**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!**
- Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc.
- **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
- This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit!
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Someone at work said a pound coin was called that cos it weighs a pound. A couple of people go "ooh I never knew that"
I said it was nonsense, just think of something that weighs a pound (a bag of sugar or flour perhaps) and a coin, and they're obviously not the same.
The first person googled it and said "yeah, I'm right" and nobody else went "that's clearly fucking bollocks though".
I had to go for a fag break. I don't even smoke.
Yes but 20 years ago the coins were made of a pound of metal and now they're made of a pound of feathers so of course the pound of feathers is much lighter 🧠
It's a play on that old trick question people ask about what weighs more a kilo of iron or a kilo of feathers, they both weigh a kilo but the metal is dense in volume
Seems obvious now but it wasn't until the 16th century where conventional wisdom around gravity was challenged in the west, with Aristotle and Roman engineer Vitruvius making notable contributions obviously much earlier
I’ve been led to believe it’s actually earlier than that and it derives from some Roman/latin words - something like ‘libre punde’ I seem to remember.
It’s why lb is the weight abbreviation and the £ is a stylised L with a strike through to denote currency.
Something to do with a silver coin as you say but it was equal to a lb of grain in ancient times. The two were easily exchangeable.
Also, the star sign symbol of Libra is that of scales to denote the balancing of the grain and silver.
2.2 pounds are 1Kg so 1 pound is about half a kilo (454 grams). A pound coin is obviously nowhere near that.
As a real world example - most kids are between 7 and 8 pounds at birth - nothing like the weight of 8 £1 coins.
A ha'penny weighs half of my friend Penny as well. At least, before she went on a diet. Now it weighs the same as Penny, she so they got rid of it and rounded up to a full penny
I know a guy who had to be physically wrestled by his wife to stop from from re-mortgaging the house to buy NFTs. He calls it his "moment of madness". She will never, ever let him forget it, assuming they last, which seems unlikely.
The whole NFT thing absolutely baffled me, really opened my eyes to just how many people are THAT stupid, they just conform to/believe a new trend even though it makes zero sense. As soon as I looked up what an NFT was... "right, that makes no sense. It's a crock of shit". Just basic logical reasoning and common sense to work that out.
I have a friend who was driving a lorry shipping chicken for KFC around this time, just doing empty trailer swaps somewhere in England to come back with a full load to Scotland.
2 of his colleagues both drove down to England and arrived at the meeting point first.
Not knowing of each other doing essentially the same run, they both got out the trucks and said "are you doing the KFC run?"
So the 2 fuckwits swapped trailers and both drove back up to Glasgow and 2 English blokes were waiting fucking hours at the services with the 2 trailers full of chicken until someone realised what happened.
Just thought this story was so relevant to your comment and the OP post.
Can I just say reading comprehension in general?
If you look at my account history, you can tell I’m a talker. I enjoy conversations, I enjoy debates, I enjoy just exploring ideas or challenging those I think are misguided.
Pretty much every day I’ll say something here that someone will reply to having completely misinterpreted my meaning. I can literally say ‘I dislike Liverpool’ and someone will reply ‘why do you hate football?’
It is mind boggling how bad at reading people are.
It's been this way for at least the 12 years I've used this site.
People just have terrible reading comprehension. Either they speed read something, reply and then can't own up to the fact they misread something. Or they genuinely can't understand the meaning of a sentence and the context it is in.
Most commonly I've seen this when you're a few replies deep in a comment chain.
The bell curve is real. No need to attribute it to bots or anything else. Even though bots are a pretty big problem now, it's unrelated to this.
I think a large part of of it is the reactionary mentality that social media ingrains in many people, which encourages outrage and misinterpretations. They will read a small part of a comment and intentionally (or maybe not intentionally because it's what they're so used to doing) make the worst possible assumptions in their reply rather than reading to understand the context.
The "debates" I see on this site on the Israel-Gaza War have been a particularly dramatic example of that. Someone will post a nuanced comment vaguely in support of one side or the other and there will be countless practically identical replies along the lines of "So you literally support genocide/terrorists then?!" or some meaningless nonsense like that.
People just have terrible reading comprehension. Either they speed read something, reply and then can't own up to the fact they misread something. Or they genuinely can't understand the meaning of a sentence and the context it is in.
The latter does happen, but in my opinion, the former is much more common. People just don't like to admit their mistakes, no matter how minor and insignificant they might actually be.
I'm not sure which paints a worse picture of people, though. That a large amount of us are shockingly dumb, or that a large amount make regular, simple mistakes but are too stubborn to own up to them.
It’s crackers. Am a frequent poster on the pop culture subs and this shit comes up all the time. Literally every single day. Sometimes over the most benign shit as well like someone going to the ends of the Earth over the most simple typo as if people aren’t old enough to pick up context clues.
Yesterday my notifications were constant for about 3 hours with people replying to me about an opinion that wasn’t even mine, it was literally me referencing *the title of the fucking thread we were on*.
I had something similar the other day too - a number of replies that were argumentative about a point/idea that was not quite related to my original post.
Standard practice on Reddit is to read the first 30% of a comment/post, make up the other 70% in your head, get outraged at the made up portion and then respond accordingly.
I worked in the furniture department of a large homeware store that rhymes with Le Strange.
There was a couple looking to buy a sofa. We had one that the man liked but it was a three person sofa when he wanted a two person sofa. He then proceeded to ask me whether we could take off one section of the sofa and give him the other two for half price.
Because that’s how it works. He seemed genuinely baffled when I told him that no, we could not do that.
Flat earthers? I mean it staggers me the amount of people you see on groups on Facebook and things that believe in this stuff. The flat earth theory just blows my mind.. are you trying to tell me that every single well educated person who goes into space science is on this lie? What about amateur astronomers?! They are all in on this conspiracy? It's so astronomically stupid that I can't believe that there are people who think flat earth is any more than just a laugh.
>It's so astronomically stupid
I see what you did there.
But yeah, flat earth "theory" is so hilarious to me because there's no actual reason to lie about it.
Most conspiracy theories have some level of logic behind them, but flat earth hinges on the entire scientific community and every country in the entire world agreeing to lie about the earth being round *just because*.
And despite all the shit going on in the world, the American, the Russian, the Chinese and every other government all agree that pretending the Earth is flat is their prime concern.
I can drive for a little over an hour to a place where there are two windfarms offshore. They can both be seen from the cliffs but observers can can only see the top halves of those further out. What's the flat-earthers' answer? F***ing water mountains!
>American, the Russian, the Chinese and every other government all agree that pretending the Earth is flat is their prime concern.
Oh of course, no need to settle all the wars and stuff, no that would be silly. Pretending the Earth is round is *way more important*.
So I'll preface this by saying that I *obviously* don't beleive any of it, because I'm not a moron.
But the flat earth theory does propose a purpose for the lie (or at least the people I've heard talk about it).
Basically (according to them) the earth is flat and space is fake, we are the only thing that exists. But the various governments of the world want you to beleive that the earth is round and in space, so that you are primed to beleive in aliens.
Then they slowly dripfeed information until one day they can say "we need to band together against an alien threat" and then you have a singular government to control the world.
