Odd questions

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In the spirit of the surreal experiences thread, how about ones about odd questions you never expected to be asked.

When I was a junior in college a girl from California moved into my dorm. One day she tracked me down to ask me something…

“Shannon,” She said, “I want to ask you something because I think you’ll tell me the truth.” I asked her what, and she asked, “Are there such a thing as seagulls?”

Puzzled, I explained that yes, there are birds called seagulls and they were large white and gray birds. She nodded, and told me she thought people were pulling her leg when they pointed out some large birds and told her they were seagulls.
I told her that they probably were seagulls.

“But how can they be seagulls? We’re miles from the ocean!” Which was true, but not too many miles.

After some questions of my own I learned that she lived about as far east as you can in CA and had never seen a seagull before. She apparently had also gotten the impression that they only live on the beach. I still find it odd that she wanted to know if they were a real bird. Wiki didn’t exist yet, but the internet did. You’d of thought she’d of looked them up online.

So, what have you been asked that struck you as terribly odd? Bonus points if the questioner was both sober and seemingly sane.

2

While working for a state government agency that handles job referrals and unemployment insurance, I heard a lot of strange questions, but this one stands out:

“How do you get bugs out of a well?”

Apparently some folks think that all government employees have infinite knowledge.

3

Did this encounter happen before the advent of reference books? elfkin477, it strikes me as odd that you would think that looking something up online would be superior to her looking in a dictionary or encyclopedia regarding the existence of seagulls.

4

I detailed the incident in another thread, but a grown woman in a bar in Texas once asked me in all seriousness where Mexico was. She was offended when I laughed at what I thought was a joke question. I knew she was not the brightest bulb in the house, but still. That’s Texas for you.

Although this occurred a bar, she was not drunk. Her sanity was always in question, though.

5

If I’m going to work by train, my post office uniform gets routinely mistaken for a railway one, and I get asked lots of questions about why the 5:17 is running late.

It’s made more unusual by the fact that I’m a rail enthusiast as a hobby, so I usually know! This leads to a great moment where they thank me, and as they turn to walk away, they notice the post office insignia and their brain goes straight to a blue screen.

Other times, they are abusive, I let them vent, and then I just point to the insignia and smile sweetly.

6

Where in Texas was this, though? Texas is a big state, as we all know, and it’s possible that if she was from the panhandle, or at any rate far from la frontera, she didn’t grok that Texas and Mexico share a border.

Maps of the USA often just show the contiguous 48 (with Alaska and Hawai’i in their little boxes, which further confuses the clueless), and no Canada or Mexico. So it looks like the peninsula juts out into nowhere/the ocean. Perhaps she had a vague sense that Mexico was “down there somewhere,” but didn’t know exactly where.

Anyway, my question: “Well, you know Jesus loves you, don’t you?” Apropos of absolutely nothing that I could see.

7

During a discussion of WW2, a sweet, sober and marginally sane young lady asked if I had served that war; when I told her I wasn’t born until 1940, she responded, “So?”

Another young, sober and presumably sane young person asked if New Mexico was part of the USA. I assured her it was indeed part of the USA and she said she had never heard of it. There was a large map of the USA hanging on the wall; I pointed to New Mexico but I’m still not sure she believed me. She worked in the mail room/shipping department.

8

A fair number of years ago, I had a buddy that owned a gas station right off the 405 Freeway just before it merged with I5 in the north San Fernando Valley. He had to fire an employee, and he asked me if I would work on Sunday for him. Sure.
So there I am middle of the afternoon and a car full of people pulls in for directions. This was fairly common and there was a map posted in the office window. They pull up and ask Where is Carson?
About 40 miles that way (I point South)
It can’t be was the response.
It is, I reply.
But we just came from there, they cry.
Where did you start from, I ask.
Hawthorne was the reply.
Ah, the answer is simple you got on the freeway the wrong direction. Hawthorne is about 6 miles north of Carson.
I invite them to look at the map. I point out our location, where Hawthorne is (south), and where Carson is (further south).
Next comes the question from one of the middle aged ladies.
Why would my friend tell me to get of the freeway north, if she lived south of me?
My automatic mouth opened up and here is how I replied.
I don’t know, maybe she doesn’t like you very much.
:smiley:

9

:confused: Please let this be a Whoosh. :frowning:

10

As a librarian I’ve had several patrons who’ve tried to use me as a free lawyer in divorce/landlord dispute/estate type matters and I’ve had to ultimately tell them “I can show you where the legal books are, I can help find a lawyer referral service if you like, and I can even agree with you that the legalese is confusing and your ex sounds like a prick, but I cannot interpret or give advice of any kind based on what I think a law means or even tell you if what you think it means sounds right because that would be practicing law without a license which is quite a not good very bad thing”. The majority of the people I had to do this with were members of a bizarre black supremacist cult who lived near the university where I worked in Georgia; they were called the Nuwaubians (or the Native American Nation of Moors, or Yorkites, or whatever the hell they were going by that week). Their leader Malachi York[ (aka Ra al Mahdi, aka whatever the hell else he was going by that week) was a man who had been kicked out of the Nation of Islam for being too radical and loopy; he had all kinds of legal problems due to allegations of everything from welfare fraud to child molestation and had led his followers from NYC/Detroit/Philadelphia to a promised land near Eatonton, Georgia, where he bought a large farm and built a compound that had to be seen for true effect but can perhaps best be described as a combination of Indian wig-wam village with ancient Egyptian themed mini-golf course. (pics and more pics; it was recently razed, but for absurdity sake this compound was located a few miles from the Turnwold Plantation where Joel Chandler Harris wrote the Uncle Remus stories, and a few miles from the childhood home of Alice “the Color Purple” Walker).

