted to move to his new employer with him and stay on as his underlings. Hmm....how does "no way ever" sound?
22. Don’t Pokemon the Bear
I knew someone who unironically tried to convince me that not only is Pokemon demonic, but they exist in real life, and there are reported cases of then attacking and harming people.
23. You Don’t Know That
An ex became really religious, and I'd still talk to her sometimes. The topic of flat earth theories came up, and she said she thinks it's possible that it could be true. I tried to explain that we have more than enough imagery and data indicating that the earth is round. Her response made my jaw drop. She said Satan could have planted them all. You just can't come up with a response to that.
24. Hard to Bend
I worked at a software company in downtown Boston. One of the best perks was the flexible hours and work-from-home days. I knew I could drop my kids off at school and get in by 9:30, and my boss had no issues with it. Others who had children would work similar schedules. After a few years, a new CEO came and ruined everything.
She spent a month observing how the office worked, then called for a company meeting. She said that a full office 8-5 was the most productive environment, and at the start of the next month, all work from home was canceled, and she wanted everyone in the office during those set hours. A big debate ensued with discussions of there being very little warning, to pleas of flexibility, to concerns of making necessary childcare arrangements especially given that in many cases like school, we couldn't adjust those times. Plus, commuting into Boston sucks.
After listening, she responded with this long speech of appreciating the sacrifices everybody has to make to improve the company. She ended it by saying, "I understand where you're all coming from! Years ago, when my kids were little, my husband and I had to hire three nannies to cover all of the times we had to work!" We all looked around at each other, utterly speechless. It was also the moment I realized I would have to start looking for another job. When the millionaire CEO thinks hiring 3 nannies is a relatable example to her middle-class employees, it's pretty clear she's not going to change her mind.
25. Knocked It Off
My “friend” took my credit card information and bought tons of expensive stuff. I asked her if it was her before reporting it, knowing that one, she was going through a tough time, and I wanted to give her a chance to make it right and two, that I could be in trouble if I reported it and they didn’t believe I wasn’t in on it.
They could say that I had stuff delivered to my friend and make a claim for the money back. She said it wasn’t her. I thought someone else had done it and reported it. When she got caught, she said she didn't think, “they'd take it that far.” She thought you could call banks to get the money back with no investigation.
26. Yacht Did You Say?
I was a stable hand at a very upper tier barn in a wealthy part of the USA. The staff have to sign non-disclosure agreements to protect clients. On one particularly scorching July day, I overheard a client venting to another about a problem that made her "incredibly stressed" and say that she was "going to have a mental breakdown."
Her problem was that her first choice catering company was all booked for the weekend of her last-minute yacht party. I'm paycheck to paycheck and had around a total of three days off since Christmas. I would love for a yacht party to be my basis for a mental breakdown. The staff had a healthy chuckle hearing that one.
27. From Stream to Reality
A Twitch streamer who I watched a couple times talked about his girlfriend. Except his "girlfriend" was a female streamer who lived in Europe. He lived in the US and never actually met her in his life. She got wind of this and debunked the story on her stream saying they had never even interacted before. This caused him to go nuts.
He started stalking the girl wherever he could, which caused her to eventually have to stop streaming, delete all her social media, and so on. After his Twitch account was banned for this, he eventually managed to convince Twitch to remove the ban...and then he did it again to a different girl. Now he’s been permanently banned from Twitch as a result of this again and keeps raging about it on Twitter. Dude needs to change his life.
28. Pulling Out All the Stops
My female cousin who was getting married was a very shy, nice, but not popular kid. She also didn’t attend family events or really build relationships with anyone. She was marrying a gentleman who was very similar to her: shy, quiet, reserved. But her family was pretty well off, so any wedding was an excuse to have a huge expensive wedding.
Even though she asked for a small wedding, her family invited all of the family members and other guests. And even though they didn’t get any RSVPs back, they still went all out on the venue, food, and entertainment. It was the same with the groom who wanted a small wedding and did not have much of a social group/family.
When wedding day came, there were only about 10-15 guests in a venue set up to entertain and feed over 150 people with an open bar though the bride and groom did not drink. The bride and groom were both extremely embarrassed, and it ruined the whole day for them. I always just felt really bad for her. Neither the bride or groom were bad people, but they were just reserved and private people that had a very special day ruined by oblivious parents.
Wikimedia Commons, Kenny Louie
29. Beyond Funny
When I was a newbie lawyer, at my very first hearing, an established solo attorney from a different state represented my adversary. We will call him Brad. I had spoken to him a few times over the phone and considered him competent and a passionate advocate. My co-counsel and I, both women, met Brad at the courthouse to chill out before the trial.
