Things overheard in the hairdressers. Couldn’t believe my ears this afternoon.

[ChocolateDoll]

Sat with dye on my hair listening to this conversation taking place next to me. Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry

HAIRDRESSER: What you going to do on your holidays, then?

CLIENT: Well, we’re planning to visit Auschwitz.

HAIRDRESSER: Oh, right. What you gonna do there then? Just chill out for a bit?

CLIENT: Umm...well uhhh....it’s a concentration camp, you know?

HAIRDRESSER: oh right....sorry.....thought it was like a resort or something.

I don't see it like this, but more as a surprise that some people ignore some facts.
We are not talking about a single battle, a general or Australia's first prime minister. The holocaust and Auschwitz are a fundamental piece of our world.
This thread is more about where does this ignorance come from? We are not blaming the history teachers but I certainly point the finger at the history curriculum in schools.
This is by no mean limited to UK/ Australia.
When I was living in London in a shared house, two Americans from St Louis came to live with us. They were gutted as they had discovered on the flight there while going through the flight brochure that UK was an island. They didn't know and they were university students!!!

I'm fairly sure that random client X's holiday plans are of fuck all interest to the hairdresser, given that she's probably had to politely enquire about 10 other clients' holidays already that day.

Honestly - it's far more likely that she gave an auto-pilot response, given the sheer mundanity of the topic at hand.

""The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
History is around us everywhere and in everything" exactly!

Badbilly - I watched and thoroughly enjoyed a show called "how we used to live" it's now coming on 40 years since I watched the episode with black shirts beating an old Jewish man and the daughter of the family at the centre of the show coming across the incident and being shocked that people could be so awful to someone just because of their religion/race, and it's stuck with me. Because until that point (I was maybe 8?) I didn't know that there were British fascists. That led to me learning more about Mosley, Enoch Powell etc

Some years ago we were touring Windsor Castle and overhead elderly American tourists commenting that it was a lovely castle but such a pity they built it on the flight path!

Also... I was chatting to a colleague once about an upcoming holiday in Brisbane, Australia. We worked in London. She asked how long it would take to drive there. She was an accountant. Same firm, different colleague asked if they had "Drs and lawyers and stuff like that" there.

I thought most kids did Anne Frank at school.

My dh overheard gossip about us 😂
My friend carried our baby - surrogacy - and he heard all about it. Completely wrongly but hey!

My friend visited her hometown from abroad and went to the hairdressers. A conversation went something like the following but with different names.

HAIRDRESER: So what are you doing in Manchester then?

FRIEND: Im from here but I've lived abroad for 20 years.

HAIRDRESSER: Where do you live?

FRIEND: A very small county called Neverneverland.

HAIRDRESSER: Oh my god Sophie there's a client here from the same place as that guy Dick you see. You know, the one who comes here on Business a few times a year.

HAIRDRESSER TO MY FRIEND: Its a small world, maybe you know him, he's dead good looking, he's in oil and gas and his name is Dick.

MY FRIEND: Wow, it really is a small world, I do know HIM.

HAIRDRESSER: Wow, how come?

FRIEND: He's my husband!

A minute or so of what my friend calls herself being 'all calm god knows what' then followed and the next thing she knew Sophie had ran out of the Salon leaving her client in the chair.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has its place, but it is really Holocaust lite. Schindler's List is a lot longer and more harrowing. We saw it at the cinema and people coming out just couldn't speak.

History was very poorly taught when I was at school in the Eighties and my knowledge of history mostly comes from the education all around us - the films, books, conversations with family members and others, watching the news etc. I see my niece receiving the same sort of education I did at school but at her house the only television watched is Love Island, Made in Whatever-reality-TV-show-place etc. They are quite proud that they don't have books at home, films are mostly Disney (think grown adults who call their family 'The Tinkerbell Clan'), and conversations with parents mostly involve discussing Kerry Katona and Katie Price.

Is it snobby to disapprove? I don't care if it is. I disapprove massively.

My niece's family are not short of money and have all the gadgets in the world but there is a desperate cultural poverty going on there making me ashamed and worried for the future. She may touch upon the Holocaust and similar topics at school but the likelihood is that it will go in one ear and out the other because there's no room in her brain for stuff that isn't on reality TV. Genocide and similar subjects will mean nothing to her and she will come across as terribly ignorant because she is. There's only so much that teachers and the curriculum can cover and parents should take some responsibility for their children.