Anyway, after their leader was arrested and awaiting trial on a myriad of charges (he was convicted on most) his former followers (dozens of them were, allegedly, his children) were left to flounder about. Their leader had a high-priced defense team, but like most cult compound leaders all of the money was in his name and his followers had almost no resources, monetary or otherwise, and began coming to the public university library where I worked to ask all manner of questions of anyone on duty, but they especially liked me and thus I got the nickname (at work) of “Official Legal Counsel of the United Nation of Nuwaubian Moors”. I think their preference for me was due to the fact I wear an ankh ring and they took this as a sign.

Anyway, short story long, some of their many legal questions, ALL OF THEM ANSWERED WITH “here’s the Georgia Legal Code” and “No, sorry, I can’t interpret it or give advice, I can only show you the law itself”:

-If you slaughter an animal on your own land and sell the meat, are you liable if it’s rabid or poisoned if you don’t make any represenation that it’s not?

-Can you be evicted from your primary residence if it’s a car parked on public property?

-Can you refuse to allow Christian social workers on your property on the basis of Freedom of Religion?

-What exactly constitutes an illegal nightclub?

And my personal favorite:

-Are camels considered farm animals in Georgia for tax purposes?

(Ironically, I was able to answer a lot of their halal based questions from various Muslim sites and help them with Egyptian and Cherokee mythology related questions.)

One non Nuwaubian rural Georgia question that I got intrigued me enough that I did find out the answer to it from the lawyer husband of a faculty member. The question was “If I kill a deer with my vehicle on a county road, can I keep the carcass?” The answer is (or was, at the time at least), yes. (If you’ve ever driven through rural Georgia at night, you’ll start thinking Bambi’s mother had it coming- the deer can be a real nuisance.)

11

When I worked at the Poison Control Center, a guy called me and asked “What diseases can you get from someone’s urine?” Sensing the questions beneath the initial questions (and since it was 2 in the AM and I had some time), I pressed him for the whole story…

Turns out he was married and had a 14 year-old stepdaughter who was overweight and diabetic. Apparently she also was 1) incredibly lazy and 2) not taking care of herself since she had the charming habit (acc to this caller) of urinating in the household drinking glasses. Even though the glasses were washed, the guy was (understandably) concerned. Apparently the wife was not that worked up about this disgusting habit.

I told him to buy himself a bunch of paper cups. Problem solved!! (well, sort of).

12

When I worked Armored (Loomis, but see also: Brinks, Dunbar, etc), I was standing in line in my uniform at a fast food place when a guy walked up to me and started asking me how easy it would be to just walk off the job with a large bag of money. :rolleyes: When I told him about the paperwork and the obvious measures to prevent this kind of stupidity, he started asking me if I’d done it. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: No, dumbass, I have no desire to spend 10 years in prison for something they’re absolutely going to catch me on.

Then he starts telling me how he and his wife had racked up a ton of credit card debt and had declared bankruptcy, but even after that, had managed to rack up another big pile of debt.

Then he asked me if they’d hire him.

:eek:

Why no, I didn’t simply turn and shoot him in the head…

Even with the spirit of Charles Darwin standing on my shoulder, egging me on.

13

I once worked in a place where it would have been possible to walk out with eleven kilograms of gold. Possible in the sense that the systems meant I might have had enough chance that a person with a criminal mind might try (whereas if they were in the armoured cash business, they wouldn’t). I hated working with that gold because I was worried some dumbarse would try it, and thankfully they stopped handling the stuff soon after.

14

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a “seagull.” There are many varieties of gulls, but none of them is termed “seagull.”

15

The boring detail I didn’t include was our college library underwent renovation for 2 years, and at the time she asked, the reference books were being stored in the field house. Requests for them usually took 24 hours, so going on line was a more ready impulse for most of us right then. Oddly enough, I just found a webpage talking about the renovation.

16

While teaching an HIV education class, during the question-and-answer period, someone asked my friend

“Can you get HIV if you drink a cup of someone else’s blood?”

love
yams!!

17

I can’t believe how many Americans (here, no less) who cannot identify all 50 states when looking at a blank map. That still baffles me. To me it is like tying your shoes or knowing how to drive.

I had a roommate in college who thought that postage stamps would cost more in Iowa City than at home in Tiny Little Hamlet of Iowa (so small I’ve forgotten the name of it). Also, she had never seen or heard of argyle socks–this in the era of Preppiness.

I’m sure I’m ignorant of something elemental as well–we all have our moments.

18

The last odd question I got asked was “Do you work Sundays?” I responded with “sometimes”. This conversation doesn’t sound odd until I explain this was a complete stranger, and he didn’t have any follow up questions to my response. I was a bit hungover, so didn’t really process it all at the time. However, I was very confused later on.

19

I don’t get it?

20

“What is a credit card?” asked by a rural Kentucky gas station attendant.