The first thing Brad said was, "hi." The second thing he said was, "let me show you a picture of my wife." Brad is in his early 60s, small, and bald. He took out his phone and showed us a photo of this little girl who he assured us was 20 but looked all of 15. He told us that she's from Dominica. We just stared at him in horror. As we stared at him, he, unprompted, related to us a hilarious anecdote about going to the mall with her begging him to buy her stuff while calling him daddy. Brad thought we would be impressed. We were not impressed.
30. Fish Out of Water
I once met a 25-year-old college graduate who was a marketing major and had absolutely no idea that dolphins and whales were mammals. Then they went on and asked if penguins were mammals too…
31. Made Up My Mind
My father is a habitual liar. I somehow think he believes his own lies. Over the past couple of years, I've noticed he doesn’t actually have anything new to say. He regurgitates sentences in slightly different ways. It’s caused his business to fail. He lied to every employee saying that he had to liquidate the company. He went so far as to tell people he met with lawyers and the process has been started.
I did some digging and found out the truth. There were no lawyers or liquidation. He just tried to duck the system and avoid having to do things by the book, like giving his hard-working employees severance packages. I have no contact with him, but my brother says he is still trying to use the same tactics. I just think he believes everything.
32. That’s Incredulous!
My boss's wife is 28. She grew up in a wealthy family and married a man who was the 3rd generation owning the company where he worked, and they were even a regional power. She was talking to a staff that, in general, made $36K a year mumbling about a staffer who was on his honeymoon. "Tennessee?! Really?! HA! Tennessee?!"
She looked around the room for everyone to join in laughing with her. "My GOD! How did she agree to that? We did Hawaii and that was the least of what I told him was acceptable.”
33. Hard Pass
I had an ugly, mean, unemployed friend who believed he deserved a perfect 10 girlfriend. He only asked women who were way out of his league. It was so cringey. He really had no self-awareness. In the club, he would walk up to supermodel types and ask them out and would come back mad when they would always shoot him down.
He eventually moved to Brazil because he was convinced American women were too smug to appreciate his excellence. And the crazy thing was that he wasn’t just playing any “confidence is sexy” game or anything; he 100% believed in this. He saw himself as a god.
34. Penance for a Predator
I had a neighbor who was convinced that I was flirting with him and wanted to be with him. He got all of this from one-word verbal exchanges we would have while getting our mail, which was just basically, “hey.” At the time, I was a minor in high school, and he was in his late twenties. He then harassed and stalked me.
He would always message me online declaring his love for me and feeling wronged because I was playing “hard to get.” He would knock at our house door when he knew my parents weren’t home and try to lure me out so that he could just “talk to me.” He searched me up on all my social media accounts and tried to contact me.
He had used my last name from our mail box and searched for me. It did not help that we lived in the same building. I got so scared that I could no longer go outside for a run like I usually did. I filed a report, and his family asked me to please forgive his son. This completely freaked me out, and we decided to move.
35. Distancing Myself
My brother told me, “I’m avoiding Asian people if I see them on the street or anything. You know, for safety because of the coronavirus.” He’s Asian. OUR ENTIRE FAMILY IS ASIAN.
36. It Made Sense to Me
My cousin's wife got very sick while we were at a wedding in Mexico because she drank no water. She only had drinks. She said, "there were ice chips in my drinks, so I thought it was enough." She also complained at the hospital because some of the staff couldn't speak English. YOU'RE IN A SPANISH-SPEAKING COUNTRY!
37. In the Purest Sense
My mother, and several people in my family, believe that God marks people. If someone ultimately has a good soul, they're white, and I'm sure you can guess where it goes from there. If only non-white people did bad things, it would make sense, but you don't even have to look at much of the world to see that isn’t true.
When I try to bring up that a lot of white people do awful things, her logic is, "they're lost souls that will eventually find their way." Meanwhile, she'll believe a non-white person will never find their way even if they act like they have. The level of delusion this takes is one of the most frightening things to me.
38. Aging Richly
My grandparents gave my mother and father $20K in 1965. My parents were able to buy a house with the money. 50 years later, my mother gave me and my sisters $10K each. She didn’t understand that houses were ten times the price now, and she accused us of not being good with money because she was able to do it back then.
At the time, she was sitting on a ton of money in the bank and was 100% aware that to buy a house in her neighborhood would cost around $1M. That would be 100 times the amount of money she gave us and 50 times as much money as her parents gave her. God, if only I could be so good with money as she was. I’m not saying the $10K wasn't nice. Just saying she expected us to become her neighbors with no understanding of inflation while thinking half the amount she was given 50 years earlier should be enough while knowing full well the value of her house.
39. What a Bargain
I have an aunt who's never really worked a day in her life because her husband created his own business early on in life. They live in a McMansion, and I was over once, and we got to talking about fitness, and she told me the most cringey thing I've ever heard. She said, "oh yeah, we send Pamela to this special training gym. It’s only $200 a week. You should try it!"