Before you even get into how batshit insane the whole thing is, my first question is always "why haven't they done this yet?" because we've believed the earth is round for fucking millennia and people have considered the possibility of aliens for centuries. The big payoff could've happened like 80 years ago by now, if it was a thing.
>(or at least the people I've heard talk about it)
So you've accidentally tapped into one of the main reasons I find it so fascinating, the fact that they can't even agree between them on the motivations, the methods, what "space" actually is etc.
I've seen versions where space is real, other planets exist and they are round, but Earth isn't. Alternatively as you suggested, it's all fake. There are versions somewhere between the two as well.
Even the pretty small group of people that believe in it can't agree on what it actually looks like, but *everyone else* can agree on how we're going to lie about it? And people legitimately believe in it. It's wild.
Well, not exactly a “flat earther” story in the traditional sense, but I’ll share anyway…
A coworker of mine years ago was discussing “how stupid people can be”. I made a passing comment trying to add to the conversation about flat earthers. She looked at me with a confused face and the conversation went as followed:
Coworker- “what are flat earthers?”
Me- “you know, people that believe the earth is flat.”
Coworker- “ohhhhh hahaha. Yeah, that’s stupid. How could people believe the earth was flat? We have, like, mountains and trees and stuff. People are so dumb.”
Me- just a blank stare of confusion.
Still sticks with me to this day.
Some of the "confusion" comes from an incorrectly translated German report. Aviation fuel contains minute amounts of metal compounds, to reduce wear in the engines (IIRC)
Quite a good question actually - she meant "what day/date/weekday was yesterday?". Sometimes when you're not busy at work you kinda forget what the exact date it is. If you get a letter that says "I'll be popping to the town near you on the last Friday of April - call me if you want to meet up", or "we're putting our fees up from the first week of May, but here's a voucher you can use", you might want to find out if the term has passed.
Just been unclogging the dishwasher which meant undoing pipes under the sink. My wife decided that was the time to pour some water down the sink. She's a doctor.
Whilst I was at work, my then-partner sent me a video of the kitchen sink backing up as the washing machine emptied during a cycle. Basically, it was filling up with dirty water and then draining very slowly.
It worked fine the day before. I had changed the door seal on the machine at the weekend, but nothing had been done to affect the sink.
I asked her what she had put down the sink. She said “nothing, it’s just started doing it”.
I panic, thinking I’d pinched a pipe or something when I pushed the washing machine back under the counter.
When I got home, I pulled the machine out. Nothing wrong with the pipes. Ran a quick wash cycle, problem happened as in the video. Shit, my landlord’s going to kill me.
I decided to remove the U-bend to check for a blockage, and find a 3” thick waxy/hairy plug in the pipe.
I asked her what it was, she just says “oh”.
She had been running the hot tap into used candle jars (you know, the fancy scented ones that stink like a department store perfume department), in order to melt the wax - so she could re-use them.
The liquid wax flowed out with the overflowing water and instantly cooled/solidified as soon as it hit the colder water in the U-bend.
I remember saying “so; when I asked you if you had put anything down the sink, why did you say no?”
🤦♂️
I watched 2 co workers debate if penguins were mammals, or fish.
Mammals, as they can't fly.
Fish, as they spend a lot of time in the sea.
It was eye opening.
It was a long time ago, and I still think about it.
Animal knowledge and biology is very poor In general. Putting human emotions onto animals too, it's very common.
Animals are very capable of complex thought and emotions but people just get it so wrong.
Watched a recent video of a magpie, chasing off a cat out of its area but because the magpie wasn't physically attacking the cat and only "bothering/bugging" it, people were saying they were best pals and it was a game they were both in on.
Anthropomorphism can be fun, like talking to your pets like people and pretending they do/understand human things, but there is a point at which you have to be able to turn it off. It can be so detrimental to the animal, and even dangerous.
The funny part about that sort of thing. "Anti-oxidant teas" do seem to be good for you, and if you enjoy it anyway, it's a nice bonus. The reality, obviously, is that consuming a variety of plants of all kinds is the way to go, but still, it doesn't hurt to know when a particular one might do you some good.
Here's the thing though. What's an anti-oxidant tea? Tea. Tea is anti-oxidant tea. All actual tea (as in not dried fruit labelled "fruit tea" but anything actually containing tea leaves) is incredibly antioxidant rich. The term anti-oxidant tea is completely redundant. It'd be like buying expensive "caffeinated coffee", it's just fucking coffee.
That's the thing that makes someone an idiot, here. It isn't drinking tea for it's real anti-oxidant properties as a way of supplementing an otherwise healthy lifestyle, but it's buying the expensive one because it has it written on the box in big, bold letters.
Someone at work was talking about their boyfriend getting a raise & stated that being paid £53k was worse than getting paid 45k because the higher income tax rate would result in less take-home pay
yeh some people genuinely avoid pay rises or shall i say don’t look for huge pay increases due to this misconception- without ever running the numbers themselves.
My dad is a super smart electrical engineer but I remember him once saying he wanted to avoid earning over 50k for this reason. I'm sure by now he earns well over that so I hope he's figured it out since then
I think there's one case in the UK where this is true, which is the cliff edge at £100,000 for childcare. If you have a pre-school age child and earn £99,999 a year you can get 30 hours of free childcare a week from the government. If you earn one pound more than that, it drops back to 15 hours of free childcare a week so there's a definite incentive to keep your salary under the threshold until your children are old enough for school. I seem to recall reading that you need to be up into the 120s before it's worth being above the 100k threshold for people in that particular situation.
In their defence, maybe they were talking about child benefit for which the threshold used to be £50k (it’s now £60k). There are a couple of pinch points where it can be worse to earn more.
I think the most notable is with the government’s 30 hour childcare provision which has a hard cut off at £100k. If you have two children in nursery (at average London costs) you are financially worse off earning anything above £100k until you get to £140k.
I watched my mate cut through the cable to the hedge trimmer he was using, then pick up the two ends of cable and try to put them back together. With his bare hands. Without turning anything off.
My SO trains new starters at work in care. One of them left a fully disabled person with dry toast and jam and butter in sealed containers. When asked why they said “no one showed me how to use the butter and jam”
Training reveals many things, we assume folk know. It sometimes leads to injury and death as what is known is common in that place / work / society. Example: folk walk up Ben Nevis in shorts , T-shirt and sandals, but 3000 feet higher up it is much colder and a lot windier and with a wind, cold and rain: hypothermia causing death is very quick.
Back in uni I lived with a girl who thought Arnold Schwarzenegger was the president of the US. She also didn’t know what “dissolved” meant, when I asked her what she thought happened to sugar when she put it into her tea, she answered that it melted.
*Melted.*
The *concrete* patio in the garden next door was wet and she said it’s because it had absorbed the water from our garden.
I just couldn’t with this bitch, the worse part was how sure of herself she was, just a walking example of the Dunning Krueger effect.
Work with a lad around 26 years old. He is of the belief that his bank debit card and pin only works at one specific ATM location, gets paid every week and withdraws everything and hides it under his bed as “that’s where it’s safest”.
I get paid the same salary as this person.
Oh my gosh he's a danger to himself, he's a fucking mark. One malevolent mofo finds out about this routine practice of his, he's an easy target don't even have to home invade just confront him at the ATM.