I honestly think she just wasn’t listening. When you go into work on a Monday and ask Karen at the next desk if she had a nice weekend, do you honestly listen, or do you just nod and smile politely while thinking of something else? And you’re not even a colleague, you’re just a head on the conveyor belt of her day. She probably asks the same question 10+ times a day, and 97% of the time, her response works.

DD won't be watching Schindler's List quite yet. She's 10.

Teaching a physiology unit to potential nurses, all have GCSE science/biology.

Someone asked if blood was blue, I was a bit startled but said no but some of the text books use blue to indicate deoxygenated blood.

1/3 of the class shouted me down.

Apparently blood is blue, when you cut yourself the blood turns red because it meets the air.

Blood in bags given in hospital is red because it has been in the air before it was put in the bag.

Blood meeting air is 'oxygenation'.

I taught two other classes the same lesson and got a similar response.

It was a long week.

HolyMerlot - yes, it was in Wales. Oh crumbs. It wasn’t you, was it?!?

We were talking along these lines at work recently. I work in a call centre, part time. Lots of us relative oldies but also a constant flow of young ‘uns
It’s like they’ve NEVER read a paper or watched the news or read a historical novel
Space station? HAHAHA what like in Star Wars? Uh. No.
Hitler? Oh yeah I heard of him. He was funny, really weird moustache ... yeah Hollowcourse? What’s that ? Oh I’ve heard of Austwitch it’s in Australia isn’t it?

Even down to travel. They’d (generalisation) been to Ibiza, Malia etc. But one was adamant you don’t need a passport for France cos ‘it’s just over there 👉🏻 ‘ and ‘yeah the train just goes through the water’
We. Live. Near. The. Channel. Tunnel.
I know there’s a bunch of people who though it was a glass tube but folks, the terminal in 10 miles away.

No general knowledge. No interest in anything but reality tv

We have a quick turn over in young ones, the bright educated with it ones split 50/50
Half stay on and make a LOT of money like us oldies- the others move on quickly to much much better roles
The dafties dont last. It may ‘just’ be a call centre but we have to understand the world ...

I'm 24 and this is the first I've heard of this :(

Someone on CBB the other night didn't know who Kim Jong-un was. I was genuinely shocked. Probs my fault for watching .

I know an adult who thought that skimmed, semi-skimmed and full fat milk came from skinny, average and fat cows respectively.

Do we have the same hairdresser OP? Mine said almost exactly the same thing when I said we were going to Krakow. She had never heard of Auschwitz, or even concentration camps. She is 32 FFS.

I was actually shocked.

My DS is 11 and knows about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. I reckon she misheard though.

I blame the parents. Never been to any of the concentration camps but we took the kids to Normandy when they were at primary school (highly recommended) and we also went to Nuremberg when they were a bit older. We show them appropriate tv prior to the holiday and now they have access to internet of course though not then. No surprises the eldest is studying history! School can't teach everything, do families not talk at home? This weekend we have castles on the agenda (though the only "kid" coming I think is canine on account of mine being grown

When I told a hairdresser that I was going to Berlin, she ask what country it was in. 🙄

SharpLily your phrase "cultural poverty" sums up the problem. It is about what you talk to/do with your children on a daily basis, encouraging an interest in the wider world and what goes on there, now and in the past

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was just awful and totally unrealistic.

Bruno is the son of a concentration camp commander but has absolutely no idea what the Nazis are doing or who Shmuel is? And Shmuel never spills the beans about what is going on?

No one realises that Bruno and Shmuel are meeting at the fence, and Bruno is able to get into the camp by digging a hole under the fence, but the prisoners are too stupid to take advantage of such lax security?

And the 'shocking twist' at the end of the little Aryan boy accidentally being gassed alongside the Jews. Because we all knew the fate of Shmuel and his Jewish counterparts, so just gassing them would have been a bit predictable.....

I'm 24 and this is the first I've heard of this

The first you have heard of what?

Half stay on and make a LOT of money like us oldies

Genuine question - how much can you earn working in a call centre?

A colleague of DH's went to Auschwitz a few years ago. He came back explaining his dilemma that he wasn't sure what was more insensitive; taking a selfie or interrupting a stranger's contemplation to ask them to take it.

The concept of taking a photo and just not fucking being in it for once passed him by.