Have you ever found yourself dumbfounded by the actions of others? Perhaps you’ve come across individuals who seem to defy all logic and reason, leaving you with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. Well, you’re not alone! As the famous quote goes, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
This is bound to leave you gasping for breath, both from laughter and utter astonishment!
I used to work in payroll for a 24-hour facility that did paper time sheets. One time, I sent a timesheet back to a supervisor because the employee listed 28 hours in one day. The supervisor tried to talk to the employee, but the employee swore I was trying to underpay him. He asked for a meeting with me and the Controller. During this meeting, he said he worked overnight in the residential area, then covered two school shifts, and had another overnight scheduled that day – for 28 total hours.
I tried to explain that there are only 24 hours in a day, and he said, “According to who? You? (pointing at me) You? (pointing at the controller) You?! (pointing at his supervisor) All of you just want to underpay me because it’s overtime! Do you think I’m dumb? Do you think I’m not educated? I know my rights, and you have to pay me for the time I work, and that day, it was 28 hours!”
My cousin called her mom panicking because she was making banana bread and her bowl was too small and the ingredients were falling out while she tried to mix by hand. Aunt told her to find a larger bowl. She had one. I refused to eat that banana bread because if she can’t think to get a larger bowl I don’t want to know how she read that recipe.
My friend’s girlfriend was showing her new driver’s license and one girl looking at it said “You’re an organ donor!?! What organ did you donate!”
A former coworker was talking about how she wanted to go back to school to get her master’s degree because she only had a “bachelorette” degree and wanted more job opportunities. I said, “Do you mean a bachelor’s degree?” She INSISTED it was pronounced bachelorette when it was given to a woman. Then she led me back to her office and pointed at her diploma, to the word Baccalaureate, and said, “SEE?! Bachelorette!”
An old boss had a morning routine of walking around the office with a bucket. He was watering all of the plastic flowers.
I’m a physician. Eye doctor specifically. I will tell you that the longer I work (now 15 years), my standard for the “average” person continues to decline. Case in point: Thanks to the awful information filtering out there, I had a patient just last week who read that Vitamin D helps you resist a Coronavirus infection. Well, he had also read that you can 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 permanently reducing his vision with no chance of future improvement.
My husband has a friend who racked up a couple of thousand dollars in credit card debt. She usually was the one getting the mail, but one day her husband got it and opened up the statement. He confronted her with the number and the fact that it looked like the balance had never been paid in the several months she’d had it. She had no idea what he was talking about. She didn’t know you had to pay a bill for using your own money. He explained to her over and over that credit cards aren’t money and they don’t work the same as debit cards, and you have to pay the balance on them after using them. She wasn’t getting it. He took control of the card after that. Luckily he had enough in savings and enough income that he paid it off within a month or two, but he wasn’t happy.
When I was in high school, we were reading a short story about what would have happened if the Japanese attacked us back with nuclear weapons after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A girl in my class raised her hand and said something along the lines of “Why does this matter? None of it is real anyway”. The teacher had to ask her to clarify, but this girl thought WWII and the bombing of Japan were just from a movie and didn’t actually happen.
The best part is: the girl was half-Japanese.
Getting a misdialed call from a random person who gets mad at you because you’re not the one he/she was looking for. Happens to me several times a year.
Customers argue that their tattoo is backward while their artist tries to explain that no, your tattoo is fine, it just looks backwards because that’s how mirrors work
A girl in one of my college classes argued that heart transplants shouldn’t be allowed because “that’s where the feelings are” and the person receiving the heart wouldn’t be the same person anymore.
Shadowed a doctor for a premed program, and had one patient that raised the bar for me.
Newly diagnosed diabetic. The Dr prescribed the patient a low dose of insulin to see how they handle it, scheduled a follow-up around a week later, demonstrated how to inject the insulin and sent them on their way.