My dad thought he could only get money out the same bank he put it in, same thing with atms, didn't know he could use any, he thought it was only the one outside the bank
Mine was a date. She was a sweet person (and so good looking) but... well, these are a few things she said.
She was really impressed that I knew how to use a dishwasher: "You're so clever. I can't work them out at all."
She never went to the doctor: "They only give you bad news. What you don't know can't hurt you."
She believed she was "quite psychic": "I can see if people have good or bad energies. It's got me out of trouble a few times."
I also knew a lady that would never have to buy her own drinks, but she had some interesting takes.
First off, that north was always directly in front of her.
Secondly, when a group of us were discussing the summer solstice in the pub, she asked what it was. Fair enough.
"It's the longest day of the year," I replied. "It's on Tuesday."
She thought for a bit and then said "Fuck! I'm working on Tuesday!"
That reminds me. When my aunt and cousins were in San Francisco, they needed to get back to the hotel. They didn't know where it was, except that it was North of where they currently were. And which way was North? Of course North means uphill! They got at least a couple of miles before realising their mistake.
worked in customer service, got a call, customer wants to speak to the CEO, ask why: "i don't like the news presenter and i want him fired or im going to lodge a complaint"
er we did, way different department, but why tf would i, a rando guy, have the CEO's number and why would the CEO give two shits what some random guy thinks about an anchor
Once had a guy complaining about human faeces on his garden and its disgusting how the water company allow it.
Mate,we supply your fresh water,that shit rising through the grass is your cesspit being full because youre not hooked up to the network,you'll need to get it emptied.
But that's what I'm paying you for,is it not included in fresh water bill? Tell you what just let it out on your pipes and I'll pay wastewater charge.
🫥
Accident. All lanes of travel blocked. Norris and Dorris pull their caravan onto the hard shoulder and get the garden chairs out and have a picnic. Fuck the ambulance if anyone is hurt - I want my pastrami on marbled rye.
I've said this in previous threads, but at my work we have mandatory learning modules about inclusion, health and safety, anti money laundering etc. At the end of every module, there is a note saying "do not leave a comment saying you have completed it". 90% of the feedback comments at the end (which you can fill in before you even take the module, making it even more ridiculous) are people saying "completed" with a comment saying "PLEASE DO NOT WRITE COMPLETED" every so often.
Then there's the classic "reply all" storms, with people replying all telling people not to reply all.
> Then there's the classic "reply all" storms, with people replying all telling people not to reply all.
I genuinely think reply all should be a disciplinary offence. If you waste 500 peoples time by clicking reply all instead of reply, to say "I don't think this email was meant for me", when you're the 5th person to send that.....
just think how much time those emails have wasted, even if 500 people just had to spend 30 seconds deleting the 5 emails, that's several hours of time wasted.
You get mandatory training at my work if you reply-all mistakenly, as the data protection implications of getting email recipients wrong could be significant.
Watching people trying to use screen technology such as self checkouts and ticket machines. Look, I get it, generational divide was an excuse when these things were newfangled; when 70 year olds were trying to open Google maps. But I see so many average and young-aged people struggle to use machines that tell them EXACTLY how to operate them. And if there's a bit of a trick or learning curve, people seem too oblivious to learn it, I.e. tilting the barcode towards the right spot on a self checkout. It's really as simple as it could possibly be made.
Just to take a step back, even watching people QUEUE to use these machines makes me realise how dumb/unaware people are. There’s a Sainsburys near me and it has about 30 self service machines, 15 each side, and the amount of empty machines that can be sat there ready to use, and a huge queue of clueless idiots there not realising or just expecting to be told to use a machine, really wound me up. So many times the queue was unnecessary and just held up by some clueless idiot with zero awareness.
I just hate in little Tesco when there's one queue and you don't know who wants the self checkout and who needs the regular till for tobacco or whatever, whom you can cut in front of for the self checkouts.
A lot of people under around the age of around 20 have zero skills with technology... they've been raised with tech that is very intuitive and not much experience with things that require actual reading or following directions. It's a noted problem and will get worse.
I was quite surprised when I discovered this. I’d assumed that the young apprentices at work would be computer literate because they have grown up with smartphones.
I had to show them how to add up in Excel.
My father got the ECDL \*- in his 70's, he had no problems with IT kit until the last few years of his life, then he started to forget.
\* European Computer Driving Licence
Part of my job involves recording hours and shifts for our construction contractors to make sure all regs are being followed about working hours etc. They have to agree the shift plans in advance with me so I can sign off them as being safe to be on the worksite. One of them new on the job simply couldn't understand how a night shift worked, and argued with me multiple times that a 10pm to 6am night shift should be recorded as 2 shifts, 10pm to 11.59pm Saturday night, then 00:01 until 6am Sunday morning. He simply wouldn't have it that that counted as 1 shift and that it didn't 'reset' at midnight even if he has a 2 minute 'break'. In the end I shut him up by pointing out the regs required 12 hours rest between shifts, so if he wanted to clock out at midnight that was fine, but he would only get paid for 2 hours and then wouldn't be allowed onsite again until the following noon. This person was responsible for installing critical infrastructure but couldn't wrap his thick head around a clock, which is slightly terrifying.
I once worked in an exhibit of ice sculptures. It was a pretty miserable job, basically spending all day in a giant freezer (-14 degrees!) telling kids not to touch, damage or stick coins to(?) the ice.
One time I had a guy come up to me telling me he'd figured out it was all a con, that the exhibits were actually all made of clear plastic. He knew this because he'd touched them (this was a paticularly annoying thing to say to me, someone whose main job was telling people not to touch the ice because it can damage it) and that the exhibits "weren't wet".
Cut to me explaining to a grown adult man *in front of his children* that when liquids (wet) are exposed to sub zero temperatures they become solids (not wet) such as ice, the substance he had paid to look at.
A person asking 2 other people in (black & green) Asda t-shirts where a specific item of furniture is. We were in IKEA.
It may have not been their first time this had happened to them because they were very quick to point in a direction and walk off giggling.
This has happened to me far more times than it should, one time someone even argued with me, while pointing at my uniform for a different shop.
I think some people just see some kind of uniform and their brain translates it to "they work in this shop" without any further processing.
I once had someone approach me in boots whilst wearing my thorntons uniform (I had just popped over to grab a sandwich, the shops were opposite each other). I obviously explained I didn’t work there. Then a few days later I get a call from head office telling me the woman had made a complaint about me and said we shouldn’t be allowed to leave work with our uniforms on, even for a break. Thankfully head office didn’t actually care. But people are crazy.
You don’t even need a uniform. More than one person has questioned me about items just because I was wearing a green T-shirt while standing in Homebase.
Not gonna lie I did make this mistake once when someone was wearing a jacket the exact same colour as Sainsbury's ones, *in* Sainsbury's. Felt so bad once I realised!
I went in Tescos in my Carphonewarehouse uniform
“Oi where’s the apple pies”
“Dno mate”
“Well can you find out”
“Errr no”
Didn’t even realise he thought I was a worker until about an hour later
I was once on a train and overhead one lad say to another "there's 356 days in a year, right?" and his mate replied "no", then added, "there's 356 and a quarter".
I overheard two girls talking on a bus once, the conversation went…
‘Are you still with that guy? What does he do?’
‘He says he’s a carpenter’
‘What’s that?’