The fact that to her it was "only $200" really pained me. I made $9.95 an hour at the time. She's nice enough but not in touch with reality at all.
40. Worst House Guest Ever
My friend found this mad German woman in a shed who’d been “unfairly” dismissed from work and was broke. I said she could live with us until she was okay. Big mistake. She was fired because she was crazy and impossible. She spewed vegan nonsense and believed only cabbages and carrots were all the nutrition humans need.
She would cry and hide in her room if we cooked food. She thought she was an astronaut. She was convinced our Prime Minister would come to our house and hear her story of grief and give her a work visa. She spent 5 years travelling around Germany with a cat in a box and wanted to bring her entire family to New Zealand.
Her family included her 2 daughters who were 21 and 23, her disabled 83-year-old mother, and her 18-year-old cat. She would support them solely on her minimum wage job. She told everybody that she had a Master’s Degree in Education. I saw her resume, and all it had was a couple of 2-day seminars on some Steiner nonsense.
I brought an orphaned lamb home to look after, and she said it was the most disgusting animal she had ever seen. She thought she could heal a friend’s dog with cancer by feeding him avocados. We ended up making her leave because she was so argumentative and would lose it on a daily basis. She even threatened to sue me.
She said, “I must have free accommodation! You are breaching my Human Rights!”
41. Like the Common Folk
A friend of a friend is the son of a billionaire. I met our mutual friend at university, and he himself was very, very rich, but a pretty normal, nice guy, and wanted to go out for his birthday, which was when his rich friend was visiting. He understood that we were poor students, so we headed to a normal bar and club.
His billionaire friend was a fish out of water. In the first bar, he ordered every cocktail on the menu because he didn't want to have a glass of just one. He wanted to drink from whichever he chose at the time and already have it at hand. The staff weren't impressed, but they complied since he was paying for all our drinks.
He also paid two security guards to follow him around for the night. That was weird in the nightclub; he really didn't look like he was having a good time, and people kept trying to take photos of him. In the end, he left and went and stayed in a hotel for the night.
42. Find a Way
We have a group of people who want to increase downtown access by removing the interstate. They’re “urban planner" types who live and work at the university. I asked one how people who live 25 or 30 miles outside of the city were supposed to make it to work without the interstate. Their response was infuriating. They told me they could, “get a bike.”
43. By God’s Strength
An ex-friend of mine was pretty out there. She withheld the crazy for a good long time, I have to admit. Eventually, she claimed she could curse me and that she was married to Lucifer if he looked like Benedict Cumberbatch as well as Loki but the Marvel Movie-verse one, which is basically Tom Hiddleston playing a role.
The thing is, she was really charismatic. She was funny and into art and comics and writing like I was. She claimed to have had “drama” with her last group of friends and that it was pretty awful. Everybody experiences that, so it was easy to empathize with her at first. Slowly, she started just losing her grip on reality.
She claimed to be pagan, which was fine, but it got weirder. She claimed to be “godspouse.” I didn’t understand. She said it meant she had a deeper relationship with her god than most people. I said, "you mean like marriage? because the word “spouse” being in there and all. She said, "yes, exactly. I'm married to him."
I started pulling away from her after that. She told me this huge convoluted story about needing money for a car payment; she had paid on time, but they claimed it was late, so she was charged a hidden fee. She had very little food money for her and her daughter the next week, and I admit, it tugged on my heartstrings.
It was all a lie along with her, "I am married to these imaginary people," but she knew how to manipulate people, and I was an easy sucker especially when it comes to a child in danger of not eating. When I finally said enough is enough, she had a big meltdown and started telling me how I never should have crossed her.
She also said that her husbands imbued her with powers, and she'd curse me. So far, nothing yet. Strangely, she also claimed to be a fallen angel, a dragon, and other fictional people. She's reinvented herself, and as the rumors go, she's tricked more people out of money. Luckily, her daughter now lives with relatives.
Is it possible to be both a fake and totally out of touch with reality? I spoke with a few of her old friends, and it turns out, she cycles through groups of people like this every few years. And it’s like she erases the past few years in her life, starting over with new friends/sources of cash and many new obsessions.
44. The Career Dance
A girl I knew from high school gained 40 pounds from freshman to senior year and gave up her dance training, which she had done for years. She became notorious for snorting at parties and sleeping around. She didn't seem to care much about school. Despite all this, she claimed to have received a full dance scholarship.
It was for a college with a pretty prestigious dance program, and she claimed to have gotten a 1500 out of 1600 on her SATs, which would’ve been the highest score in my high school. After college, she got a job as a segment producer at a cable news channel and got fired. She said she got bored there and wanted to move.