The patient comes back for the follow up reporting no change. The doctor checks their blood glucose and it’s pretty much exactly the same as last time. Even if the patient had been diabetic for years while it got more severe and only just found out (they hadn’t), there should have been SOME reaction to the insulin. So here’s the thing- the doctor used an orange to demonstrate how to inject the insulin, rather than administering it to the patient. He was very clear about where and how to use the insulin. The patient, however, was confused. They had been injecting their insulin into an orange and eating it. Insulin. One of the most well-known and commonly used medications in the world. Never thought “Huh, if I was supposed to eat it, wouldn’t it be a pill? Maybe I’ll call the doctor and ask, or just do a Google search because it seems like needles are used for injecting not ingesting”.
Be honest with your doctor people. If you’re this dumb, trust me they’ve already realized. They aren’t cheap, use their time while you have it.
Me, on a call with my mom, getting ready to leave the house but spending 20 minutes freaking out that I can’t find my phone.
My mom, asking if I’d checked my purse.
A friend of mine showered in cold water for a year cause he never thought of turning the other tap to see what it would do.
I used to work for a chatbot app. Our app would text our users every morning with a greeting in a different language, i.e. Hola, Bonjour etc. One day we got blown up by a user saying their account was hacked. She said, “My name is Kim Smith, not Kim Konnichiwa, someone’s hacked my account!” When we explained that our service has been clearly saying hello to her in other languages every day and that Konnichiwa is hello in Japanese and her account was fine, she went on a racist rant and said Disney was behind the destruction of America. Yep.
I just had a customer yell at me for putting their eggs in a separate bag, saying they don’t want all those bags and the paper ones always rip. Before putting it in the bag and throwing a pound of flour on top.
It was somewhat satisfying seeing their face as we heard the cracks until I realized I’m the one who needed to clean it up. Oh, also she complained that we hadn’t warned her about the fragility of eggs.
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 vegetarians can eat poultry??? She said 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 D*MN.
I worked in retail for a few years and it taught me that many people are either incapable or unwilling to read. I have had people walk up to me to ask me how much something is, only for the price tag to be featured prominently on the item.
“It’s $9.99, ma’am.”
“HOW DID YOU KNOW?”
“It says so on the price tag, ma’am.”
I worked with a lady who was remarking on how a friend of hers had lost a bunch of weight. She pondered, “I wonder how many diet cokes she had to drink to do that.”
I used to work in Banff National Park. One day at the end of the tour I was driving some guests back to their hotel and a woman was adamant that Banff was clearly a very dangerous place to visit since we “just let wild animals run around everywhere! They should be in cages!”
Had to fight the urge to throw her off the bus pretty hard.
I work at a restaurant
We were low on tomatoes for our tomato soup, so one person grabbed potatoes to see if we could use those instead.
I worked at Little Caesars and we were proofing the dough for pizza. My boss said (at 7 pm) that the dough needed to rise for 12 hours, and took out her calculator to do the math. So I said ummm that’s gonna be 7 am. Then she said the dough will expire in 48 hours and started doing the math again. I told her it would expire two days from now, and she said “That’s kinda weird how that works out huh?”
I quit shortly after that.
I was in High School I once had a friend come up to me bragging about his PSAT. I recognized immediately that he got a pretty poor score. When I mentioned to him that I didn’t think it was a very good score, he confidently proclaimed:
“But it says I’m smarter than 15% of Juniors, and I’m only a sophomore!”
To which I rebutted:
“Yeah, but imagine the DUMBEST 15% of people. That’s not very good.”
My ex had a student, one who occasionally misspelled his own name, turn in a very well-written essay that just so happened to be clearly printed off the internet, including the URL at the bottom. He gave the kid a zero. The kid’s grandmother came into the office completely distraught because she KNOWS her grandson wrote that essay. Her proof? He said he wrote it. When it was shown to her on the internet, she insisted that he must have written it and put it on that website himself. Thank goodness the principal was a good one and let her know she didn’t buy that for a minute.
When I was a sophomore in high school, a classmate asked to borrow a pen, and I lent him one of mine that had the Eiffel Tower on it. He asked where the building was from, and I said Paris. He gave me a confused look and asked where Paris was. Was it further away than Chicago? Now it was my turn to be confused. We were in high school, how the heck did he not know Paris was in France? But whatever, maybe he’s not the brightest. So I inform him that Paris is in France.