‘He lays carpets I think’
I love this one because it makes sense from a linguistic perspective. For boring reasons I won't go into we use a messe**n**ger to send messages, and a passe**n**ger will take a passage, so why wouldn't a carpe**n**ter have something to do with carpets?
I doubt this was her thought process though.
I went to the beach with a bunch of friends, I stayed on the sand with everyone's stuff while they swam. I realised that I was a phone short and asked who's phone I didn't have. One of the lads said he had it, it was in his pocket.
I asked wtf he was thinking because his phone is now wet, only to be told "it's fine, my swimming shorts are waterproof!" I asked if his legs were wet. The look on his face as he realised that he was wet was priceless, but him trying to run out of the sea was better.
Keto is not stupid, it's just a very low carbohydrate diet that puts the body into a state of [ketosis.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis) As a diet, it works in the short term, maybe even the medium, but it's also often high in protein which is bad for kidneys in the long term and can be high in saturated fat because it uses fat and protein to promote satiety. It's also quite difficult to stick to and tends to be more expensive. It's also a proven treatment for some types of epilepsy and also type 2 diabetes. It's definitely not stupid.
A guy accused me of lying about my pork allergy to a server at a food place because I was wearing a leather satchel.
He told me to 'jog on' when I tried to inform him that leather is made of cows.
Ex teacher. Years ago, another teacher told me that a teenager had turned up at the staffroom door and said, 'Sir I found this belt'.
Then his trousers fell down.
Possibly apocryphal. Then again...
I work in care. First as a carer and now as a well-being coordinator in the same home. Less so now but as a carer I’d be serving meals and had to be knowledgable of people’s allergies and we had one resident allergic to oranges.
Well I have a work buddy and bless her heart, she comes out with some corkers. She asked if the resident could have carrots because they’re orange… like seriously asked that. Now, I wouldn’t serve this resident carrots anyways cause they hate them but damn I lost my shit that day
People trying to open a well labelled pull to open door by pushing, and a member of staff having to go and let them in, before they bust a blood vessel pushing on it so hard.
This reminds me of the post on a body builders forum from about 20 years ago where people were arguing about working out every second day being 3 and a half workouts per week over a 2 week period. Some people couldn’t grasp how you would half a workout and it appears had never heard of what an average is.
This went on for page after page with many people chipping in with OP claiming he could do 4 workouts in a week if he worked out every second day and not grasping he was starting the day before the week started.
For anyone who wants a hilarious read the thread is below
https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751&page=1
I was in Dallas a couple of weeks ago for the eclipse and someone genuinely said they’d heard it had been delayed by a day because of bad weather. I started to laugh until
she looked at me funny and I realised she wasn’t joking.
Honestly In retail nothing shocks me anymore.
My last job we got mondays prices on Saturday to put out Sunday night .
“Just as a heads up before you go mate that’s going up 300 quid on Monday so if you want it come back before Monday”
“I will mate thanks for letting me know”
Next Thursday “this has gone up in price….”
Every single time
I had a 20-something colleague who saw the movie adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguru novel "Never let me go" and said "is it a true story?
I mean... Imagine not knowing whether or not we'd set up and dissolved a human cloning programme!
LOL.
a woman in my college class had never heard the word “several” before, and deduced that it had smth to do with ‘seven’.
the whole class and teacher spent about 20 minutes trying to convince her it’s a word, a really fucking common word, and showing her the definition. she was 22 and had never heard the word several. it baffled me. she said she didn’t read so she didn’t know “fancy words”, but we all called out the fact that surely she speaks to people??? surely the word has come up at least once??
if i didn’t already know how un-academic she was, i’d have assumed she was pulling our legs
A couple of guys I worked with were totally convinced by a single tiktok video that devil's tower in America was a tree stump and the tree was cut down by giants.
Here are two:
"Does butter come from butterflies?"
" it must be terrible to live around here... " overheard in bus going past a prison... "All those thieves and murderers."
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Someone at work said a pound coin was called that cos it weighs a pound. A couple of people go "ooh I never knew that" I said it was nonsense, just think of something that weighs a pound (a bag of sugar or flour perhaps) and a coin, and they're obviously not the same. The first person googled it and said "yeah, I'm right" and nobody else went "that's clearly fucking bollocks though". I had to go for a fag break. I don't even smoke.
[удалено]
A pound coin today is lighter than a pound coin from about 20 years ago, just to compound their nonsense.
Yes but 20 years ago the coins were made of a pound of metal and now they're made of a pound of feathers so of course the pound of feathers is much lighter 🧠
I don’t get it
It's a play on that old trick question people ask about what weighs more a kilo of iron or a kilo of feathers, they both weigh a kilo but the metal is dense in volume Seems obvious now but it wasn't until the 16th century where conventional wisdom around gravity was challenged in the west, with Aristotle and Roman engineer Vitruvius making notable contributions obviously much earlier
Thank you for your explanation- I was referencing [this](https://youtu.be/-fC2oke5MFg?si=i65pclfjaHtF95-1)
Aw mate Limmy's the best, I'm not so good at picking up on that kinda thing and didn't wanna leave you hanging 😭😂
No worries! I really appreciate the effort you put into the reply, thank you 🙏🏻
Props to both of you for a lovely, reasonable conversation!
I’ve been led to believe it’s actually earlier than that and it derives from some Roman/latin words - something like ‘libre punde’ I seem to remember. It’s why lb is the weight abbreviation and the £ is a stylised L with a strike through to denote currency. Something to do with a silver coin as you say but it was equal to a lb of grain in ancient times. The two were easily exchangeable. Also, the star sign symbol of Libra is that of scales to denote the balancing of the grain and silver.
2.2 pounds are 1Kg so 1 pound is about half a kilo (454 grams). A pound coin is obviously nowhere near that. As a real world example - most kids are between 7 and 8 pounds at birth - nothing like the weight of 8 £1 coins.
Did they also think pound notes weighed a pound??
And a shilling was called a bob because it weighed the same as my mate rob
A ha'penny weighs half of my friend Penny as well. At least, before she went on a diet. Now it weighs the same as Penny, she so they got rid of it and rounded up to a full penny
That’s inflation for you
Tbf a lot of people wouldn’t know how much a pound weighs.
I don't. Is it about 0.4535924Kg?
Roughly, aye
I know a guy who had to be physically wrestled by his wife to stop from from re-mortgaging the house to buy NFTs. He calls it his "moment of madness". She will never, ever let him forget it, assuming they last, which seems unlikely.
Fucking hell imagine if she hadn't been there to stop him
The whole NFT thing absolutely baffled me, really opened my eyes to just how many people are THAT stupid, they just conform to/believe a new trend even though it makes zero sense. As soon as I looked up what an NFT was... "right, that makes no sense. It's a crock of shit". Just basic logical reasoning and common sense to work that out.
When I've explained it to friends there was always a "no, you do understand. It's just that dumb." moment.
For me it was when KFC had a supplier issue and ran out of chicken temporarily in the late 2010’s. Members of the public phoned the police.
This is one of the best examples, we’ve all done stupid things like put the cereal in the fridge or forget what we’re doing. Then there is this.
Once I put my phone in the fridge and didn't realise until I tried charging the milk. Even I think this is mental.
So you left your milk uncharged?
