I just remembered: My cardiologist, who is a brilliant physician, needed help figuring which month was 3 months after May.
That’s not surprising. It’s obvious that the teeth go through the loops on the bottom of the staple. They’re shaped perfectly.
Wait, they don’t? That, for me, was completely counterintuitive, and I never even considered it until my wife showed me, after watching me mangle a stack of papers.
Joe
As someone who is prone to low self-esteem, can I just say thank you for this thread? It is making me feel a lot better about myself. I had no idea that there are functional adults out there who have trouble tying their shoes, driving a car, or using a broom. (I mean, sweeping with a broom? What is there to know?)
I suppose there are a lot of cooking things that I never learned. I have no idea how to make any kind of cake, or food item that has any kind of structure, such as lasagna. I can make stuff that involves throwing things into some kind of pan, that’s it.
Wait. That’s not how you do it? :eek:
Try it both ways. You’ll feel like an idiot for looping the teeth through the back. I know I did…
Joe
I’m appalled at the number of adults who are unable to cook even that much–say, anything more advanced than assembling a cold sandwich from ready-to-eat ingredients. As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t cook a little, you’re functionally disabled.
That was topped, though, when I heard about a friend-of-friend’s date one evening who was unable to eat with a knife and fork. FOF had to cut up her food for her as for a small child. :eek:
I can tie square knots and my shoes. Any other knot is a complete mystery. It takes work for me to make a slip knot. Anything else, forget it.
We have a bunch of Mennonites who live 100+ miles out in the country. Every so often some come into town and go to the airport to recieve guests or send somebody off. Which is where I see them.
And there they are, struggling to operate the escalators. They get the big idea pretty quickly from watching the the other customers, but they can’t figure out how to get on. Or they can’t work up the courage. Or something. Pretty odd to watch a 20-something fail at this basic civilized skill.
I don’t mean to make fun of these folks; their lifestyle is pretty admirable all around. But it does leave them at a loss in some pretty basic modern situations.
My husband didn’t know how to clean when we started living together. Having visited his family in India, I can see why. They have servants to clean twice a day, scrubbing the floors, dusting every surface, etc. They also have people to cook their meals and clean up afterward. When he was in college, he didn’t have anything but a bed and made nothing but frozen pizzas and takeout, so cleaning wasn’t very necessary.
He’s still pretty bad at it and can’t figure out which cleaner to use for what unless it’s painfully obvious (toilet bowl cleaner, for example), but at least he knows generally what to do when I hand him a scrub brush. Now, if only I would delegate more often…
Edited to add: I figured that it goes without saying that he can’t cook terribly well. He can scramble an egg and preheat an oven; over time, his expertise has also expanded to encompass one Indian dish and cheese quesadillas, so he’s not totally hopeless.
I run into that a lot. I have a map book in each of my vehicles. I own a GPS but it doesn’t ever get transferred to a work truck. The first time I ask an apprentice to look a street up in map book they are utterly baffled.
I’m suddenly feeling a lot better about myself 
I can do all of the things so far mentioned, though some I’m not all that good at.
I hate to cook, so I’m not good at it, but I can feed myself & my husband. Obviously I can type after a fashion, but it’s pretty much hunt n’ peck and I have to look at the keyboard. I drive a stick all the time, even the F-250 pulling the horse trailer.
Is IT stuff common yet? 'cuz I can’t do much of anything about computers, programming, webpage stuff, troubleshooting etc. I can use the most basic of html, and that’s about it.
Oh, and I can’t tie a bowline knot to save my soul. Even following along with a diagram or a demo, I just can’t get it right.
Once my freshman year in college a girl who lived across the hall from me came by my room to ask about doing laundry. She wasn’t sure how much detergent to put in. I said, “Well, it depends on how big the load is and how dirty it is.” She said “Is three cups enough? That’s what I’ve been using, but I want to be sure it’s getting clean.”
