Thinking back to when you were younger, were you ever taught or read something that you ALMOST voiced an objection to, but, looking back, are very glad you didn’t? Chalk it up to the naivity of youth, or something.
Sex Ed (sixth grade): The teacher was telling us that the sperm from the man meets the egg from the woman. I nearly raised my hand and asked the teacher “Um, how does the sperm get from the man to the woman?”
I don’t think I would’ve ever lived down the teasing had I publicly exposed that gap in my knowledge.
Social Studies (junior high): The teacher was reading some diatribe written in the Old South complaining about freeing the slaves. You know, the standard: they’d be lazy and shiftless, prone to crime, and destroy our cities if allowed to run free. I almost commented, innocently enough, isn’t that what’s happening now in the ghettos?
I lived near DC in the 80s, and thought it was a legitimate observation. Had I asked that nowadays, I probably would’ve gotten expelled.
While working for a bank doing data entry work, our tech support guy handed me a token-ring adapter and said “that PC sitting over there needs to have the network card replaced, and I’m swamped, will you take care of it for me?”
Not saying “I’ve never opened up a PC in my life before” set me up to be his replacement, which gave me two and a half years of front-line tech support experience which got me in the door at the library I still work at, with a starting salary 10% above their first offer because I brought more experience to the table than they were asking for.
Don’t feel bad, that one had me baffled in sixth grade as well.
My own happen on a semi-regular basis nowadays. If I hit the local curry restaurant for lunch, I’m usually feeling a bit sleepy around afternoon. Add to that the effort of trying to follow meetings in a foreign language when I’m not directly involved, and my mind tends to wander rather vividly. I’ve trained myself not to speak up under any circumstances during these meetings so that I don’t blurt out things like: “But if we give the client a cantaloupe, won’t that earn us five points?”
Often in my life, not asking women when they were expecting, and later learning that they were not, in fact, pregnant. As Dave Barry wisely said, “Never ask a woman when she’s expecting unless you see the child actually emerging from her body.”
A friend once complimented another friend on her new nose piercing. Turns out it was a big, red sore. :smack:
I asked my mom that question around second or third grade after reading about the sperm and egg thing in a children’s science encyclopedia that curiously omitted that piece of information. When she told me the nuts and bolts of the operation (so to speak), I was horrified. They do what??
And I’m sure glad I didn’t.