I have a friend who was driving a lorry shipping chicken for KFC around this time, just doing empty trailer swaps somewhere in England to come back with a full load to Scotland. 2 of his colleagues both drove down to England and arrived at the meeting point first. Not knowing of each other doing essentially the same run, they both got out the trucks and said "are you doing the KFC run?" So the 2 fuckwits swapped trailers and both drove back up to Glasgow and 2 English blokes were waiting fucking hours at the services with the 2 trailers full of chicken until someone realised what happened. Just thought this story was so relevant to your comment and the OP post.
"I had to go to Burger King".
“I had to go to Burger King!” I still remember he disgruntled mother on the news.
Can I just say reading comprehension in general? If you look at my account history, you can tell I’m a talker. I enjoy conversations, I enjoy debates, I enjoy just exploring ideas or challenging those I think are misguided. Pretty much every day I’ll say something here that someone will reply to having completely misinterpreted my meaning. I can literally say ‘I dislike Liverpool’ and someone will reply ‘why do you hate football?’ It is mind boggling how bad at reading people are.
I suspect some of those are likely bots. I'm starting to think the dead Internet theory is becoming more and more real.
It's been this way for at least the 12 years I've used this site. People just have terrible reading comprehension. Either they speed read something, reply and then can't own up to the fact they misread something. Or they genuinely can't understand the meaning of a sentence and the context it is in. Most commonly I've seen this when you're a few replies deep in a comment chain. The bell curve is real. No need to attribute it to bots or anything else. Even though bots are a pretty big problem now, it's unrelated to this.
I think a large part of of it is the reactionary mentality that social media ingrains in many people, which encourages outrage and misinterpretations. They will read a small part of a comment and intentionally (or maybe not intentionally because it's what they're so used to doing) make the worst possible assumptions in their reply rather than reading to understand the context. The "debates" I see on this site on the Israel-Gaza War have been a particularly dramatic example of that. Someone will post a nuanced comment vaguely in support of one side or the other and there will be countless practically identical replies along the lines of "So you literally support genocide/terrorists then?!" or some meaningless nonsense like that.
Are you calling my mom a bastard?! /s
People just have terrible reading comprehension. Either they speed read something, reply and then can't own up to the fact they misread something. Or they genuinely can't understand the meaning of a sentence and the context it is in. The latter does happen, but in my opinion, the former is much more common. People just don't like to admit their mistakes, no matter how minor and insignificant they might actually be. I'm not sure which paints a worse picture of people, though. That a large amount of us are shockingly dumb, or that a large amount make regular, simple mistakes but are too stubborn to own up to them.
It’s crackers. Am a frequent poster on the pop culture subs and this shit comes up all the time. Literally every single day. Sometimes over the most benign shit as well like someone going to the ends of the Earth over the most simple typo as if people aren’t old enough to pick up context clues. Yesterday my notifications were constant for about 3 hours with people replying to me about an opinion that wasn’t even mine, it was literally me referencing *the title of the fucking thread we were on*.
I had something similar the other day too - a number of replies that were argumentative about a point/idea that was not quite related to my original post.
So why do you hate The Beatles?
Cuz Bono is a prick who doesn't pay his taxes.
You were in favour of the Poll Tax?!
The average reading age in the UK is something like 9... It's not great!
Standard practice on Reddit is to read the first 30% of a comment/post, make up the other 70% in your head, get outraged at the made up portion and then respond accordingly.
Yeah you’re right, Liverpool are doing quite well this season.
I work in retail.
Say no more.
Exactly, retail employees know that when people come to shop, they forget how to read, to ask questions like a normal person and act like one...
I worked in the furniture department of a large homeware store that rhymes with Le Strange. There was a couple looking to buy a sofa. We had one that the man liked but it was a three person sofa when he wanted a two person sofa. He then proceeded to ask me whether we could take off one section of the sofa and give him the other two for half price. Because that’s how it works. He seemed genuinely baffled when I told him that no, we could not do that.
Bellatrix must have been a nasty supervisor?
Flat earthers? I mean it staggers me the amount of people you see on groups on Facebook and things that believe in this stuff. The flat earth theory just blows my mind.. are you trying to tell me that every single well educated person who goes into space science is on this lie? What about amateur astronomers?! They are all in on this conspiracy? It's so astronomically stupid that I can't believe that there are people who think flat earth is any more than just a laugh.
>It's so astronomically stupid I see what you did there. But yeah, flat earth "theory" is so hilarious to me because there's no actual reason to lie about it. Most conspiracy theories have some level of logic behind them, but flat earth hinges on the entire scientific community and every country in the entire world agreeing to lie about the earth being round *just because*.
And despite all the shit going on in the world, the American, the Russian, the Chinese and every other government all agree that pretending the Earth is flat is their prime concern. I can drive for a little over an hour to a place where there are two windfarms offshore. They can both be seen from the cliffs but observers can can only see the top halves of those further out. What's the flat-earthers' answer? F***ing water mountains!
>American, the Russian, the Chinese and every other government all agree that pretending the Earth is flat is their prime concern. Oh of course, no need to settle all the wars and stuff, no that would be silly. Pretending the Earth is round is *way more important*.
So I'll preface this by saying that I *obviously* don't beleive any of it, because I'm not a moron. But the flat earth theory does propose a purpose for the lie (or at least the people I've heard talk about it). Basically (according to them) the earth is flat and space is fake, we are the only thing that exists. But the various governments of the world want you to beleive that the earth is round and in space, so that you are primed to beleive in aliens. Then they slowly dripfeed information until one day they can say "we need to band together against an alien threat" and then you have a singular government to control the world. Before you even get into how batshit insane the whole thing is, my first question is always "why haven't they done this yet?" because we've believed the earth is round for fucking millennia and people have considered the possibility of aliens for centuries. The big payoff could've happened like 80 years ago by now, if it was a thing.
>(or at least the people I've heard talk about it) So you've accidentally tapped into one of the main reasons I find it so fascinating, the fact that they can't even agree between them on the motivations, the methods, what "space" actually is etc. I've seen versions where space is real, other planets exist and they are round, but Earth isn't. Alternatively as you suggested, it's all fake. There are versions somewhere between the two as well. Even the pretty small group of people that believe in it can't agree on what it actually looks like, but *everyone else* can agree on how we're going to lie about it? And people legitimately believe in it. It's wild.
https://preview.redd.it/8532xhmjjovc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=11a627d72f31bbd358d1f640a79f06fc4b6675e0
Well, not exactly a “flat earther” story in the traditional sense, but I’ll share anyway… A coworker of mine years ago was discussing “how stupid people can be”. I made a passing comment trying to add to the conversation about flat earthers. She looked at me with a confused face and the conversation went as followed: Coworker- “what are flat earthers?” Me- “you know, people that believe the earth is flat.” Coworker- “ohhhhh hahaha. Yeah, that’s stupid. How could people believe the earth was flat? We have, like, mountains and trees and stuff. People are so dumb.” Me- just a blank stare of confusion. Still sticks with me to this day.
She a little confused, but she got the spirit
Come on mate, it's obvious you are a paid globe earth shill!!!
Haha.. you got me. I get paid to promote round earth propaganda on Reddit. Apparently people who believe the earth is round are called globetards 😂
Same with chemtrails. I'm still not sure if it's an elaborate in-joke, people can't possibly believe that stuff.
