My friend Teresa got me a leaving present saying ' I wanted to get you a mars bar but my mum said you were too delicate so here's a banjo instead. '
Grrr
Is a Banjo the name of a different kind of chocolate bar? I've never heard of that one. If it was an actual banjo, that would have been so much better than a mere Mars Bar!
I have yet another pub quiz one (well, it was a community one). The question was "To which island group do Eigg, Muck and Rum belong?" We've been lucky enough to visit Eigg and we knew that these three, along with Canna, were classed as 'The Small Isles', so that's what we put. The answer given was 'The Hebrides', which is not incorrect of course, but is much less specific than our answer. Quizmaster marked it incorrect and wouldn't listen when we protested. He had obviously never heard of the term and refused to quickly Google it or look if we did (it wasn't that long ago). I still remember him saying, as if we were really simple, "Well, yes, of course they are all relatively small islands, but we can't just accept that as an answer." Doofus!
Even weirder than that was at another pub quiz, where the landlord had just bought in a ready-made all-in quiz. Music round: name the song. A Smokey Robinson track came on and it was obviously 'Tracks Of My Tears', but the answer on his sheet said 'Tears of A Clown', so that's all he was willing to accept, even though he fully admitted that the quiz setters had messed up. Most of the other teams recognised SR and just guessed at his much better-known song and got the point that we didn't!
Much further back, I remember at primary school, when we had weekly spelling tests. As it happened, I was an avid reader and spelling was my absolute forte so I very rarely had to actually learn the words that we were given, as I already knew them. One week, I'd been on holiday when the list of words had been given out (that was still allowed back then, it was an annual conference related to my parents' profession - HT had signed my holiday form and everything!), so I just turned up for the test without any foreknowledge. The teacher read out the word 'model' which, in her northern accent (school was in the Midlands), sounded exactly like 'muddle' and not at all like a local would have said 'model', so MUDDLE is what I answered. She refused to let me have the mark, even though I knew full well how to spell both words - told me that it had been given out in the list, which I'd never had a chance to see - and thus blotted out the whole year's clean sheet.