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).
[QUOTE=Dr. Watson, speaking of Sherlock Holmes]
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing . . . My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
[/quote]
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.
