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!?

As a child I had been explained the nervous system as being "messages" passed around the body. E.g. "hot surface - move hand away". As a child I imagined tiny little notes papers flying around my body ... I do not care to admit how old I was when I realised that this was illogical and improbable

It's a good example of why you should first challenge your own assumptions before labelling someone else stupid though.....

@FrancesFlute

Really?! I've lived in Yorkshire all my life and I have really never heard that! Sorry, colleague! Happy to have been enlightened, thank you! Although as a Christian, I am still wondering of its significance!

I think the tradition may have arisen out of a deliberate play on words - Ash / Hash. But it is definitely a "thing"

Turkey doesn't reay have any relevance to Jesus' birth either!

That the white line around the harbour wall couldn't possibly mark where the water went up to at high tide, because if it went THAT high it'd cover all the boats.

@bluebeach

I once overheard some people discussing whether a penguin was a bird or a fish.

Hahaha this really tickled me

@ShopTattsyrup

As a child I had been explained the nervous system as being "messages" passed around the body. E.g. "hot surface - move hand away". As a child I imagined tiny little notes papers flying around my body ... I do not care to admit how old I was when I realised that this was illogical and improbable

Given that the messages are electrical impulses, maybe it's little emails being sent? Or a "the body" Whatsapp group where all the organs post stuff. The brain is also kind of capable of "muting notifications", isn't it?

@GrandAltogether

Oh, and one of my students once thought that George Eliot was TS Eliot's pen name.

That's really not THAT stupid. Both were writers, George Eliot was a pen name and both were roughly (ish) the same time.

@Fink

Mind you, given members of recent and past Cabinets who've had degrees in PPE, I have occasionally wondered whether sending assassins to take out the entire PPE undergraduate population might not be a beneficial move. (Sorry, innocent and well-meaning PPE students..)

The thing is, PPE is a massively popular subject so if you kill them all you'll take out a lot of future really amazing leaders as well as the dregs. I knew a ton of PPE students (I wasn't one of them!) as I was very involved in student politics where, of course, they all hang out, and only a couple of them have gone on to do anything disastrous to do with the government. One is a fabulous member of the shadow cabinet. A load more work for NGOs and the like. Even to get rid of the entire decade's worth of dreadful former PPE-ists, there'd be an awful lot of collateral damage. I reckon you'd probably have to take down 50 good ones and a whole load more average onesto be sure of getting the next Jeremy Hunt or Rishi Sunak.

Now you're being tiresomely fair and rational, @Fink. Of course you are right, and I even knew some perfectly nice Oxford ones who hadn't even joined the OU, far less turned into Rishi Sunak or Mark Reckless. But I was kind of enjoying the idea of a tribe of handpicked ninjas silently picking people off at tutorials, possibly after asking them a question about the Nicomachean Ethics.

That you can make loads of money if you join up with a MLM scheme .....think Avon, Younique, Intele, Scentsy, BodyShop, etc etc etc

Run your own business/be your own boss/rock your business

Executive director of business @ Avon at home (insert any MLM crap shite name here)

Living my Best Life Hun

....I think you get the idea - those type of people

On R4 this morning somebody said that at a wedding only the bride and groom may dance together.
That the parents of neither the bride nor groom nor any other couples would be allowed to dance together.
Government rule apparently.
Can’t be true.

Can it?

I worked with someone who was Pakistani. They thought that they were white and that Pakistan was a religion.

"Why did they built so close to the freeway?" Tourist outside 14th century castle in Switzerland.

Watching a history program about early man with ExH and he got all excited at the scenes of early men/women doing things as he thought they'd found a tribe of neanderthal people still living. After I finished wetting myself, I had to explain they were actors dressed/made up like Neanderthal people.

Another time he decided to cook a stir fry using frozen stewing steak, stir fry veg/sauce and a tin of baked beans. I had to throw the wok out it burned so bad.

In a pub quiz a question asked for an animal, the answer was a type of bird and many argued that a bird is not an animal.

In th pub/ hotel I work in some guests had hummingbirds in cages in the corridor outside their room.
When the manager went up and told them no animals were allowed they argued with her that they were not animals, they were birds!

This is a bit silly, but when I went to live in the USA for three years, many years ago. On my first visit to a large Supermarket and at the check out,The woman said, oh,you are English, do you live next door to the QUEEN there, and have coffee and cookies round at her house.Then seeing my tomatoes at the check out, she said,do you have tomatoes in England.

I chatted with her for a while. and she seemed to think that there was only London, Stratford on Avon, and a place called Scotland somewhere.

@GrandAltogether, well of course if the killers were going to do a bit of reconnaissance first then I think 5 minutes in an OUSU or OU meeting should be enough to identify the ones who should be first up against the wall, it was just the blanket massacre I objected to. I've got no problems with selective killing of future trouble makers, and they're not hard to spot. I wouldn't advise making the assessment on academic grounds though, not strong enough correlation between ability/ effort and later dickishess, so stay away from lectures and just head straight for the Union bar.

I’m self employed and a friend of mine thought that when I could claim something on my taxes, that the government would give me that money back at the end of the tax year.
Same friend couldn’t get her head around how the game show ‘Pointless’ worked.

I can never understand how people don’t understand how prorata works or how the amount of tax they pay goes up when they get a pay rise

Also me; are outy bellybuttons hereditary?’

That's really not THAT stupid. Both were writers, George Eliot was a pen name and both were roughly (ish) the same time

@BuddyRun, not being able to tell the difference between a Victorian novelist and a modernist poet is pretty stupid if you're in the second year of an English degree.

On a trip at Center Parcs I was by a pond when I overheard a man saying "are geese the same as a goose? Are they the same thing? I thought a geese was different to a goose" etc. His family were pissing themselves and one of them clocked me trying not to burst out laughing out of politeness. Proper Joey Essex vibes

I can well believe this, having met a young woman on a Greyhound bus in Texas (I think it was Texas) who had never met a British person before and so was delighted to meet me and ask me all about our horse-drawn carriages and our castles and peasants. She was so, so nice. She was absolutely fascinated to learn we have paved roads, cars, electricity, McDonald's, a parliament, a democracy...

I am not exaggerating, it was one of the most surreal experiences of my life.

Also in America -
I was asked by an interviewer in 1988 if we had phones over there in Ireland. It's alright until you don't get a job because someone thinks you come from a place where we use carrier pigeons to communicate.

Around the same time I also fielded a comment to the effect that Irish was surely just a funny way of speaking English.

When I dropped to a 4 day week I spoke to at least 3 different men, also young parents, who said that sounds fantastic, an extra day off every single week! I smiled and said yeah, but the 20% drop in salary takes getting used to. Without exception they were all open-mouthed and "didn't realise" that would happen . We're talking men in their early 30s with a minimum of a masters and 6 years professional experience...

I can top you lot. The most ridiculously stupidest thing I’ve seen is a ‘friend’ on FB posting “Well done Boris you’re doing a fantastic job”. 😳😳🤪