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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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Original poster

How can you not know?!

423 replies

TittyGolightly · 19/04/2017 19:52

I work with a woman (29 and a mother of one) whose lack of general knowledge I can't quite believe to be normal. Ask anything about TOWIE or IACGMOOH and she knows it (unlike me) but the following are just some of the things she hasn't known in the past couple of weeks:

that we aren't "doing cows a favour" by milking them
that tea grows on bushes (or that it's a leaf)
that coffee comes from beans
that bees are being threatened by modern farming practices and that if there are no bees we will have no plants (inc fruit and veg)
that reindeer are real
that early humans lived in caves
that a month isn't 4 weeks

She "has no idea" how anyone can know this stuff.

Is this normal now? My 6 year old knows most of this!

OP posts:

Thread gallery

frieda909 · 19/04/2017 23:56

In 2012 I was having a conversation with a friend about politics where it transpired she thought the SNP and the BNP were the same thing. She was shocked to discover not only that they weren't, but that the SNP had actually been in power for the past year.

She's a doctor.

And we were living in Edinburgh.

MrsPacMan · 19/04/2017 23:56

I can't believe you're on mums net and don't realise the amount of basic shit people don't know 😊

Goldfishjane · 19/04/2017 23:59

User, your Trump example is one reason I don't believe in compulsory voting. We'd end up with people choosing any box for the hell of it. If people really aren't interested, compelling them to vote would end up with...oh wait, we have Trump...!

ifcatscouldtalk · 19/04/2017 23:59

I used to work with a girl that was just out of college. She was absolutely lovely and a joy to work with. Not really general knowledge but she never understood jokes. This made people's really crap jokes funny as her reactions were funnier than any joke. I remember my boss suggesting a comedy club night out and and she just said "no i don't get comedians, i don't understand the jokes " I actually miss her, she was a very nice person.

MamehaSan · 19/04/2017 23:59

PetalMettle

It never ceases to amaze me how little general knowledge some people have. I'm not talking rocket science stuff. Things like the fact that Scotland's not in England

SabineUndine · 20/04/2017 00:00

AGnu I thought Hawaii was close to the west coast of the USA until a couple of years ago too.

In one of Bill Bryson's books he quotes the statistic that a third of college graduates couldn't name a country in Asia.

I do remember when I first started working full time finding it weird that Israel is in Asia. Still do. Can't we move the Middle East to Africa?

BadLad · 20/04/2017 00:00

Bad, I remember that but I thought it was a wind up.

Hopefully, but she was very insistent.

AndNowItIsSeven · 20/04/2017 00:13

People lived in structuallly built homes before they lived in caves. Caves were temporary hiding places or convenient places to preserve the bodies of loved ones, but they were not normal living spaces.

ifcatscouldtalk · 20/04/2017 00:14

I like these threads as I always learn something new.

ILookedintheWater · 20/04/2017 00:38

Showing my age here....One of the cleverest people I ever knew was irritated every Sunday morning during our college years as all the call boxes in the town centre were 'emergency calls only'. She honestly thought they went round and switched them to 999 only for Sundays. The look of light dawning on her face when we explained it just meant that they were full and couldn't take any more coins will stay with me forever.

DoJo · 20/04/2017 00:40

I worked with someone who thought that if you opted for a caesarian, you were given a general anaesthetic and woken up to be given a clean bundle of baby ready for cuddles. She also didn't understand why I was so concerned for her that her brake lights weren't working as she would know when she was braking anyway.

She is lovely and an incredibly talented musician, but she struggles with logical progressions, with thinking about how one thing impacts another and the eventual outcome of a situation. It's the way her brain processes information, so it's not even something that I think she could learn necessarily as if you don't see how things relate to one another, you don't see it. I could explain the importance of brake lights to her and she would understand it, but it would make her able to join the dots with the next situation that came up - critical thinking is a skill that some people simply don't seem able to master.

caroldecker · 20/04/2017 00:44

Sabine this is often how it is presented, with Alaska and Hawaii just off to the west. here

NoncommittalToSparkleMotion · 20/04/2017 00:59

I had a university friend who thought bygones were rodents of some kind.

So when people said "Let bygones be bygones," she thought it meant, "Let a rat be a rat," because she wouldn't forgive someone's bad behaviour towards her.

