To share the stupidest thing I have ever heard

[Sparklfairy]

My friend is away in a country that a few days into her holiday brought in quarantine restrictions upon returning to the UK. No big deal to her, she can wfh and organise deliveries etc.

She just told me she was chatting around the pool and people are confused about when quarantine actually 'starts'. Most have convinced themselves it's the day after you land 'to give them time to go shopping and get food and everything ready and stuff'.

So you're quarantined, but you have a magical window of time where you can get supplies and merrily skip round the supermarket infecting everyone saying 'Oh, I'm not in quarantine until tomorrow'.

I'm not sure if they're spectacularly thick or just so entitled they've twisted the rules to suit themselves. I don't normally get annoyed about CV or what other people do but really!?

I was chatting to the guy doing our plastering, we were talking about diets and he said
"Me and my Wife wanted to loose weight and thought we'd go vegan, her friend went vegan and lost 4 stone.
So we started off eating boiled eggs but the friend said you can't eat eggs, so the next day we had some tuna pasta but the friend goes you can't eat tuna, so my Wife said well what can we eat.... do you know what she said? Vegans...Just...Eat...Vegetables...
VEGETABLES...you can't even eat cheese...I mean what do they eat with jacket potatoes and no milk in your brew either?"
I was waiting for him to say "The dirty bastards"

The power went out in maths class. She asked the teacher how we were going to do our calculations if our calculators didn’t work.

She went on to become a lawyer.

*My MIL maintained people always got married to someone whose first name was within two letters of yours in the alphabet. Pointedly then looked at me and DP and noted our names are further than three letters apart.

We've never marrie*d.

Ha! My DH and I have names beginning with A and S.

There are plenty of people in healthcare who are more than capable of saying stupid things like, the HCP in a Cardiology department who asked a patient how long they had been suffering with Dextrocardia while incorrectly prepping the patient for an ECG.

Just a note for people with less knowledge of cardiology dextrocardia is when your hear is reversed. It happens when you are developing as an embryo so is present at birth.

It can be just the heart or all organs can be reversed.

Sometimes you get 'mirror image' twins who are identical but one is the mirror of the other both outside and inside so one will have all organs reversed.

Prepping for an ECG - you should take 2 with a patient with dextrocardia because the recording of the limb leads looks like you have put the electrodes on the wrong way so you do a standard ECG then you reverse the chest leads.

In cardiology departments most ECGs are taken by cardiologists who are trained to record ECGs not analyse them.

Ok, I got one. Years ago I loaned a camp stove to a friend. It was the kind that uses a bottle of propane. When I asked for it back, she hesitated and said she did not want to carry it in the trunk of her car, because she was afraid it would ignite. Horrified, I asked her if the propane was attached and she assured me that it was not. I remember being taught before age 10 that you need oxygen, fuel and heat for a fire. I have no clue what she thought was going to burn. The best part is that she was an industrial safety consultant, with minimal understanding of science.

heart not hear

[quote Tamejoca]@starfishmummy are you trying to be funny or do you genuinely believe leap years need to divide by 400 rather than 4🤔[/quote]
@Tamejoca google it

A colleague went with their spouse to see Transformers The Movie. No kids just two adults. On Monday morning I asked them what they thought.

"It was a bit far fetched. Not realistic at all".

Fluffycloudland77 - i agree.

Some people can't be reasoned with however simple the informaton.

My cousins wife corrected me in public on the spelling of my own child's name. Like I would get that wrong after 12 years. It's the classic spelling of a top ten name.

One of my colleagues tried to correct me on the pronunciation of my surname. It’s pronounced exactly how it looks, he just has a different accent to me (short “a” in my northern accent, long “aah” in his southern accent).

I’d argue that was less stupidity than rudeness

The 2 daftest things I’ve heard are the person who thought human kidneys are the same size as kidney beans and the woman who thought she nearly died in childbirth because she passed an enormous clot after the birth. (It was the delivery of the placenta, she had never been told about the afterbirth)

There are loads of geography ones though because I think kids don’t get taught where places are the way they were in the 40s-70s.
Eg if you are on the U.K. coast not having any idea what the next bit of land would be if you sailed off into the horizon or not knowing which ocean you fly over to go to New York.

I’m surprised no-one’s mentioned the channel tunnel on this thread yet...

