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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To share the stupidest thing I have ever heard

793 replies

Sparklfairy · 10/10/2020 13:44

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!?

OP posts:
ShirleyPhallus · 13/10/2020 09:29

@bluebluezoo

*She had 14 kids!

So we're guessing she decided she actually quite liked it!*

Or possibly, as she was your great gran, she was from an era where there was no contraception, sex was a man’s “right” within marriage, and consent wasn’t required...

I thought this and actually felt rather sad for her

Did you not ever think about that?

WendyMAD · 13/10/2020 10:37

Canteen at work a few years ago. I got a quiche, thinking it vegetarian, and found it had prawns in it. I took it back to the counter, and was told, "Oh yes, we put those in for the vegetarians."

user1471565182 · 13/10/2020 10:56

Do you think people who are this stupid are much happier for it? it sort of sounds like quite a nice state to be in

Mittens030869 · 13/10/2020 10:58

An old friend once asked me, in all seriousness, 'Is the Pope Catholic?' (We were on holiday together in Rome at the time.)

She actually considered herself a Catholic. Confused

GrandAltogether · 13/10/2020 11:23

@user1471565182

Do you think people who are this stupid are much happier for it? it sort of sounds like quite a nice state to be in
But would you really trade dimwit bliss for the vast and terrifying levels of ignorance described on this thread? (Or even the 'We didn't get taught it at school, so, despite having access to unparalleled amounts of high-quality knowledge online, without even leaving the comfort of my own phone, I have a right not to know' position, which bobs up alarmingly often on here?)
sashh · 13/10/2020 12:24

I think we all come out with daft stuff now and again.

My carer is really intelligent, has a degree, has travelled round the world, speaks enough Japanese to have a conversation.

We were talking about place names and he was saying how some people have no imagination hence New South Wales, New York, Manley, Newfoundland.

Then after a with, "Any thing with 'Land' in the names is fairly new too".

My response, which I occasionally repeat to him

Er yeah, like England, Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, Finland, Deutschland...

I spent the evening adding more 'lands'.

Back to genuine beliefs of my mother.

My dad and one of his brothers are left handed, my mother believed this was because of the way my Nana used to feed them as babies.

cricketmum84 · 13/10/2020 15:20

I'm just so glad I'm not the only person who spent my childhood thinking Sinn Fein was a bloke with a black beard.

Tunnocks34 · 13/10/2020 15:34

So I am not stupid I swear..but until a couple of years ago I thought reindeer’s were mythical creatures like unicorns.

No idea why I was allowed to believe this until my late twenties!

Butterer · 13/10/2020 15:43

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

SenorFrog · 13/10/2020 15:45

@happinessischocolate
I'm in my 50s and I distinctly remember the cover of a girls magazine annual (Judy maybe?) from when I was 5/6 with a girl on the front pushing a wheelbarrow with a large cheese plant in it across a road, next to a sign saying "large plant crossing" and I didn't understand the relevance or the joke. It was probably another 10 years before I understood it. 😁

If you're in your 50's and the magazine came out in 1978, you were not only 5/6 years old.... fibber! Wink

BalloonSlayer · 13/10/2020 16:53

Blimey @Butterer that warrants a polite complaint to the practice manager if anything ever did!

Butterer · 13/10/2020 17:00

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

supperlover · 13/10/2020 17:44

A friend,who has a degree in French and Russian recently insisted that the R number was 9 in her area- not 0.9 but 9! I'm no mathematician but---. I could not convince her otherwise.

DdraigGoch · 13/10/2020 17:49

@LomasLongstrider

Sorry I'm only catching up on the rest of the thread now. I feel like I have to explain that my ex friend is not an ex friend because he was daft, but because he was so stubborn he couldn't admit when he was wrong and would argue and argue he was right despite all evidence to the contrary. He would also go on long mainsplainy rants, about stuff he had absolutely no clue about.

When I say he thought Jesus spoke English, he meant as his first/ only language. Even though he was aware Jesus was born and raised in a foreign place (had no idea where though). A pp's suggestion he was probably confused by how white Jesus etc are depicted as, had something to do with it. That and the fact the bible's in England are translated into English (he probably thought Jesus and co wrote in English, and thus probably spoke English).

He also thought people in Britain had been speaking modern English, since they came here. I tried to show him a Shakespeare anthology I have, and how different the language was then, never mind many hundreds of years before that. But he was convinced what I was showing him was written by a foreigner/someone barely literate who didn't have a full grasp of English (it turns out he had no idea who Shakespeare was other than he "wrote some books").

Prior to the Anglo-Saxon and Norman Conquests, pretty much everyone south of the Scottish Central Belt (going all the way to Cornwall, plus a few outposts like Brittany [now France] and Bretoña [now Spain]) spoke a language similar to modern Welsh. So the next time someone bangs on about "immigrants not learning the native language", ask them when they'll be learning it.
RiftGibbon · 13/10/2020 19:05

@Jaichangecentfoisdenom

Has nobody heard of "Brideshead Revisited"?
Used to LOVE watching that in my teens. Then again, I was a booky swot at that age, so I'd heard of both George Elliot and Evelyn Waugh, although I preferred Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Gaskell. (And I used to work in a library - nerd points amassing here)
Winniewonka · 13/10/2020 19:25

@ShinyNewApples 2020 - When I started as a library assistant in my teens in the 1970s, you had to have a minimum of 5 O Levels including English Language, English Literature, Maths, Foreign Language and a Science! In 2010 I returned and this time around it was all about people skills - how to calm down challenging situations, minimise threats, have sufficient computer skills so that you can help folk accessing public computers and of course like yourself having a good knowledge of current authors!