She has a government job now.

And, to my shame, when I was younger I asked how the horses managed to swim in water polo

I'll get my coat...

brasty · 20/04/2017 01:01

I had a 20 year old ask me during the Second World War, were the Germans our enemies or allies? Same person did not know the difference between Parliament and the House of Lords.

A friend did not know that Easter had any religious significance. She went to church every week as a child, but simply said she didn't listen to any of the sermons.

I only learned on MN that a pony is not a baby horse.

BoomBoomsCousin · 20/04/2017 01:05

We are all ignorant of a few general knowledge things and some of us are ignorant of a lot. But it;s definitely not a recent phenomenon. I've encountered people like this all my life. From 30 years ago there was the office assistant who thought you could weigh a really big letter by putting one half on the scales and weighing that, then turning it around and weighting the other side (holding up the side that didn't fit on the scale) and add the two together. She also didn't know that "imitation leather" wasn't real leather, that Scotland was a part of the UK and that airplanes hadnt been around for hundreds of years. These are just a few of the things that came to light during our short time working together. She seemed lovely though and was never mean to anyone, which seem=s somewhat more important. I did feel sorry for her though. It must be hard to make good decisions when you have a very poor grasp of general knowledge.

RedBullBlood · 20/04/2017 01:11

It was someone on NM that asked where in the UK the Germans had their airbases during the war.

I didn't know, until I had horses of my own, that drenching a horse didn't mean leading a horse into a big bath of chemicals, like a sheep dip.
I thought pineapples grew on trees, like coconuts.

MrsJamesMathews · 20/04/2017 01:12

Grilledaubergines I didn't study Latin at school either but knowing 'mille' to mean a thousand I had thought was one of those basic life facts that any adult just knows.

Especially those who lived through the turning of the last millennium, or as a youngster picked up a millipede (who doesn't actually have a thousand legs), or took a thousand paces to walk a mile.

My point was, I thought this was basic general knowledge. But reading these posts I realise in comparison to what some people don't know this is rocket science!

Batghee · 20/04/2017 01:13

Knowledge gaps can be very startling but i bet you have some that you dont realise too OP!!
Im sure theres lots of random info i dont know yet many people do.
All the things youve listed i knew but I genuinely dont know the order of the alphabet!
I didnt know you couldnt put foil in microwaves until i put a small butter sachet in one.... i didnt know that milk boils faster than water until i put some in a kettle one time.......

Batghee · 20/04/2017 01:14

redbullblood..... pineapples dont grow on trees?!?!?!

Batghee · 20/04/2017 01:16

oh i also didnt realise you needed to use hot water when doing the washing up until someone in my shared house laughed at me about it

Batghee · 20/04/2017 01:17

WTF pineapples grow out of the ground?!?!? WTAF?!!?! NO WAY

LightDrizzle · 20/04/2017 01:18

I've come across more than one person that won't use a microwave because it emits gamma rays. How they think that got past safety testing I don't know.

RedBullBlood · 20/04/2017 01:19

No, Batghee, they grow on bushes, out of the ground!

Someone in my house didn't know the difference between regular dish washing detergent and dish washing machine detergent. It was spectacular.

tigerdriverII · 20/04/2017 01:25

These threads never end well, OP. There is a weird culture of glorifying ignorance in this country, as if the fact that you have a basic knowledge of how the menstrual cycle works/why Easter isn't the same date every year/can point to Berlin on a map means you are a shrivelled, heartless egghead who runs over toddlers on your way to compete in Brain of Britain. Yet this coincides with an obsession with Ofsted reports and 'good schools'.

This, precisely.

There are loads of things I don't know, that's for sure: but I know I have a broad general knowledge as I am and always have been intellectually curious. Whether that's due to education or is innate, I don't know: it's certainly not acquired from my parents - my father was the sort of man who was proud - proud! - never to have read a book.

Being interested in things doesn't make me a totalitarian egghead. What it does do is make me feel sad for people who bumble along in a haze: why?

BlackeyedSusan · 20/04/2017 01:49

There are holes in everyone's knowledge. You sort of get used to people knowing roughly the same amount that you do, so finding people who know a lot less, or a lot more can be surprising.

I am amazed at people who have a good knowledge of music/films etc as I am hopeless, and even when I try to remember it does not stick.

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