Stuff that seems common, but outside your life experience

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m talking about things that are apparently common but just sound odd and strange and maybe you’re not sure if people are serious or not. Could be things outside your income level, could be things outside your culture, whatever. Like someone says well if your baby is fussy just have the au pair amuse her, and you’ve never known anyone who had an au pair working for them.

-Contact your congressman to solve your issue! So people do this and it works? Huh.

-Call your travel agent and go get all the needed vaccines! Ok what is a travel agent :p, and do people really worry about vaccines when traveling? I’ve known a lot of people traveling and all of them including me buy tickets straight from the airline, and no one I know has ever bothered about vaccines again including me.
This also goes for a lot of general travel silliness, like being worried about traveling alone even in safe nations like Japan.

2

“Oh, you deserve to find someone who loves you back. You will someday. And then you’ll want to get married and have babies. Just stop looking.”

O really? I see it happen all around me, but am apparently completely incapable of whatever it takes to be part of a committed partnership. I am not interested in marriage or babies, so maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe I don’t want it badly enough. Or I’m bringing whatever baggage to the table that makes me Completely Unacceptable as a potential partner. I dunno; I can’t figure it out. I know all sorts of assholes and dysfunctional non-assholes who all somehow manage to be in relationships, but the whole thing eludes me and I find it a total mystery. I don’t know how people ever fall in love and get married.

3
  • getting a colonic cleanse. Really? You can’t just empty out your intestines the old-fashioned way? It seems like a lot of inconvenience to go through for something that has no known benefits. I had a coworker who raved about hers, but I just don’t get it.
4

Lining up for a chance to buy an iPad.

5

“You need to talk to your lawyer.”
I don’t have a lawyer, I don’t know of anyone that has a lawyer, I wouldn’t even know how to go about finding a lawyer these days since phone books are obsolete and googling ‘(your city) lawyers’ will give you over 10,000 hits.

6

Heh I was going to post “Just let me call my lawyer” I don’t know anyone who has a personal lawyer on retainer.

7

Owning a house. I mean, I grew up in a house (owned by the bank, held by my parents) so I do understand the perks of having a building that you can paint or remodel or put a new shelf in the bathroom without asking a landlord’s permission. I get that. But I just don’t get the risk and costs involved. I can’t imagine having so much money in the bank that I could not only give someone a whole lot of it for a house, but still have enough in reserve so that if my furnace and my roof break in the same day, I can have it taken care of.

I grew up hearing how a house was an investment. I spent my 20’s hearing how I was throwing money away by renting (but I also saw the stress and financial strain on my landlords, who did have to replace boilers and stoves and windows and…). I spent the early part of my 30’s with a wary eye on the housing market, thinking, “this can’t last. This is crazy! “Investments” can’t keep going up and up forever, someday houses have to lose value.”

Now I’m so glad I didn’t buy a house. I’ve got friends trapped in towns and states they hate, because they can’t sell their houses when they want to. I see people owing three times what their house is now worth, and they can’t afford to sell, even if they could find a buyer.

So, I’m sorry I was right, but I still don’t understand the pressure and drive to own a house. It may be the American Dream, but it’s not my dream.

8

Yes, the whole “getting married, having kids, buying a house and/or being religious” things are completely outside of my experience.

9

Kind of similar to this one, there always seems to be a local TV station that has some kind of “On Your Side” consumer reporter that intervenes in various retail and commercial things. In Indianapolis, it’s our ABC affiliate, channel 6 WRTV. And for the most random crap, people will soberly intone “we’re calling channel 6.” As if channel 6 gets involved in every single consumer problem.

“Oh, sorry ma’am, these coupons expired last week, we…”
“…oh really? I’m calling channel 6!”

“My neighbor ran over my dog, and now I can’t afford his veterinary bills…”
“Oooh, you should call channel 6, they’ll take care of it.”

As far as I’ve known, the whole “On Your Side” schtick involves nailing seriously shady folks-- car garages that have scammed dozens of people, or utility companies double-billing whole neighborhoods for months on end-- and not getting involved in everything under the sun (unless it makes for a good TV story, of course). But invoking channel 6 is almost as common as prayer, and has been for a good 20 years. Oh, vending machine’s out of Dr Pepper? Channel 6!

And in my own experience, there’s the whole “talk to your lawyer” thing for every damn thing under the sun. I don’t have a lawyer. Never have. Almost got one when I went through a divorce 12 years ago, but didn’t; drew up the paperwork myself and everything went well. (As an aside: divorcing with kids or desirable property? YES, get a lawyer. I do not question your need for one. I’d have damn sure had one if there had been something precious involved.) I’ve been told that all adults should have a lawyer, just in case. I have friends and coworkers who mention consulting their lawyer about seemingly mundane things. Everyone seems to sue car dealers or repairmen or whatever all the time, and always have lawyers on retainer for things like $25 shock absorbers that were charged at $30, or for speeding tickets, or whatever the hell they use them for. My ex-fiancee urged me to talk to “my lawyer” a couple of years ago for some mundane thing (like over some erroneous bill that was settled with a single amiable call to the service line), then went ballistic when she found out I didn’t have anyone. I had a student threaten me online, a professor got university and city police involved, and the university pulled me out of any position to be harmed… and the fiancee wanted me to use her lawyer to sue the university for some reason, even though they’d done everything right and suing would have exposed the professor to FERPA problems. Hell, even the one time my identity was stolen, I simply confronted the thief at his job (!.. thanks to the Johnson County sheriff’s department for the info on that), then cleared everything up with a few hours of short, amiable phone calls.