But he still looks utterly confused. I assume he misheard me, so I started explaining it. *”France, you know, like, FRANCE. From history class? World War II, Napoleon… that France.” He said he was bad at history and had never heard of France before. He then asked me if it was another state, or was it like a region of our state.
Utterly baffled at this point, I tried to explain that it was another country entirely, and it was in Europe. Exasperated, I remember saying “You know, Europe?! That other continent?” He still looked confused, so I added “THE LAND ACROSS THE OCEAN!”
Finally, there is recognition on his face. He tells me he heard of oceans before, he thinks he understands now.
I remind you that this encounter, with a student who didn’t know what Europe was, took place in high school.
I worked as a frontline tech support for a big internet provider. Pick any call.
Want an example?
“My internet is h*lla choppy, I can’t do anything”
Ok, can you describe what you mean by “choppy”
“The arrow thing jumps all over the place”
The cursor? Make sure your mouse is clear of debris and on a smooth surface.
“Mouse? I ain’t got no mouse. What do I want a mouse for?”
Are you on a laptop?
“No! I’m on my Internet! I just bought this internet computer thing, spent like 5 hours putting it together and it doesn’t work!”
Ok, the thing you are using to move the cursor? That’s the mouse. Make sure it’s on a clean, smooth surface
“Wait, that’s not a pedal? I’m supposed to use that with my hand?”
I work for a cupcake shop that takes deliveries and this just happened today. A lady calls, pissed, saying the cupcakes she ordered for her brother never arrived. This is concerning because all the morning deliveries had been made! I frantically start texting the delivery driver about what happened, in case it went to the wrong place, but she swears up and down it was delivered with no problems to the recipient’s assistant since he wasn’t in the office at the time. I call the lady back, explaining this, and she tells me “Oh that makes sense. He hadn’t asked if anything had come for him, so I’ll tell him to ask for his cupcakes.” Love when people jump to the worst conclusions about our staff instead of just telling their loved ones they have a delivery and should look around for it for more than two seconds.
Years ago, I had to apply for some kind of government program. Can’t remember what. Probably something to do with my kids’ health insurance. But that’s immaterial.
I had just closed the doors on a dismally failed business, which was why I was applying for the program. They had me fax all of my earnings and bookkeeping paperwork… most of which had zeroes or negative numbers on them. The person on the phone was looking at the papers I faxed them the day before.
Finally, the guy said, “Sir, I’m going to go ahead and transfer you to our financial expert.” He used that word…”Financial Expert.” (Remember that. It’s important.)
After a brief 40-or-so minutes on hold, I was talking to the “Financial Expert.” We went back and forth for a while and she was obviously confused. (My paperwork was as simple and basic as you can imagine, mind you. Like first-lesson-in-high-school-accounting simple) She sighed with frustration. Oh, really? YOU’RE frustrated, b*tch?
Here it comes:
After 20 minutes or so, she asks me, “What does ‘Sooo’ mean?”
I get confused. I look everywhere. The word “Sooo” is nowhere on the papers. I say, “Ma’am, you’re looking at an exact copy of the papers I’m holding in front of me. The word ‘Sooo’ isn’t on any of these pages.”
Well, to make a long story slightly less long, it took me another 10 minutes or so to realize that she, a supposed government agency “FINANCIAL EXPERT,” was mistaking the numeric designation for no money — “$0.00” —- for the word “Sooo.”
A Financial f*cking Expert… didn’t… know… what “$0.00″… meant. Financial expert.
That was the moment I realized that George Carlin was being generous when he said, “Picture how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of them are even stupider than that.”
Watching someone wear a mask to the grocery store, then take it off so that she could sneeze into her hand.
I have an ex who refused to believe different people had different body temperatures. He would get annoyed if I was cold & he wasn’t as (apparently) it wasn’t possible
Ex-coworker one asked why we don’t we just use helicopters as a cheap way to go to space as they can go straight up into the air.
“Can I get a medium pizza?”
“We actually only have large.”
“Oh okay. Let me get a small then.”
“We… We only sell large pizzas… “
“Oh, I see now. I’ll go ahead and get the medium then.”
My brother told me a story about a girl at his job. They were decorating the store for Christmas and they have stairs in the middle of the store. This girl placed a ladder next to the stairs to put up the decoration not realising she could have used the stairs… Almost couldn’t believe it when he told me.
