I’m not trying to be an elitist jerk here, and it’s not like I think people should all be well versed in Shakespeare to be considered intelligent, but working with the general public has made me realize just how ignorant some people are with things I assumed were public knowledge.
Today, for example, I had this exchange with a customer (BTW, I own a pet store, so many of these are animal-related):
Customer: My cockatiel keeps laying eggs, but none of them ever hatch.
Me: Do you have a male?
Customer: No. Why?
Now, I assumed that it was fairly common knowledge that most species require a male and a female to reproduce.
Another time, a lady was disturbed to see her aquatic frog rise to the top of the bag to take a breath. She freaked out and asked what it was doing. I told her it was taking a breath. She looked at me for a moment, confused, and asked, “So, it’s not a fish?”
Please share your similar stories and convince me that I don’t live in the stupidest town in America.
I am a *terrible *show-business snob–I go all Margaret Dumont and fall over in a faint when someone has never heard of, well, Margaret Dumont. So I am used to people not knowing what or who the hell I am talking about.
But I was a bit shocked when a 30-something commuter friend had never heard of Sharon Tate or the Ziegfeld Follies. (Yes, only I would bring up Sharon Tate or the Ziegfeld Follies during morning-commute chat).
As a veterinarian, I am quite regularly reminded that most people don’t know very much about physiology. But a stand-out moment for me, and likely more than a few other vets, is when a client told me that neither of her dogs needed to be reproductively altered because “They’re brother and sister. They would NEVER do THAT!”
When I was a child, about seven or eight, I’d heard of the Korean War (because it wasn’t all that long over) and the Crimean War and wanted to know the difference. My father, who had precious little formal education but who was generally knowledgeable about a lot of things explained it to me thus, “The Korean War was in Korea and the Crimean War was in the Crimea.”
A former girlfriend of mine did not know what I was talking about when I mentioned the Chernobyl disaster… even tho she was alive and in her junior year of high school when it happened.
I once placed a Foley cath into a woman who was delivering her 3rd(!!!) child who asked me if the cath would “stop the baby from coming out.” :smack: Boy, did I do some educating that day!
A very smart friend of mine who was studying at an Ivy League university once asked me to explain the difference between Congress and the (state) legislature. She really had no idea how Federalism works in the U.S., or that the states have separate governments.