Goddamn, multiple ninja’d on the lawyer thing. Serves me right for obsessively rewriting before submitting (yet managing to still submit with multiple errors).

10

You see quite a bit of this on The Today Show.

In the Money Management segments, they will preface their tips with, “Say you have $400,000 in your IRA and wonder if you should switch it to a low-risk, high-interest money fund…”
Uh, sure - let’s go ahead and say I have that $400,000…

In their Travel segments they will say, “Here are some great hotels for under $500 per night, and have great spas!”
I wonder if they rent those rooms by the hour as well…

In their Food segments, “How to prepare a fast, fun gourmet meal to surprise your family!” And then they list ingredients like “1/3 lb of fresh yak butter, 2 ounces of gold flakes from India, 6 lbs of thinly sliced Kobe beef, a cup of leftover Crystal champagne and four petals from a Swiss Edelweiss bloom crushed up…”
Sure - and I will be certain to serve it with the recommended bottle of 1864 French Cabernet.

11

That seems unlikely. I’m pretty sure the OP is asking about things that you don’t have any close experience of at all, not just things you personally haven’t done. I’d be pretty surprised if you don’t have at least one close acquaintence who hasn’t done those things.

12

Spending $60+ dollars on a cell phone plan, in addition to however much more for home internet/cable/phone, etc.

13

Very, very few, actually–maybe one.

14

I worked as a retail manager in a big box store for many years and you know how the saying goes “If I had a dime for every time…”.
Every city or town I worked in the customer had a “friend” who worked at the local newspaper or tv station and boy was I going to be sorry.
My pat answer when told I would be hearing soon from channel 6 was “Cool.”

15

Biological clocks ticking, being desperate to have a baby, seeing people with babies and thinking, “Man, I want one of those,” rushing into marriage with random takers just to have that baby…

I’m almost 34 and have never felt any of those feelings.

E: Or did I mistake the spirit of the OP as well? If so – not just lawyers, but having run-ins with the law, going to court, etc. I know no one who has been arrested or been sued.

16

That advice is just old, kind of like telling someone to look something up in a phone book or encyclopedia. Travel agents are much less common now than they were in pre-Internet days.

I think “Oh, better call channel 6” would be a great sarcastic reply for when someone is complaining about a trivial thing and you are feeling snarky.

17

Strewth. :confused:

Whilst I appreciate the idea of the thread, I have done all the following:

  • contact my local Member of Parliament to (successfully) sort out a problem

  • got a UK travel agent to arrange my Vegas trips (involving overnight stay at airport hotel; flights; accomodation; US ESTA visa; £1,000,000 medical insurance; trips e.g. to Hoover Dam); shows (e.g. Penn + Teller) … and advising me on any vaccinations needed)

  • bought a house 22 years ago for £60,000, which was valued recently at £180,000 (and of course I’ve never had to pay rent)

  • buying the house involved getting a lawyer (who also sorted out my will; power of attorney; probate for my parent’s estate; selling my parent’s house)

18

Having health insurance pay for stuff. I’ve had health insurance once through my work and once through the college. The work one paid for nothing (because my boss was an idiot) and I never used the college one for stuff (although I did use the health center for checkups, which sorta counts, I suppose, since I didn’t pay anything).

I’m looking forward to my current health insurance kicking in.

Finding a doctor. I’ve always just gone to whoever my mom goes to because it’s easiest. That will change.

Getting therapy. I know a therapist (he works for the county he lives in). I know I was sent to a shrink when I was grade school because my teacher thought I was crazy (diagnosis: over active imagination). I don’t remember it.

Calling a plumber. I’ve always done it myself, had my dad do it, or had the apartment handyman do it. (It was all minor stuff, except for my dad redoing some pipes in their house).

Getting drunk. Never done it. Since getting buzzed means getting withdrawn enough that I’m not having fun, I see no reason to. I know plenty of people who get drunk and seem like they’re having fun, but I also get to see them miserable later.

19

This. Plus going to a strip club to give money to naked women.

20

This one is pretty crazy but…stairs.

I didn’t grow up with stairs in my house. Stairs in other people’s houses always sort of perplexed me. I was never particularly good at running up or down them.

Now I have stairs in my house (only to the basement, thank Og) and they sort of creep me out. I am always afraid I’m going to fall down them or trip up them. I always have to have the lights on in the stairwell to go up or down.

I have this feeling that people who grew up in a home with stairs have amazing muscle memory for stairs and never think twice about them.