She wanted to go to another network with more professional opportunities. She moved over to a lesser known network only available by satellite and online. She got fired again. According to her, she’d reached the peak of the journalistic world and, realizing there was nothing left to accomplish, decided to give that up.
Then she messaged me one day saying me that she had an "epiphany" and wanted to be a lawyer. I asked her some questions, and it was clear that she'd given it no thought. She was sure she'd be great at it however. She bought an LSAT book and posted a picture of it on Instagram. So far though, she’s never taken the LSAT.
A month later, she wrote a post stating that she scored her first by-line and was breaking back into the journalistic world. She was blogging for an unknown conservative blog. It lasted for three posts and then, from what I can tell, she was fired again. A few weeks later, she made another announcement on social media.
She said that she was, "moving over to the public sector," and added, "no JD required!!! (for now)." However, she avoided saying what she would be doing. I found out that her dad got her a job working part-time as a dispatcher like every job/career she's had before, this is her calling!
45. You Know What I Mean
I was working in a pharmacy and answered a call. The voice said, “hello. Can I get the yellow ones, please?” I asked, “sorry, could I get your name first?” “It doesn't matter. I just need the yellow round ones.” I asked him, “did you have a prescription?” He said, “no. I always get them here. Little yellow round ones.”
It went on like this for like 20 something minutes. In that time, I found out that by little yellow round ones, he meant red/orange circular Xarelto tablets. He had been on a lower dose a couple of years ago, and he had not filled the yellow ones in over 18 months. There was one dispense technician who knew who he was.
The technician also knew his doctor, and by sheer coincidence, she'd greeted him every time he was there. He physically had no idea how a pharmacy worked. He'd only even been to this one, only ever picked up one medication, and only through one technician who knew the doctor who sent his prescriptions every few months.
It was surreal explaining reality to somebody who by pure fortune had never experienced it.
46. Still Have a Problem
I'm a vet tech. A lot of people bring their dog in because of a stray attack on a walk. They tell me, "but it's not my fault my dog got attacked!" when they didn't have the money to pay for the laceration repair on their dog. Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean you don’t have to take responsibility to fix it.
47. I Can Do Anything I Want
My college classmate, let's call him Rob, is very out of touch; he was a classic sheltered rich kid who's never experienced the world. Rob started his college career by insulting and swearing at people, and apparently thinking that was okay. It was not. People reported him several times before he finally got the message and stopped.
It gets worse. He wants his first job to pay him $50,000 salary otherwise it’ll all be over for him. He hasn't yet realized that your first job will almost always be at the bottom of the hierarchy. And you'll rarely be paid $50,000! Rob also thought that it’d be very easy to become an English teacher in Japan. In his words, "you just fly there, speak English, and you’re hired." He hasn't considered that he’ll need a teaching degree or that he’ll have to compete with others who apply to be English teachers in Japan.
48. Professional Understanding
Medical trainees were learning how to perform a pelvic exam on a female patient. The lecture emphasized neutral terms and how to perform an exam in the most professional way possible. A male student complained that he didn’t understand why we’re being so picky, which then made me realize something.
Nowhere explicitly stated that, “many people have been physically traumatized, so we don’t want to re-traumatize them.” I said it to the class, and we discussed how even if he does not mean to, he can scare or hurt an already traumatized person, how he can never tell, and 30% or more of women have a history of assault.
He genuinely had never known this, and once I got through to him, I could tell it really shook him. Months later, prostate exam lectures were much less professional and much more “hur, hur, hur bums.” He came to me and asked why they were different and couldn’t men also be victims. It prompted some changes in policy. A good man.
49. A Scientific Feet
My girlfriend was traveling in China when she was 18 years old, and once, a man randomly approached her claiming to be a scientist performing a medical study on feet. He’d need to measure the exact dimensions of her feet. For this, she obviously had to take off her shoes and socks, and he’d taken a couple pictures too.
Years later, she told this story to me and some friends in a bar. At first, we started laughing but then realize she wasn't joking and still didn't realize what had happened there. We actually had to spell it out for her. I'm sure she made some Chinese foot lover's day.
50. Wiping Away Independence
International schools are prime hunting grounds for out of touch people. A friend of my mom’s was a school counselor at an international school in Indonesia. They were organizing a school trip for the 13-year-olds in year nine. It was a top dollar school, and it was going to be a top dollar trip at a fancy, pricey hotel.
One of the parents came and asked her about the toilet situation. She replied saying each room had an en-suite, so the kids will be fine. The mother then replied with the most ridiculous question: “But who will wipe his bottom?” Apparently, this kid actually had a maid who slept at the end of his bed at night and had to wipe his privileged bum for him.
Sources: Reddit,
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