To ask what things made you question your intelligence

[Theroadnottravelled]

Lighthearted. I have a degree and a masters and consider myself fairly competent with common sense. Our dishwasher seemed to be broken, the tablets weren’t breaking down and the clean was awful. I’ve just realised the tablets have a plastic wrapper that needs removing. I thought they all went in like washing ones. Very embarrassed. Was going to ring an engineer on Monday. What a dumbass :-)

😂
Perhaps your mind is too busy thinking of more important things than dishwasher tablets

Well some dishwasher tablets do have dissolvable plastic (I’ve never used one that doesn’t tbh). I find the mistake is putting them in the little box and they work best if you just put them on the dishwasher floor

Actual footage of me every time I write the word.

It took a number of years after us moving to near Paisley to realise that there was a direct link between Paisley - a mill town that made fabric - and Paisley pattern fabric. 😳😳😳

Love this

At a Viking museum last week and the guide explained they arrived in Newfoundland around the year 1000. I got so confused trying to work out if that was earlier or later than the raids of the 7/800s. I think I was getting confused with BC or something.

I just cannot get the left and right immediately, I have to think every single bloody time.

I also struggle with percentages and exchange rates, I work in Financial Services

I was walking home one day and saw a home made placard/sign in a window that said "National ducation union". I continued on my way, pondering what "ducation" is. Only later did I realise that it said "National Education Union" and the 'E' must have been obscured by a curtain. My son's teachers had been on the strikes led by the NEU at this time.

For a long time I thought that 100 degrees C was a sort of maximum temperature; nothing could be hotter. Eventually a helpful MNer asked me to look at the dial on my oven.

Reader, I work in the food industry.

I have two degrees and a PhD

I still have to say to myself lefty-loosey, righty tighty, when faced with a nut and bolt

My choice of men.

I suddenly briefly forgot that the sun was a star and referred to it as a planet at Sunday lunch with the family, when I was talking about a presentation on solar radiation. (I have an MSc and an undergraduate science degree) I was writing. Big mistake when 2 out of 3 of your adult children have science degrees and your dad's was a literal 🚀 scientist. They've never let me forget

This is a great thread - let's hear some more stories!!

Not me, but my father. My parents were visiting and one of my sisters dropped off a box of old Brio train set for an in utero DS. My father happily pounced on this and declared he'd sort it out for me. Some time later he proudly showed me where he'd neatly stacked all the track and gubbins. 'It's a funny thing' he said 'but all the track curves in the same way. DS will only be able to build circular tracks'
Reader, he hadn't worked out the track is double sided and can curve either left or right. My father, the possessor of several advanced degrees and widely acknowledged to have a brain the size of a planet, hadn't flipped a single piece over when sorting through a large box. He'd carefully just oriented everything the same way and then wondered why everything curved in the same direction. 🤦🏼‍♀️😂

your family sound pretty insufferable.
We're more humanities focused but if someone referred, for example, to Jane Austen writing Wuthering Heights it would just be a "don't you mean...." and then conversation moving on, not something brought up at every family reunion 🙄

Conversations must be pretty boring if such an utterly inconsequential mistake is even worthy of remembering that day, let alone becoming a repeated anecdote

No actual degrees or measures of my intelligence, but my school considered me Oxbridge material, bar my complete inability to pass Maths O-level, so make of that what you will.

Aged in my 30s, out at a restaurant with friends. Looked at a friend's fish dish and asked what it was. It was a tuna steak.

I was gobsmacked. My brain always went "fish in tin - must be small fish", so I had them bracketed with pilchards and sardines.

Felt like a right numpty given that tuna in a tin is obviously mushed up fish not individual ones.

Also, during a stressful period in my life, I was prescribed antidepressants. All good, but like clockwork I'd crash out at about 3pm and have to have a nap, which was pretty inconvenient. It was proper punch drunk exhaustion stuff, so I mentioned it to my GP.

He asked me when I took them. First thing in the morning, I said, because that's when you take your daily medication in my head, unless otherwise directed.

GP looked at me as though I was a bit peculiar and asked why I hadn't thought of taking them in the evening.

Yeah. Slunk out feeling like a complete time waster.

Fortunately I'm surrounded by a family that love and care for each other and yes they remind me of my mistake but it's all very good humoured.
They all have huge respect for me particularly as I gained my qualifications later in life. I'm secure in the knowledge that I'm loved even if they do pull my leg every now and then and that I'm an intelligent woman who has a sense of humour. How dull life would be if we couldn't laugh at ourselves.