I was astonished and quickly explained that one cup or less should be sufficient. It turns out that although her mother was an American her father was from somewhere in the Middle East and she’d grown up mostly in Dubai where they had “people who do that kind of thing for us.”
I don’t understand how not knowing how to cook is a disability. You have many options that make cooking (unless you like cooking) seem like more work than one has to do. There’s take out food of all kinds (and costs) and ready made foods of all varities.
If you can’t prepare food for yourself, that means you’re dependent on other members of society to do it for you. You could not survive in a recognizably human fashion on your own. IMO it’s not qualitatively different from, say, needing help wiping your ass, or being unable to walk a mile on your own feet.
Working at the library I am shocked by these on a regular basis. People have not the first clue how to make copies. Copies! I mean, our copier is confusing, yes, but who doesn’t know your original goes FACE DOWN? Seriously?
Also, tons and TONS of people are evidently terrified of escalators, but will not take the damned elevator. What’s up with that?
What’s so complicated about the Dewey Decimal system? Once you have the number, I don’t see what’s hard about finding the book. 2 comes after 1, people. 1.2 is after 1.01. Just like in real life, believe it or not.
I once had to sit down and show a girl how to write a check. I’ve had to do that with immigrants once or twice before, but this was a college freshman who was born and raised in this country and she had no idea how to go about this very ordinary task. I don’t get how nobody ever did it in front of her when she was paying attention in her whole life.
My mom has friends who very bitterly eventually learned how to pump their own gas when the very last full service stations disappeared. I don’t know how you can respect yourself in the morning if you drive a car but don’t know how to put gas in it. They very proudly do not know how to change a tire, either, but they don’t have AAA. “Someone will come!”
Personally, I had to be shown how to mop when I got my first retail job. We didn’t have floors we mopped as a child.
Do you grow your own food? If not, then you are dependent on other members of society to do it for you. Certainly, most of us are.
I find your comparison way over the top. There are many foods requiring little or no cooking, which would still form a complete and healthy diet. Fruits, vegetables, rice, nuts, beans, etc. You might get bored with such a diet, to be sure, but that’s a different issue. You will still be recognizably human.
Put it this way. Of all the skills mentioned so far in this thread, I’d rather live with somebody who can’t cook but knows basic house cleaning, rather than vice-versa.
45 and have never driven stick.
Can’t snap my fingers. For some reason it has always grossed me out, like popping knuckles. I can whistle and blow bubbles, though.
Sometime between 12 or so (when I was an expert) and 40 (when my kids asked for a demonstration) I lost the ability to armpit fart. Is it the hair? The extra weight (I was a scrawny kid, less so as an adult)
My college grad daughter despite multiple demonstrations just can’t write a check. I went with her to H&R Block and watched while the worker literally had to watch her write and tell her what to put on each line. I used to be able to whistle, now just make a faint whistling noise. I think it’s because my teeth have shifted.
Actually, I’m going to claim that’s just horrible design we’ve gotten used to. In what other context do we place documents face down in order to perform a task?
Sure, if you think about it from an engineering standpoint, it might be “obvious” that you have to place the image on the transparent surface, in order for the machine to “see” it, but who does an engineering analysis when they just want to make a copy of something? The machine could trivially have been designed with a mirror or other inversion to allow this to work intuitively, but we’ve gotten used to the oddity.
Hence, in many modern copiers (and fax machines) with a feeder, the documents DO go face up, so someone who’s only used a decent copier might have exactly the wrong expectation. And because we now do it both ways, the confusion has gotten so great that they now have to put little ‘folded paper’ icons on the feed trays to tell you which way to insert – which are themselves often ambiguous, especially the “face down” one.
All food perparing is dependent on someone else. For example, do you know to turn a cow into a steak? Or gut a fish? If you don’t you’re dependent on someone else. Do you grow all of the vegatable you eat? I suppose if you buy those things from the market, that’s somehow more independent.