How can you not know?!

[TittyGolightly]

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!

So....what happens if you don't milk a cow?

I knew all the other ones but I genuinely thought it hurt cows if they weren't milked regularly?

What Barney....WHAT??

Ermmmmmm.....a kipper is fish?

I always get really judgy about people who don't know basic geography. We were playing a game with my in laws once where you go through the alphabet and answer with a country on whatever letter your turn is on, and my sister in law (about 25 at the time) kept answering with things like New York, South America and Paris!? I was thinking "how can you get to the age of 25 and not know stuff like that?". Her reaction to our faces each time was "but I'm rubbish at geography!"

I'm shit a geography, I aced every single one of my subjects at school but I was bottom set for Geography, it just wouldn't stick and still won't.

@IndiaGrace they need milking because their babies have been taken away, like a breastfeeding human mother they produce milk because they think the baby is still there to feed. If you didn't milk a dairy cow she would get uncomfortably full and probably get mastitis, but if we didn't take their milk in the first place they wouldn't be separated from their babies. So the calf would wean naturally and the mommy cow's supply would dwindle accordingly causing no pain.

I do get your point OP, but your thread seems quite judgemental and mean spirited?

IndiaGrace cows only produce milk when they have a baby, like we do. They're kept pregnant and then newly babied to produce the milk, if they weren't it would a) be used to feed their babies b) dry up if not used. It probably would hurt to leave them, like a women's breasts if she's breast feeding and doesn't feed for a while, but we could just not impregnate the cows and take their babies instead, then there would be no problem.

I think Barney means they thought a kipper is the type of fish. A Kipper fish. A kipper is a herring.

A Kipper is a fish but it's a Herring and the Kipper part comes from the way it's been prepared as far as I'm aware.

One of my sisters has 3 degrees and couldn't identify a Guinea pig in the pet shop. We all have our weak spots.

A kipper is a herring.

They don't just magically produce milk all the time that we're doing then a favour by removing. Unfortunately lots of people think that is the case.

Tits

Fair enough some people aren't the best at geography but not knowing Paris isn't a country????

I am only just discovering in my 30s how stupid a lot of people are. Not in a rude way, I mean, I generally thought most people knew most things. But, in fact there are a lot of people who are unaware of things that I consider just basic simple knowledge. I can barely spell or type though, so not saying I am perfect!

I work with a young lady, 18 so has just left school - she did not know that trying to conceive was a thing. She thought that you just decided to have a baby, have unprotected sex, and you get pregnant first time.

When I explained ovulation and fertility to her, she looked at me in so much awe that I felt like a genius definitely agree that it is to do with lower standards of education.

My friend thought that stars went away in the daytime. And my husband thought robins migrated in the summer. I didn't know the different times to use practice and practise. We're all different!

a friend of mine thought people with a glass eye, had better vision. She though it was like a magnifying glass/eye. To this day she doesn't believe that you can't see out of them!

Have you seen the 'how have I got to being a grown adult and only just found the out' threads?
There is one every couple of weeks.
Someone will com along to tell you that Gibraltar isn't an island soon.

With some it is genuinely down to poor education, however there are a generation of people these days, generally the big brother/TOWIE types who actually take pride in being "thick" and cultivate that image, but the majority of the time it's bullshit.

Sounds like someone in your office was on an anti farming rant op?

Having gaps in your knowledge isn't such a shameful thing. Some people just don't absorb information easily, or can only retain the parts that are useful or interesting to them.

There's a place in a pub quiz team for everyone. I used to play in one with a woman who knew more or less nothing of what I'd class as general knowledge, but she had an encyclopedic knowledge of James Bond films and musicals. She won for us more than once.

Some robins do migrate. We have European and British ones in winter - the Europeans are more orangey and less fluffy, I think.

I agree. Not knowing something doesn't make someone fundamentally stupid or incapable of learning...it just means they don't know that particular thing.

DH and I argue over whether a month is 4 weeks or 5 weeks.