I believe The Refreshments said it best: “Everybody knows the world is full of stupid people.” You work with them, you date them, you live with them, and you meet them every time you get on the Internet. Recently AskReddit users shared stories about when they realized the people around them were complete, 100% idiots.
1. “Let’s make 9/11 about me.”
When my girlfriend got jealous on 9/11 because the Twin Towers were getting more attention than her.‘So a couple of buildings fell down. What’s the big deal? Everyone is ignoring me today.’ —from my soon-to-be ex-gf at the time.
2. What are airplanes?
In my exchange year in the USA.
I came from Germany, and in class we had this thing where I introduce myself and everyone asks their 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 im not entirely sure if she maybe just trolled me, I mean, you cant be THAT uneducated?!
3. What about spring and fall air?
Someone came into the shop and asked to change out the air in her tires from ‘summer air’ to ‘winter air.’
4. Dead smoke.
In my 7th grade science class there was a debate going on between a good chunk of the class on whether smoke was alive or not.
5. Cloud bump, bro.
I tried to explain to my ex-colleagues that thunder is not the result of clouds smashing together. They thought I was stupid. When I asked them to explain why its not always thundering when its cloudy, they both agreed that it only happens when they’re storm clouds.
6. Blood donor.
A girl I know once asked why anyone would donate blood. She said that you only got a certain amount for your entire life and giving it away didn’t make sense.
7. Cataracts.
Freshman year of college I’m in a math class and we had some random group project to do. A girl in my group informed us she wouldn’t be at the next meeting as she was going to have eye surgery. I asked her why and she said, ‘I have genital cataracts’ and I said, ‘you mean congenital?’ and she gave me an confused look and everyone backed her up that she really did mean genital and not congenital. Even after I Google it and show everyone the difference between the two words they proceeded to tell me how you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. I was dumbfounded.
8. What?
My friend once couldn’t find his iPhone in his house, so he rang it from the landline.
His iPhone rang, on the table in front of him, he picked it up and obviously, there was nobody on the other line.
Screams upstairs to his parents, with a phone in each hand: “Who the fuck is ringing me?”
I sat there facepalming.
9. Space, the non-existent frontier.
I was at a small social at my parents house and mentioned something about the National Space Center in Leicester. A girl pipes up and says,
‘Oh I love taking my son there, he loves it, I just find it amusing because I don’t believe in space.’
I looked at her dumbfounded and asked if she meant she didn’t believe in investing money in space exploration. No, she did not believe in space. She simply did not believe that anything existed above the sky, that pictures and videos were all fake and that all space agencies and anyone who claimed to have been to space was lying.
The other girls in the group started nodding in agreement saying things like, ‘Now that you mention it, I’ve never really seen space.’
I just went home.
10. 86 on Fried Chicken.
Yearly, a local restaurant offers a meal for the price of $1 for their anniversary. They offer a fried chicken with sides or meatloaf with sides. Decided to go only to find a line stretching around the block. Hop in line, waited an hour and a half before I was pretty close. Employee walks out to say ‘Sorry, we ran out of chicken. We only have meatloaf.’
The shitshow that erupted after that was astounding. One lady in particular I remember for the amazing quote ‘That’s fucking bullshit! Me and my dog have been here for 2 hours and we both wanted chicken!’ Further up, I hear a bigger commotion. Apparently, one guy got upset about there being no chicken, his friend tried to calm him down, someone else in line made a comment, and all-out brawl ensues. Line scatters. Two cops nearby subdue the situation to the best of their ability. Restaurant shuts down for the day. No longer does $1 anniversary special.
That was a nice thing for a while. I miss $1 Fried Chicken day.
11. Titanic was real.
My first year teaching high school English. I was showing my class the DiCaprio version of Romeo and Juliet, and one girl was staring at the screen intently with a puzzled look on her face. Finally, a light went off and she said, ‘How can he be in this movie? He died in Titanic.’
12. Assholes.
I used to work on the Brooklyn Bridge as an ironworker…One day some poor soul was standing towards the edge and was contemplating jumping. I told my foreman and he called the police, at about this time all the trades on the bridge started to gather and watch this man. Maybe 5 minutes go by and someone starts a ‘Jump!’ chant. This dude was going to kill himself and now he has about 40 people egging him on…he jumped. Quit my job and moved across the country, fuck those fucking fucks.
13. Scary.
I had to explain that Halloween, in fact, can never be on Friday the 13th.
14. Brand, spanking new water.
I once had an argument that rain was ‘new water’ bestowed to us by the Earth. My friend truly believed that water did not recycle, and the consuming it meant that it never saw the Earth again. Also believed that anything flushed down a toilet or drained was burned and evaporated into nothingness.
15. When the Japanese threw tea in the harbor to piss of King George III.
Some people in my class thought The Boston Tea Party and the Attack On Pearl Harbor were the same thing. This was my high school class…
16. “Not academically enriched.”
I was a TA in high school for a regular High School, I think it was World History course. So not Honors, not ‘Academically Enriched,’ but not quite eating your own feces either.
Anyways, 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.
17. Fuck you, dummy.
First day of college, girl raises her hand and asks why there are two Pacific Oceans on the map.
[The professor] turned to look at the map, turned back towards the class and motioned with her hands and said, ‘the world is round.’
Literally the best “fuck you” response a professor could give.
18. Fire spiral.
I was hanging around with my friends. One of my friends had just gotten his very own moped. It needed a fill up, so they went to get the jerry can with petrol in it. We were in the middle of an apartment building complex at the patio. My other friend wanted to see how much petrol there was, so he used his lighter to help him see. I immediately said ‘stop that! It will catch fire.’ He did not believe me so they decided to test it by pouring the petrol on the ground and to try lighting it up. The person who was pouring the petrol got scared and jumped once the petrol caught on fire and dropped the jerry can. The rest of it splashed to the ground and formed a 10 meter (32 ft) tall fire spiral.
19. Slow down with your fancy words, college boy.
I was at work and explaining to a coworker how to put wrap on a cooking wrapping machine and I say, ‘You have to pull it taut.’” And she just stopped and said ‘That isn’t how you use that word. You can’t teach a wrap.’ And my bosses come in and I had to convince them that taut was a word and they told me that I shouldn’t use big words like that all the time. Taut.
20. (E)Unbelievable.
The morning after the EU referendum in the UK. People around me in work: ‘So, as we’re leaving Europe, does that mean there will be eight continents now?’
Because they didn’t know the difference between Europe and the European Union.
22. Rounding down to the lowest common denominator.
I used to work at Walmart as a cashier. During tax free weekend, the place was a mad house. The lines were long and the customers are non-stop. That being said, I can say that at least 80 percent of customers would point out to me, quite angrily, that their total was still including the tax. For example, if their purchase was 148.67 they would wonder why the tax of .67 was on there and why it wasn’t an even total, like 148.00 even. I had to repeatedly explain that’s not what tax is.
23. Blueberries aren’t real!
I met an american woman travelling that got agressive trying to convince me that blueberry was a flavour and not “a real thing” while obsessively picking out all the little blue/purple “round things” from her blueberry icecream.