I was a bartender and we have a 50% off everything happy hour. Had a woman tell me how the happy hour at another place was better because it was buy one get one free. After I attempted calmly to explain to her she got upset with me and asked to see my manager who then tried to explain the same thing to her. We ended up giving her the vodka soda she orders for free and letting her leave. Pretty sure she still does not understand.
Driving. (Speaking about Americans here, at least) I don’t understand how people can spend lots of money on cars and finance them for many years just to be like whatever while they text or do anything else while driving and lose it all. And no one EVER will say it’s their fault. They always think they’re right.
I mean I guess if driving around a two-ton mass of machinery is easy and harmless I don’t want to see those same people in control of any large equipment.
I was born legally blind. Basically, I have a bit of usable, navigational vision in my left eye, but I’m totally blind in my right. The amount of people who freak the f*ck out when they see me traveling independently astounds me. The fact that I have to tell grown-*ss men and women to use their words instead of their hands because they think it’s okay to touch, grab, grope, spin me around or handle me in any other way because they think it’s helping me is unbelievable.
I can’t stand strangers touching me without permission. I get that people mean well, but if you wouldn’t do that to a sighted person, it’s not okay to do it to me. The idea that people think they have to grab us to help or communicate is pretty stupid in my opinion. Think before you act. Don’t be so d*mn impulsive when you see us out in society. We’re fine. We don’t need to be grabbed.
Not to mention those who talk to us like we’re toddlers the minute they see our white cane, service dog or any other access device. I don’t need you to dumb life down for me, I just need you to treat me as an equal. End rant.
Many years ago I was applying for a job at an office. There were 5 or 6 of us there in the waiting area and the receptionist handed each of us a clipboard with an application and a sheet of paper under it. The application was straightforward and simple. The second page was where things got interesting. It was a list of 20 numbered instructions.
The first line said, “Read this entire page before doing anything on it.” The second line said, “Print your full name and today’s date on top of this sheet”. The next 17 lines were instructions that got more ridiculous as they progressed. A few of them said to write things on paper while others instructed them to perform physical actions. There were guys standing up and saying their names out loud, hopping on one foot, spinning in a circle and scribbling all over the paper. All really dumb stuff that had nothing to do with the job but they were doing it.
As this was happening I made eye contact with the receptionist and both of us were trying very hard not to laugh. Apparently, I was the only one who read the entire page as instructed before beginning. The last item simply said, “Don’t do anything on this list except for number one and number two.”
It was obviously a simple test to see how well we could follow basic instructions. I got the job but so did a couple of the others who didn’t do so well on that test. I wondered if they administered the test just to amuse themselves because it didn’t seem to have much bearing on who was hired.
Drove up to the gas station this morning and saw not one but two people smoking cigarettes right in front of the pumps.
My home phone number is the same as some restaurants in a different area code. So people call up all the time asking to order delivery. When people call I simply tell them they have the wrong number they apologize and we never hear from them again. One night this guy calls I tell him he has the wrong number and he hangs up. less than a minute later he calls back again I tell him the wrong number he hangs up. This happens a 3rd time but this time I ask the guy, “Hey man why do you keep calling the wrong number”? He tells me it can’t be a wrong number because he is pressing ‘redial’ on the phone and that will redial the correct number when the wrong number is called. My brain does a mental what the F and I just hang up.
The guy AGAIN calls back but this time I answer in my best New Jersey accent “Joe’s Bar and Grill, Zoe speaking can you hold”, I then make a ‘click’ sound and start humming. After a few minutes I then ‘click’ again and say “Hello thank you for calling Joe’s Bar and Grill how can I help you?” He starts talking and I interrupt him and say “Oh I’m sorry please hold ‘click’. humming then a couple of minutes later ‘click’ Sorry about that how can I help you?” He starts to place an order for delivery, I interrupt him and tell him we don’t do delivery or carry out.” He pauses for a few seconds then says OK thank you and hangs up. I don’t hear from him again.
My lunch was $10.35, I gave the cashier $20.35. She had to get a manager to help her figure out the correct change.
