I had always assumed everyone who worked with me was of a… well, at least a modest level of intellegence. I mean they all manage to show up in the office wearing pants, or occasionally skirts.
Today that assumption had been blown out of the water as I was asked, “Do you know how to put paper in the printer? I think that may be why my stuff isn’t coming out.” Meanwhile, the little red light on the printer is flashing, and the display reads, “Load Tray 2, Plain Letter”.
I do telephone customer service… I have gotten some good ones I thought no-one could EVER ask anywhere… for instance:
How do I make a lower-case letter “LEE”?
Is the capital “J” the one with the dot over it?
Is that “Q” as in “Corvette”?
You said "capital ‘B’… what does ‘capital’ mean? (this was from a school teacher)
I used to be stunned when I got questions about whether or not various numbers were capital letters or not… I am used to that one, now…
there are more… I will add them as I remember them… I generally block them from my consciousness…
I have a website on a civil war unit and was showing it to a co- worker. A young girl in the office came by and looked at it, and asked me if that was the unit I served with during the Civil war
geez how old do ya think I am :smack:
I told her go out the door she had just come in and look up. We were literally within a hundred feet of it, less than 1/6th of its height.
Also from my Seattle Center mini golf days: Young guys would come up to me and say, “Can I play for free? I’m just practicing.” Like Tiger Woods doesn’t have to pay greens fees when he’s practicing? NO!!!
Me: The township doesn’t have an engineer. We contract out, in this case with G.F… You can find out all you need to know from their man D.C. He’s the engineer in charge of the project; we don’t have anyone in-house who can answer your questions.
Him: Who there at the township can tell me about the project?
I work in a video store and get asked, what seems like, the same rediculous questions everyday.
Customer–“Are these movies for rent?”
Customer–“If it says ‘New Release’ does that mean it is a new release?”
And probably the one that had me floored… “This adult movie claims to be 4 hours, do you think it actually takes that long to reach…you know?” :eek:
If you have to ask, you’re not doing something right.
Not really in keeping with the stupid-questions-from-coworkers theme so far, but I never in a million years expected my boss to discuss her upcoming breast reduction surgery with me.
I hand out audio tours at a large museum and have discovered that it’s not always the questions that get you, but moreso the ones that go unanswered.
It’s not unusual to have people ask where to go in the museum after they receive the audio tour, even though the exhibit entrance is in plain sight. What gets me, however, are the folks who don’t ask…and try to get to the exhibit through our auditorium, in our elevator, or at the box office.
Um, hello? It’s over there, in the room with the huge works of art hanging on the wall? :wally
Other than that, the rest of the day is “Where’s the volume on this thing?” or “How do I pause the tour?” while I point out the buttons marked “volume” and “pause.”
Ugh. I think we could start a thread solely on the stupidity of video store patrons, and have no shortage of stories.
I worked for a place called Family Video for about, oh, three months. We used to joke it was the Family Video Store with the Not-So-Family Videos In The Back.
I used to get people asking me to help them pick out videos on a nigh-constant basis. I don’t quite get why I was apparently a porn connosieur, but I always drew the line at choosing someone else’s whacking materials. I have a tough enough time making a decision for myself.
Nothing beat the time I was asked if the videos contained men in them, because “all the boxes had nothing but women on them” and the person in question didn’t want an all-lesbo sex-fest. Other than directing this patron to the back of the box where they could get a better…ahem, “glimpse at the product,” I had nothin’.
I’m still at a loss on how to answer that question satisfactorily.
You know the regular renters are fine…some every now and then hit me with the silly questions, but those “adult” renters…now that is where the real fun begins.
A few more that I just thought of…
“If I rent this for just tonight, is it due back tomorrow?”
“I know this says it is a Triple X…but does it really have sex in it?”
“Do I have to pay for it now? What if I dont like it, can’t I just pay for it when I return it?”
I work at a radio station or three. One of them is classical music. This may seem a little esoteric for this discussion, but in broadcasting and engineering, it’s assumed you know how to do your job.
We have a productions engineer who floored me the other day with this exchange, after I found out he’d made an entire run of a concert series in mono instead of stereo:
Him: What do you mean, it’s not stereo?
Me: It’s the identical thing on both channels, because you had the channels balanced to center instead of Left and Right.
Him: But it’s on two channels, look!
Me: But it’s the same thing on both.
Him: Well, it’s coming out of the program in stereo.
Me: But you have the master pans set to mono.
Him: No, it’s stereo, look, it’s on two channels.
Me: Stereo is when you have the cellos on the left and the horns on the right. In this recording, everything is coming out of the middle.
Him: But it’s two channels!
Me: Yes, and they are both mono!
This went on for about twenty minutes…
Me: All the rest of our programming is stereo. Music buffs are going to complain.
Him: Nobody ever told me (station) is stereo.
Me: How many programs have you done with the controls set this way?
Him: All of them.
This person is a graduate of a highly-regarded school for recording engineers.
:eek:!!!
(To be fair, I work in a pharmaceutical company and a new project wanted to aim for a similar viscosity and so we had to test the KY…but still, it was SO wrong to hear that in the middle of the morning!!)