@mathanxiety

There aren’t things that are general knowledge and things that aren’t.

I would say that general knowledge is knowledge of a wide range of subjects, as opposed to detailed knowledge of a few subjects. It also refers to knowledge that is widely known and forms the vast majority of material in simplex crosswords, quiz shows, etc. It is material that one picks up by various means, through general reading, watching TV or films, news, documentaries, internet rabbit holes, and asking questions.

This. I’m constantly depressed about how little people know outside their immediate sphere of interest, and I include my DC in that. I try to plug the gaps and answer questions but I’m still astonished at how little they know overall.

We used to learn a lot more “off curriculum” stuff in schools (70s and early 80s in my case). I remember in primary school the Friday afternoon chats with Mr T, basically a half hour lesson touching on random subjects and current affairs. Nowadays teachers will teach the curriculum and that’s it. No time for anything else.

Also with the advent of internet and smartphones people’s attention span has gone down the toilet. Most people won’t bother reading past a headline, hence the 3 word slogans that are currently winning elections. The immediacy of information has not led to better knowledge for all, if anything it appears to have had the opposite effect.

I was in my 30s when I discovered that tuna are huge fish that you can get steaks from. My brain had gone "Must be small fish becomes comes in cans" like pilchards and sardines, and the revelation came when I was eating out and friend ordered tuna steak. Funnily enough never thought the same about salmon because I'd eaten big salmon.

I'm 51 and I still love learning new things

Oh and the other day I was frantically looking through my handbag for my phone at the same time as speaking to my DP on said phone and actually said I was worried I'd left it at work. There was an awkward pause but he was gentle with me......

I was 15 and on a german exchange school trip. I joined a music lesson where the class were learning an English song, so the teacher asked me to to read the words.

They were "Precious memories, how they linger".

He stopped me on the last word and CORRECTED my pronunciation of linger saying it was linjer. Err, no it's definitely linger.

He (the native German speaker) was adamant it was linjer and proceeded to have the whole class sing it that way.

On a youth camping trip with my sister who is nearly 2 years old than I am. We looked very similar (still do), and one girl asked if we were twins.

Nope, she's older than me.
Are you sure, she asked.
Yes, I'm sure.
Really? You must be twins.
No, we're really not.
You're kidding.
Oh, OK then, we're twins.

Because she would know obviously.

@maartjebaabes

A colleague went with their spouse to see Transformers The Movie. No kids just two adults. On Monday morning I asked them what they thought. "It was a bit far fetched. Not realistic at all".

@maartjebaabes I haven’t seen that film, but I can get behind the comment! For me, I can suspend belief and watch a Transformer win a battle. But if one Transformer beat off hundreds of fiercer opponents, one by one, I’d find myself rolling my eyes and being annoyed!

A friend of mine is a doctor and saw a couple who were struggling to get pregnant.
Turned out they weren't having concieving sex conventionally... and thought they could get pregnant through the back door...

Anyway when she explained they looked very confused. Not sure if that is stupid or tragic??

@LindyMoe. It might be that he is pretty clever to have convinced her of that for several years!

Plus isn’t that how the current PM was conceived?

I did my history GCSE thinking Sinn Féin was a man with a big beard. No idea why I thought that but it’s not surprising I didn’t do very well.

This should make me outraged, as it's pretty much the level of knowledge I've come across from an awful lot of people well into adulthood in the UK, but it actually made me howl with laughter in the middle of a grim morning. Thanks, @theviewfromhalfwaydown.

A colleague once asked another if her twins were identical as they looked really alike. Didn't seem daunted by being told they were a boy and a girl.

@BathtubGin you're trying too hard, get off Google 🤣

Some thicko Facebook friend shared that this year Halloween will fall on Friday the 13th!! Woooooooo 👻

Couldn't even be bothered to explain it, she's one of those that shares crap without even reading it usually ( I hope!).

My friend's mum was a twin and I asked my friend if they were identical. She said no one knows as HE died at birth. Took her a while.

I have identical twins and the stupid questions I've had could fill a book!

you thought that about Sinn Fein because Gerry Adams was their spokesperson, so every time they were in the news (or republicans generally) GA was wheeled out, except of course we never heard his actual voice, instead an actor speaking his exact words, so as to deny terrorism 'the oxygen of publicity'

oh, and Gerry Adams had a beard