My friend’s ex-boyfriend bought a new truck because he wanted to go to Hawaii and the old one “probably wouldn’t make it there.”
When I told him there weren’t roads all the way to Hawaii, he laughed and told me that Hawaii was a state…. that proved his point.
Went to a vocational high school where I studied culinary arts under a teacher that makes Gordon Ramsey look like a complete saint. One day, he tells the most annoying popular girl in our class to hard boil half a case of eggs. Not only does she end up boiling twice that amount, around 200-300 eggs, but she’s also cracking them into the boiling water. Even with limited cooking knowledge, everyone knows that’s not how you hard boil an egg, and we all told her that before she’s telling us to f*ck off, and then getting the teacher to come over and inspect the fantastic job she was doing.
Needless to say, three minutes of the teacher screamed at her later, and she ran crying into the bathroom, and we took hard-boiled eggs off the menu for that day.
This was our senior year, by the way.
I worked with someone once who insisted smoking doesn’t cause cancer. She said we all have cancer cells but smoking activates them (which is half true, I suppose), but I was there like… “Do activate and cause mean different things to you then?”
I work in an opticians. It’s scary how often I have to explain to people that the glasses aren’t improving their vision yet because they’re plastic ‘dummy’ lenses for trying on the frames we have to order lenses in with your prescription and the frame you’ve chosen but some people really don’t get it.
My family is from New Zealand, we live in the US now. A woman once asked my mother,
“NZ is basically two big islands, right? I know the top one is called the North Island, but what’s the South Island called?”
My mom: “It’s called the South Island.”
Lady: “I know, but what is it called?”
Mom: “…It’s called the South Island.”
Lady: “Ugh I KNOW it’s the South Island – but what is the South Island CALLED?”
Mom: “It – the southern island of NZ is named the South Island.”
Lady: “OH MY GOD I KNOW it’s the South Island! But WHAT IS THE SOUTH ISLAND CALLED?!”
My mom: “Look you stupid cow, it is the South Island, it’s called the South Island. That’s it.”
The woman stormed off, fuming.
I’m a veterinary assistant and about a year or so ago, a lady walked into the clinic where I worked. She asked, “This is a veterinary clinic? So you treat veterans?” Seriously, and with a straight face. I was floored.
I’m a veterinary technician. A dog was brought in for an ear infection. We sent home meds and showed the owners how to give them. Owners couldn’t remember whether the meds went in the ears or the eyes. And so they decided it had to be the eyes. Because that’s how you treat an ear infection, right? The poor dog.
One of our seasonal employees ( I worked at Toys R Us) asked me one day, as we were sitting in the break room: “I clocked out at 10:42, when do I go back?”
Me, being the useful, naive person I am, answered: “If you’re on lunch, you get a half hour.”
Following a short silence, she said: “So… when is that?”
I pointed to the analog clock above the doorway.
She gave me a blank look.
Turns out not only was she unable to do 10:42 + 30mn but she didn’t know how to read an analog clock.
And I know for a fact that person was at least 18 years old.
Back when I worked in retail, a customer who had bought a phone on a Thursday came back Saturday night claiming it was not working. She said she and her husband have tried to turn the phone on all weekend long and it wouldn’t turn on.
I take the phone, push the power button and it turns on. She looked shocked and said “What did you do?”, and I said, “Nothing, just pressed the power button”.
I asked her to show me what she did and she takes the phone and presses the volume button and says “See? It won’t turn on”.
This lady, and her husband, spent an entire weekend trying to turn a phone on via the volume button and didn’t consider for a second trying any of the other ones.
One of my cousins started crying at the zoo once (we were grown-*ss adults for the record) because she thought it was wrong. Slightly inappropriate reaction, but not unfair.
What’s her solution you ask? Literally free all caged animals in the world (including horses, cattle, chickens as well as wild animals in zoos). Just release them, she had no follow-up. Literally her solution was to release them all and just let it be.
I worked as an optician for many years and one of my clients was a little girl who got her first pair of glasses. A week after picking them up the little girl and her mother returned complaining that the glasses weren’t made right. I pulled her file and double-checked the prescription, they were made correctly. I placed them on the table and began to explain that they were made according to the RX and that maybe we should adjust the fit. The mom swiped them off the table and put them on. She screamed, “These are made wrong! My little girl can’t see out of them and neither can I!”