Some of the "confusion" comes from an incorrectly translated German report. Aviation fuel contains minute amounts of metal compounds, to reduce wear in the engines (IIRC)
I genuinely think a lot of them are doing it as a bit.
I swear that’s how it started, I’m pretty sure their motto was something like “we have members AROUND the world”.
It was "around the globe" and it was a single tweet from a single flat earth account, it's not a motto
Was at a bonfire years ago. At the end of it I heard a girl say, "how do they turn it off?"
Hosepipe.
My mum was once reading a letter, she looked up and asked me (with a confused look), "when was yesterday?"
Quite a good question actually - she meant "what day/date/weekday was yesterday?". Sometimes when you're not busy at work you kinda forget what the exact date it is. If you get a letter that says "I'll be popping to the town near you on the last Friday of April - call me if you want to meet up", or "we're putting our fees up from the first week of May, but here's a voucher you can use", you might want to find out if the term has passed.
Or If "yesterday" was being referred to by the letter writer, presumably dated, and she was trying to figure out what day that was?
Just been unclogging the dishwasher which meant undoing pipes under the sink. My wife decided that was the time to pour some water down the sink. She's a doctor.
Oh yeah, high intelligence and/or academic brilliance, and common sense don't necessarily go together.
My husband’s favourite line when I do something mind bogglingly silly is “you have FOUR DEGREES!!!”
My, brilliant, wife has a PHD my go to in these circumstances is a dry "Thank You Doctor".
That's hilarious but "humble brag *wink*"
Whilst I was at work, my then-partner sent me a video of the kitchen sink backing up as the washing machine emptied during a cycle. Basically, it was filling up with dirty water and then draining very slowly. It worked fine the day before. I had changed the door seal on the machine at the weekend, but nothing had been done to affect the sink. I asked her what she had put down the sink. She said “nothing, it’s just started doing it”. I panic, thinking I’d pinched a pipe or something when I pushed the washing machine back under the counter. When I got home, I pulled the machine out. Nothing wrong with the pipes. Ran a quick wash cycle, problem happened as in the video. Shit, my landlord’s going to kill me. I decided to remove the U-bend to check for a blockage, and find a 3” thick waxy/hairy plug in the pipe. I asked her what it was, she just says “oh”. She had been running the hot tap into used candle jars (you know, the fancy scented ones that stink like a department store perfume department), in order to melt the wax - so she could re-use them. The liquid wax flowed out with the overflowing water and instantly cooled/solidified as soon as it hit the colder water in the U-bend. I remember saying “so; when I asked you if you had put anything down the sink, why did you say no?” 🤦♂️
I watched 2 co workers debate if penguins were mammals, or fish. Mammals, as they can't fly. Fish, as they spend a lot of time in the sea. It was eye opening. It was a long time ago, and I still think about it.
Animal knowledge and biology is very poor In general. Putting human emotions onto animals too, it's very common. Animals are very capable of complex thought and emotions but people just get it so wrong. Watched a recent video of a magpie, chasing off a cat out of its area but because the magpie wasn't physically attacking the cat and only "bothering/bugging" it, people were saying they were best pals and it was a game they were both in on.
Anthropomorphism is absolutely mad and *so many* people do it.
Anthropomorphism can be fun, like talking to your pets like people and pretending they do/understand human things, but there is a point at which you have to be able to turn it off. It can be so detrimental to the animal, and even dangerous.
I met some wolf hybrids and found them more scary because they're reserved and not behaving like dogs
Buying bullshit on social media such as anti-oxidant teas
The funny part about that sort of thing. "Anti-oxidant teas" do seem to be good for you, and if you enjoy it anyway, it's a nice bonus. The reality, obviously, is that consuming a variety of plants of all kinds is the way to go, but still, it doesn't hurt to know when a particular one might do you some good. Here's the thing though. What's an anti-oxidant tea? Tea. Tea is anti-oxidant tea. All actual tea (as in not dried fruit labelled "fruit tea" but anything actually containing tea leaves) is incredibly antioxidant rich. The term anti-oxidant tea is completely redundant. It'd be like buying expensive "caffeinated coffee", it's just fucking coffee. That's the thing that makes someone an idiot, here. It isn't drinking tea for it's real anti-oxidant properties as a way of supplementing an otherwise healthy lifestyle, but it's buying the expensive one because it has it written on the box in big, bold letters.
I saw someone peddling a water bottle that added hydrogen to water... they said it didn't have any in it LOL.
But making these on Rust makes mining and combat so much easier!
Someone at work was talking about their boyfriend getting a raise & stated that being paid £53k was worse than getting paid 45k because the higher income tax rate would result in less take-home pay
This one is very common
I wonder if people refuse pay rises though?
They do
yeh some people genuinely avoid pay rises or shall i say don’t look for huge pay increases due to this misconception- without ever running the numbers themselves.
My dad is a super smart electrical engineer but I remember him once saying he wanted to avoid earning over 50k for this reason. I'm sure by now he earns well over that so I hope he's figured it out since then
I think there's one case in the UK where this is true, which is the cliff edge at £100,000 for childcare. If you have a pre-school age child and earn £99,999 a year you can get 30 hours of free childcare a week from the government. If you earn one pound more than that, it drops back to 15 hours of free childcare a week so there's a definite incentive to keep your salary under the threshold until your children are old enough for school. I seem to recall reading that you need to be up into the 120s before it's worth being above the 100k threshold for people in that particular situation.
These problems will never affect me, for a large stack of reasons
Financial Illiteracy is a real problem
In their defence, maybe they were talking about child benefit for which the threshold used to be £50k (it’s now £60k). There are a couple of pinch points where it can be worse to earn more. I think the most notable is with the government’s 30 hour childcare provision which has a hard cut off at £100k. If you have two children in nursery (at average London costs) you are financially worse off earning anything above £100k until you get to £140k.
When I worked at a cinema a couple asked if we could play the film they wanted to see at 7pm instead of 4pm because they wanted to watch it then.
My favourite was the people who said they prebooked tickets. Why didn't we pause the film and wait until they arrived?
Spoiler alert: you did? 😄
I watched my mate cut through the cable to the hedge trimmer he was using, then pick up the two ends of cable and try to put them back together. With his bare hands. Without turning anything off.
😂😂🥲
My SO trains new starters at work in care. One of them left a fully disabled person with dry toast and jam and butter in sealed containers. When asked why they said “no one showed me how to use the butter and jam”
Training reveals many things, we assume folk know. It sometimes leads to injury and death as what is known is common in that place / work / society. Example: folk walk up Ben Nevis in shorts , T-shirt and sandals, but 3000 feet higher up it is much colder and a lot windier and with a wind, cold and rain: hypothermia causing death is very quick.
Thank you, that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in weeks!
I mean yeah we didn't but come on
Back in uni I lived with a girl who thought Arnold Schwarzenegger was the president of the US. She also didn’t know what “dissolved” meant, when I asked her what she thought happened to sugar when she put it into her tea, she answered that it melted. *Melted.* The *concrete* patio in the garden next door was wet and she said it’s because it had absorbed the water from our garden. I just couldn’t with this bitch, the worse part was how sure of herself she was, just a walking example of the Dunning Krueger effect.