Graphista · 13/10/2020 19:47

She thought the reason people got heartburn when pregnant was that babies just grew amongst your organs and could pull at them.

she wasn't completely wrong, cause of heartburn in pregnancy is disputed, generally speaking the heartburn in early pregnancy is most likely due to certain hormones increasing and a slowing down of digestive actions, but in later pregnancy this can be exacerbated by the baby's growth impacting on organ placement, the stomach moves significantly in pregnancy

Breast milk adapts to the needs of the baby, your aunt may have (either accidentally or deliberately) had a taste of the milk at different times on different days or whatever, noticed the different tastes and attributed that to the different breast she tasted from.

It's generally quite sweet but not always, changes to suit the babies needs at different times so eg tends to be less sweet at night and thicker and more "substantial"

@bluebluezoo and @GrandAltogether

I thought someone would come back with that! The lack of effective contraception (contrary to modern opinion there were some contraceptives back then albeit quite unreliable, eg rubber condoms have been around for quite some time) could well have been an issue but mainly as they were catholic and at that time anything but abstention at certain times would not have been considered acceptable.

The couple in question by all accounts loved each other very much, and the conversation she had with my gran on the eve of her wedding was very much of 'it might seem an odd thing to do but it's actually alright' but of course we can't know for certain this much later on, although this great gran was still alive until I was in my early teens so I knew her and she spoke very lovingly of her late husband.

@WendyMAD And others on the vegetarian thing there's been threads on here where posters are absolutely adamant that fish, chicken, meat stock etc are perfectly acceptable things to serve to a vegetarian

I became veggie for other reasons but by default discovered that red meat and red meat products (like stock) actually make me extremely ill. So if someone were to give me something with that type of ingredient I would be a very sick and very unhappy person.

@Butterer As a dx ocd sufferer that's appalling!

I'd be querying if they're ACTUALLY a dietician - which is a protected title by the way so if they don't have the qualifications they shouldn't be calling themselves that!

DdraigGoch · 13/10/2020 21:24

To be fair, it would be possible to get a parking fine after death, so I don't think this is stupid.
@ReceptacleForTheRespectable it wouldn't be the first traffic warden to issue a ticket with a corpse slumped against the windscreen. Nor would it be the first traffic warden to ticket a mangled wreck just as the ambulance arrives at an RTA.

TheSandman · 14/10/2020 00:43

I think for real stupid questions you have to go listen to the sort of 'proofs' that New Earthers, Flat Earthers and other nutjobs come out with on YouTube.

The Question is usually preceded by an "If ' Science '," (they always get that sneer in at the word) "If ' Science ', can explain everything and since..." followed by a total misrepresentation of basic fundamental principles.

"Why... are all planets round?" (Cosmology)
"Why... aren't apples poisonous?" (Evolution)

Annoyingly I can only think of those two examples right now neither of which (annoyingly squared) I can find on Youtube to link to. But trust me they exist - or did. Maybe the posters saw the errors of their ways and took them down in embarrassment. I can only hope.

coffeewithcream · 14/10/2020 07:48

Yes agree, spectacularly sick or deliberate ignorance

steppemum · 14/10/2020 08:21

@TheSandman

I think for real stupid questions you have to go listen to the sort of 'proofs' that New Earthers, Flat Earthers and other nutjobs come out with on YouTube.

The Question is usually preceded by an "If ' Science '," (they always get that sneer in at the word) "If ' Science ', can explain everything and since..." followed by a total misrepresentation of basic fundamental principles.

"Why... are all planets round?" (Cosmology)
"Why... aren't apples poisonous?" (Evolution)

Annoyingly I can only think of those two examples right now neither of which (annoyingly squared) I can find on Youtube to link to. But trust me they exist - or did. Maybe the posters saw the errors of their ways and took them down in embarrassment. I can only hope.

I once found myself in a youtube rabbit hole of flat earth videos. The 'best' one was a whole series of complex diagrams about where the heavens and the earth are according to the Bible. Obviously including a flat earth, and hell underneath and layers of heavens above and so on. One reason I was so horrified fascinated is because I am a Christian, and know my Bible pretty well, and the spectacular deliberate misuse of text in the Bible was breathtaking.

It is actually pretty scary that people cannot see how batshit crazy some of this is.

Mittens030869 · 14/10/2020 08:56

@steppemum As another Christian (and one who has studied the Old Testament as part of a theology degree), I couldn't agree more. They're treating the early chapters of Genesis as a history/science text and it simply isn't the purpose of the texts.

Flat/young Earthers fill me with despair, as they do the Bible a great disservice.

steppemum · 14/10/2020 09:34

there were some bits, like there is a verse about the sun standing still during a battle (is it Joshua?) and from that they have created a whole theory of why the sun/earth must be in a certain place in the sky etc etc.

just ignore the whole WORLD that actually exists around you, and create a weird theory around 3 words in the Bible, which were never intended to describe the science of the cosmos!

It is the most incredible twisting of the obvious to fit your view point and it is scary.

WaxOnFeckOff · 14/10/2020 09:59

I understood that the origin, or a subset, of the flat earth society was basically designed as a debating platform to hone skills of debating. So the premise being that if you could argue the most ridiculous thing, such as the earth being flat, and convince others of your case then your debating skills would be highly advanced.

WaxOnFeckOff · 14/10/2020 10:00

I'm sure there is also a whole group that argue that Australia doesn't exist and its a giant ruse involving South Africa, or something of that ilk.