I had to explain to her that the glasses were made special for her daughter and that she shouldn’t be able to see out of them.
IT in the military(if that doesn’t prepare you already…) people who try to log in but it tells them their password expired, gives them step-by-step instructions but call us to get us to walk them through it.
Me: Does it say to enter a new password?
Them: Yes?
Me: Do that
Them: It says “Enter the previous password”
Me: Do that
Them: But it didn’t work before
Me: Just do it
Finally finish and they’re like “Hey look it works” and hang up
My colleagues and I are having dinner in a restaurant. This was after work. We were like miles away from the office. One of my colleagues was asking the wifi password for our office. I told her the password thinking nothing of it.
Then she said, “Why is it not connecting?”
I went, “Hah? What do you mean?”
“The password you gave me I think is wrong”
“You asked for our office password. That’s the password for our office”
“Yes. But it’s not connecting.”
…. The whole table was silent.
I teach kids piano at a local music school.
A young girl (5 or so) had come in for her first lesson and I asked the Dad if they had a keyboard at home so his daughter could practice.
The dad said yes, so I went on to explain an exercise we did and said it’s important that his daughter starts it on note C when she’s practicing at home.
He was a bit confused why she had to start on C and I could sense something was not quite right, I ask him again you do have a keyboard at home yeah?
“Yeah with the computer”
My friend owns an electric toothbrush and has done it for several years. He would apply the toothpaste to the toothbrush, take a deep breath (you know, the way you do when you’re getting yourself pumped for something), turn it on and put it into his mouth as quickly as he could. That half a second, before it’s in his mouth, causes toothpaste to splatter everywhere.
One day I told him that you could put the toothpaste on the toothbrush, put the toothbrush in your mouth, and THEN turn it on; saving him from losing most of the toothpaste to the surrounding walls before he even had it in his mouth.
He was blown away as if he had just seen Jesus or some sh*t – I’ve never laughed harder in my life at the pure stupidity.
I used to work at a fast-food restaurant. People would ask for a kid’s cheeseburger with no cheese and lose their minds when I gave them a kid’s hamburger.
On multiple occasions, we had to wrap the burger in a cheeseburger wrapping and write ‘no cheese’ on it before they would accept it.
I used to work in a Veterinary Clinic. A lady brought her dog in with a really bad infection (I forget exactly what the infection was). The vet prescribed a course of oral antibiotics. He gave the first dose in the exam room to demonstrate how to administer oral medications to a dog. The vet told her the name of the drug and how often to give it. He then said to come back in ten days to see if her dog was improving. When she came back, she told me her dog wasn’t getting better. I said, “Okay, when was the last time you gave him a dose of the meds?” She asked, “What day was our last appointment?” I answered, “About ten days ago.” She said, “Yeah, then. When the doctor gave it to him.” I asked, “So, you haven’t given him any more of the pills?” She said, “Was I supposed to? Ha ha! I was wondering why you guys gave me all these pills!”
We didn’t give you those pills, ma’am. You bought them.
I was waiting on my wife in the lobby at the theater. Watched a woman trying to get soda out of one of those fancy touchscreen soda fountains. When it didn’t have the flavor combination she wanted (Vanilla Coke, maybe?) she flipped off the machine. Like, right in its touch screen face. I thought it was pretty funny.
But then I watched her go back to the home screen and try to select the flavor combo again like five times, and each time the machine rejected her request, she gave it the finger. There were several other soda fountains present, but she tried this one over and over again. My wife came back before I saw the conclusion of this man vs machine confrontation.
Still not sure what her thought process was.
I was walking out of a fast food restaurant after eating lunch. A car rolled down their window and asked me what time it was.
I replied like 11:45. They then asked in the morning or night? I just kinda looked around and glanced at the sun. It’s morning bud.
Someone at work liked spicy food and had forgotten his usual hot sauce that day. He had the bright idea of spicing up his food with the can of pepper spray he carried. The best part was that the fumes caused an evacuation of the entire lunchroom.