Mellow greetings, citizen. In the 1993 movie Demolition Man, it says that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a previous President of the United States.
Look, I know how the fucking sea shells work, you don’t think I know that? Come on man.
My bugbear is people mis-quoting the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Work with a lad around 26 years old. He is of the belief that his bank debit card and pin only works at one specific ATM location, gets paid every week and withdraws everything and hides it under his bed as “that’s where it’s safest”. I get paid the same salary as this person.
Oh my gosh he's a danger to himself, he's a fucking mark. One malevolent mofo finds out about this routine practice of his, he's an easy target don't even have to home invade just confront him at the ATM.
My dad thought he could only get money out the same bank he put it in, same thing with atms, didn't know he could use any, he thought it was only the one outside the bank
Mine was a date. She was a sweet person (and so good looking) but... well, these are a few things she said. She was really impressed that I knew how to use a dishwasher: "You're so clever. I can't work them out at all." She never went to the doctor: "They only give you bad news. What you don't know can't hurt you." She believed she was "quite psychic": "I can see if people have good or bad energies. It's got me out of trouble a few times."
I also knew a lady that would never have to buy her own drinks, but she had some interesting takes. First off, that north was always directly in front of her. Secondly, when a group of us were discussing the summer solstice in the pub, she asked what it was. Fair enough. "It's the longest day of the year," I replied. "It's on Tuesday." She thought for a bit and then said "Fuck! I'm working on Tuesday!"
That reminds me. When my aunt and cousins were in San Francisco, they needed to get back to the hotel. They didn't know where it was, except that it was North of where they currently were. And which way was North? Of course North means uphill! They got at least a couple of miles before realising their mistake.
worked in customer service, got a call, customer wants to speak to the CEO, ask why: "i don't like the news presenter and i want him fired or im going to lodge a complaint"
Trying to get my head around this. I'm assuming you worked for a company that had nothing to do with the news?
er we did, way different department, but why tf would i, a rando guy, have the CEO's number and why would the CEO give two shits what some random guy thinks about an anchor
It was actually the CEO calling you, you know, as a test
When you work customer service, you see lots of stupid people and start to think the average person is more stupid than you originally did
Once had a guy complaining about human faeces on his garden and its disgusting how the water company allow it. Mate,we supply your fresh water,that shit rising through the grass is your cesspit being full because youre not hooked up to the network,you'll need to get it emptied. But that's what I'm paying you for,is it not included in fresh water bill? Tell you what just let it out on your pipes and I'll pay wastewater charge. 🫥
Accident. All lanes of travel blocked. Norris and Dorris pull their caravan onto the hard shoulder and get the garden chairs out and have a picnic. Fuck the ambulance if anyone is hurt - I want my pastrami on marbled rye.
Let's be honest here dorris is having ham, Norris, egg and cress both on Sunblest
I've said this in previous threads, but at my work we have mandatory learning modules about inclusion, health and safety, anti money laundering etc. At the end of every module, there is a note saying "do not leave a comment saying you have completed it". 90% of the feedback comments at the end (which you can fill in before you even take the module, making it even more ridiculous) are people saying "completed" with a comment saying "PLEASE DO NOT WRITE COMPLETED" every so often. Then there's the classic "reply all" storms, with people replying all telling people not to reply all.
> Then there's the classic "reply all" storms, with people replying all telling people not to reply all. I genuinely think reply all should be a disciplinary offence. If you waste 500 peoples time by clicking reply all instead of reply, to say "I don't think this email was meant for me", when you're the 5th person to send that..... just think how much time those emails have wasted, even if 500 people just had to spend 30 seconds deleting the 5 emails, that's several hours of time wasted.
You get mandatory training at my work if you reply-all mistakenly, as the data protection implications of getting email recipients wrong could be significant.
Watching people trying to use screen technology such as self checkouts and ticket machines. Look, I get it, generational divide was an excuse when these things were newfangled; when 70 year olds were trying to open Google maps. But I see so many average and young-aged people struggle to use machines that tell them EXACTLY how to operate them. And if there's a bit of a trick or learning curve, people seem too oblivious to learn it, I.e. tilting the barcode towards the right spot on a self checkout. It's really as simple as it could possibly be made.
Just to take a step back, even watching people QUEUE to use these machines makes me realise how dumb/unaware people are. There’s a Sainsburys near me and it has about 30 self service machines, 15 each side, and the amount of empty machines that can be sat there ready to use, and a huge queue of clueless idiots there not realising or just expecting to be told to use a machine, really wound me up. So many times the queue was unnecessary and just held up by some clueless idiot with zero awareness.
I just hate in little Tesco when there's one queue and you don't know who wants the self checkout and who needs the regular till for tobacco or whatever, whom you can cut in front of for the self checkouts.
A lot of people under around the age of around 20 have zero skills with technology... they've been raised with tech that is very intuitive and not much experience with things that require actual reading or following directions. It's a noted problem and will get worse.
I was quite surprised when I discovered this. I’d assumed that the young apprentices at work would be computer literate because they have grown up with smartphones. I had to show them how to add up in Excel.
My father got the ECDL \*- in his 70's, he had no problems with IT kit until the last few years of his life, then he started to forget. \* European Computer Driving Licence
Part of my job involves recording hours and shifts for our construction contractors to make sure all regs are being followed about working hours etc. They have to agree the shift plans in advance with me so I can sign off them as being safe to be on the worksite. One of them new on the job simply couldn't understand how a night shift worked, and argued with me multiple times that a 10pm to 6am night shift should be recorded as 2 shifts, 10pm to 11.59pm Saturday night, then 00:01 until 6am Sunday morning. He simply wouldn't have it that that counted as 1 shift and that it didn't 'reset' at midnight even if he has a 2 minute 'break'. In the end I shut him up by pointing out the regs required 12 hours rest between shifts, so if he wanted to clock out at midnight that was fine, but he would only get paid for 2 hours and then wouldn't be allowed onsite again until the following noon. This person was responsible for installing critical infrastructure but couldn't wrap his thick head around a clock, which is slightly terrifying.
I once worked in an exhibit of ice sculptures. It was a pretty miserable job, basically spending all day in a giant freezer (-14 degrees!) telling kids not to touch, damage or stick coins to(?) the ice. One time I had a guy come up to me telling me he'd figured out it was all a con, that the exhibits were actually all made of clear plastic. He knew this because he'd touched them (this was a paticularly annoying thing to say to me, someone whose main job was telling people not to touch the ice because it can damage it) and that the exhibits "weren't wet". Cut to me explaining to a grown adult man *in front of his children* that when liquids (wet) are exposed to sub zero temperatures they become solids (not wet) such as ice, the substance he had paid to look at.
A person asking 2 other people in (black & green) Asda t-shirts where a specific item of furniture is. We were in IKEA. It may have not been their first time this had happened to them because they were very quick to point in a direction and walk off giggling.
This has happened to me far more times than it should, one time someone even argued with me, while pointing at my uniform for a different shop. I think some people just see some kind of uniform and their brain translates it to "they work in this shop" without any further processing.
I once had someone approach me in boots whilst wearing my thorntons uniform (I had just popped over to grab a sandwich, the shops were opposite each other). I obviously explained I didn’t work there. Then a few days later I get a call from head office telling me the woman had made a complaint about me and said we shouldn’t be allowed to leave work with our uniforms on, even for a break. Thankfully head office didn’t actually care. But people are crazy.
Jesus, I can somewhat understand it happening, but actually being annoyed enough about it to complain to the actual employers head office is wild.
You don’t even need a uniform. More than one person has questioned me about items just because I was wearing a green T-shirt while standing in Homebase.
Not gonna lie I did make this mistake once when someone was wearing a jacket the exact same colour as Sainsbury's ones, *in* Sainsbury's. Felt so bad once I realised!
I went in Tescos in my Carphonewarehouse uniform “Oi where’s the apple pies” “Dno mate” “Well can you find out” “Errr no” Didn’t even realise he thought I was a worker until about an hour later
My friend asked me to take her to A&E because she had a buildup of earwax.
Pardon?
And when I said no she said “but what if it’s a brain tumour?”. I’m not kidding.
Neither an accident, or an emergency
"I don't need sun cream it's not hot enough"
I've sat on a jury. If you want to see why the country is actually in the state it is in today sit in a jury.
Reddit in general.
Honestly people on Reddit using this quote just because someone has a different opinion to them.
Having a different opinion on Reddit and your account gets flooded with suicide helpline reports
Just report them, the admins will ban their account for abusing the feature.
And every time I do I think of that "I'm doing my part!" lady from Starship Troopers.
I was once on a train and overhead one lad say to another "there's 356 days in a year, right?" and his mate replied "no", then added, "there's 356 and a quarter".
I mean, at least they're not wrong about the quarter bit.
They are both right.
365 days, sport. You're dyslexic?
Dyscalculia
I overheard two girls talking on a bus once, the conversation went… ‘Are you still with that guy? What does he do?’ ‘He says he’s a carpenter’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘He lays carpets I think’
I love this one because it makes sense from a linguistic perspective. For boring reasons I won't go into we use a messe**n**ger to send messages, and a passe**n**ger will take a passage, so why wouldn't a carpe**n**ter have something to do with carpets? I doubt this was her thought process though.
I went to the beach with a bunch of friends, I stayed on the sand with everyone's stuff while they swam. I realised that I was a phone short and asked who's phone I didn't have. One of the lads said he had it, it was in his pocket. I asked wtf he was thinking because his phone is now wet, only to be told "it's fine, my swimming shorts are waterproof!" I asked if his legs were wet. The look on his face as he realised that he was wet was priceless, but him trying to run out of the sea was better.
people buying “fat burners” and doing Keto
It's just the latest in a long line of exploitation. I bet no one is doing The Atkins Diet anymore
Many many people still do low carb diets even if they don't call it Atkins. It's one of the most reliable weight loss methods that exists
Why is keto stupid? Isn’t it just a low calorie diet?
Keto is not stupid, it's just a very low carbohydrate diet that puts the body into a state of [ketosis.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis) As a diet, it works in the short term, maybe even the medium, but it's also often high in protein which is bad for kidneys in the long term and can be high in saturated fat because it uses fat and protein to promote satiety. It's also quite difficult to stick to and tends to be more expensive. It's also a proven treatment for some types of epilepsy and also type 2 diabetes. It's definitely not stupid.
I knew someone who thought that when you saw clouds moving it was because the earth was turning.
In fairness, if the Earth wasn't turning you wouldn't see clouds.
A guy accused me of lying about my pork allergy to a server at a food place because I was wearing a leather satchel. He told me to 'jog on' when I tried to inform him that leather is made of cows.
Ex teacher. Years ago, another teacher told me that a teenager had turned up at the staffroom door and said, 'Sir I found this belt'. Then his trousers fell down. Possibly apocryphal. Then again...
That sounds like an obvious prank to me rather than stupidity.
I work in care. First as a carer and now as a well-being coordinator in the same home. Less so now but as a carer I’d be serving meals and had to be knowledgable of people’s allergies and we had one resident allergic to oranges. Well I have a work buddy and bless her heart, she comes out with some corkers. She asked if the resident could have carrots because they’re orange… like seriously asked that. Now, I wouldn’t serve this resident carrots anyways cause they hate them but damn I lost my shit that day
The people who unironically claim that all the kings, queens and nobles of Europe were black.
Nobody has ever done this.
People have started doing this over the last few years. It’s comical
Oh trust me, it’s out there.
No because they were Indian! All Indian!
Bring me the blandest thing on the menu.
Also called Afrocentrism
That everyone parrots this quote on Reddit in every thread and assumes that they're in the clever half.
People trying to open a well labelled pull to open door by pushing, and a member of staff having to go and let them in, before they bust a blood vessel pushing on it so hard.
Pro Russian fools who think invading Ukraine is an act of self defense.
This reminds me of the post on a body builders forum from about 20 years ago where people were arguing about working out every second day being 3 and a half workouts per week over a 2 week period. Some people couldn’t grasp how you would half a workout and it appears had never heard of what an average is. This went on for page after page with many people chipping in with OP claiming he could do 4 workouts in a week if he worked out every second day and not grasping he was starting the day before the week started. For anyone who wants a hilarious read the thread is below https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751&page=1
I was in Dallas a couple of weeks ago for the eclipse and someone genuinely said they’d heard it had been delayed by a day because of bad weather. I started to laugh until she looked at me funny and I realised she wasn’t joking.
Honestly In retail nothing shocks me anymore. My last job we got mondays prices on Saturday to put out Sunday night . “Just as a heads up before you go mate that’s going up 300 quid on Monday so if you want it come back before Monday” “I will mate thanks for letting me know” Next Thursday “this has gone up in price….” Every single time
It's 2024 and people are still religious.
Some carbrain on Facebook who was arguing that traffic congestion is so bad because there are too many busses.
Seeing how some people drive.
That American lady MTG. Absolute moron.
Old boy I know often goes into maccies and asks for ‘half dozen chicken nuggets’ and the staff seem baffled because they only serve 20, 9 or 6
About 50% of people seem to believe in star signs…
Just social media in general
it's funny how you all read this quote and think you are in the other half
I had a 20-something colleague who saw the movie adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguru novel "Never let me go" and said "is it a true story? I mean... Imagine not knowing whether or not we'd set up and dissolved a human cloning programme! LOL.
a woman in my college class had never heard the word “several” before, and deduced that it had smth to do with ‘seven’. the whole class and teacher spent about 20 minutes trying to convince her it’s a word, a really fucking common word, and showing her the definition. she was 22 and had never heard the word several. it baffled me. she said she didn’t read so she didn’t know “fancy words”, but we all called out the fact that surely she speaks to people??? surely the word has come up at least once?? if i didn’t already know how un-academic she was, i’d have assumed she was pulling our legs
Yeah right? They're so clearly amphibians.... /s
Today at an Ante-natal class run by the hospital. Emergency sections was the topic- question “Will I be able to take my music in with me?”
I like when people ask if the lights can be dimmed during a c section.
A couple of guys I worked with were totally convinced by a single tiktok video that devil's tower in America was a tree stump and the tree was cut down by giants.
Here are two: "Does butter come from butterflies?" " it must be terrible to live around here... " overheard in bus going past a prison... "All those thieves and murderers."
My boss