This happened to me in college and I still remember it 20 years later.
A girl walked up to me when I was having a party and told me I had messages. She was pointing at my VCR. Which she apparently thought was a giant answering machine that was blinking b/c it had 12:00 messages.
Yes please!
I have two work related ones…
A million years ago, I briefly worked at Barnes & Noble. While I was manning the register, a man walked up and asked where the book section was. Wha? I looked around to see if he had friends sniggering in the background, but nope, he was alone. And completely serious. My co-worker had to field that one for me.
At an office job, our boss was explaining how to work the new phone system and adjust the volume. This one is the one you want if you need it louder, this one if you want it softer. The receptionist looked puzzled and inquired, “Which way is up?” No one answered that one.
Finally, my mother has dentures and has since she was in a car wreck at 19. We all had a mutual friend that seemed fascinated by this. One day out of the clear blue, she intoned, “Those things can’t really bite!” I looked at her quizzically and my mother promptly bit her. After that, she was convinced (and in pain).
I attended my friend’s wedding in Bryan, Texas with my (Chinese) wife and her sister. One of the guests came up to me and said: “Hey, is that one of those mail-order brides? Looks like they had a 2-for-1 special!”
I laughed, but my wife didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. 
I just thought of another one: A former landlady of mine (from New Brunswick) asked me where I was from. I told her I was from Saskatchewan. Her response was “Saskatchewan? Is that in Alberta?” No, I told her, it’s a separate province. “Oh,” she said, “I’m not too good with geography because I fried my brain with too much pot in high school.”
I had no response for that.
When I was moving from California to New Hampshire I had more than one person ask me what state New Hampshire was in.
A while back I worked in a shop owned by two 20-something converts to a particularly fervent stripe of Baptist-ism. Conversations would sail off cliffs all the time, leaving me speechless even though I was braced for the sail.
Example: we’re talking about exercise, and I’m dissing running/jogging for the cumulative damage it does to knees, hips, spine etc. They counter with something like great-grandparents who worked their farms for 60 years. I counter by getting into the area of people living longer and living active lives longer, so there is more damage and it has more lasting effects for more people who didn’t expect to end up in a rocking chair.
They counter, “Well, what about when people lived to be 900?”
Goggle briefly, blink, turn back to work. Which made them happy because if I stopped to stretch they’d calculate how much of my $11.40 an hour salary I was wasting.
Some years back, my father was in the hospital; one of my sisters and I were in the ICU with him, reading the paper while awaiting test results. There was an article about vaccination campaigns in south Asia, and Dad – in his seventies and poorly educated because there were few opportunities for him in Mississippi in the 30s & 40s – asked how vaccines worked. I tried to give him the simplest explanation I could think of – "They give you a weakened form of the disease that your body can defeat easily, so your body will learn how to deal with the illness and be easily able to handle it later – but my sister wasn’t having it. This woman – 40something, college-educated, a master’s in social work – insisted that vaccines DON’T really work, that doctors are just guessing.
I think I posted about it on the board right after it happened.
At my great-aunt’s funeral, I was taking a walk outside the funeral home with my cousin and her friend. Just making small talk and getting a breath of fresh air. We stopped to admire some blooming flowers and I said something like “I’m glad that unseasonably warm spell we had didn’t kill off the tulips, look how gorgeous they are.”
Friend says “The weather is changing because of all the space ships punching those holes in the ozone. Turns the planet off center and that’s why Arizona had snow in March.”
I just nodded sagely and backed slowly away.
Having lived in New Brunswick, there is not one single part of that story that I would question.
She and her husband were a colourful pair. On another occasion, I came home and she was rolling a whole bunch of joints for her friend who was a quadriplegic drug dealer.
I got some new baby axolotls, which only really eat live and wiggling food when they’re tiny, so I was out looking for bagged live daphnia, commonly sold as fish food.
I’d tried all my regular places, but there’d been an issue with the delivery due to weather, so I asked the local big chain pet shop if they had any live daphnia. I was cheerfully assured they had some, then led to… a freezer.
Guy: ‘Here ya go!’
Me: ‘Um, sorry, I asked for live daphnia’
Guy: ‘Yep! This is live!’
Me: ‘It’s frozen solid’
Guy: ‘Yep’
Me: ‘They’re not alive, they’re dead’
Guy: ‘No, they’re live, they’re just frozen’
I couldn’t really think what to say to that.
I posted this years ago but it still blows my mind.
I work in the main office of an academic department at a state University. The Department Head had the reputation among the staff of being a total megalomaniac, reinforced over the years by her greed, financial absent-mindedness, and pleasure in breezily assigning pointless and time-wasting tasks. Somehow, if you “can’t remember” receiving a $2,500 check for a travel reimbursement and would rather I spend an hour or two looking it up than checking your own bank balance, you probably don’t really need that money. God knows the taxpayers love to know my time is well-spent.
But I digress.
At some holiday, I received a tube of hand lotion from her; inexpensive, obviously from TJ Maxx. Nothing wrong with that, I buy that kind of thing myself. I thanked her, and in the spirit of proper etiquette, mentioned I just so happened to need some new lotion for my gym bag or whatever.
She chuckled condescendingly and said “Oh, it is so easy to make you people happy!”
I smiled thinly, and in my head the ghost of Butterfly McQueen hollered “OH thank you Miz Professor Lady Ma’am! You sho is good to me!”
Whatever lady. Don’t give me a raise or anything.
“You’d make an ugly woman.”
Back in my college days, a girl walked up to me at a party and said: “You’re an uncircumcised Jew!” (I’m neither). I sat there trying to figure out WTF; then she dropped her cigarette into my drink and stumbled away.
I lived in Georgia for a couple years. I was single then so tried dating down there.
I was out with one woman and we were eating outside and she said something about the sun. I can’t remember what.
I looked up at it and said, not really thinking, that it was weird to see the sun so high in the sky (northward) for that time of year. I was used to it being further down.
She asked me about it and I told her that up in Yankeeland that the sun was not as high in the sky, you know…the earth tilted and all that?
She looked at me and exclaimed “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT!?”
Ok, this one wins the thread.
Many many years ago I was at a 4th of July party. Rooftop with a view of the NYC fireworks, good music, good food, perfect weather. The party was given by a group of friends of mine that mostly consisted of gay men.
So I am sitting with a female friend and enjoying the ambiance. We are approached by the host who was a little buzzed and very effusive.
“It’s a beautiful night and you are beautiful girls. Why are you sitting alone, this is a night that was meant for romance. This night was made for love. You two need to get laid.”
So I said “Michael, it IS a perfect night for love but I don’t see any straight men anywhere.”
So Michael looks around the party guests, turns to us, looks around somemore then shrugs and points to a guy standing near the barbeque grill.
And says…“Well, he’ll fuck ANYTHING”.
I did not know how to respond.
When I was little I had a godfather who was absolutely wonderful to me. He was a friend of my parents and he would visit us a few times a year, always bringing me presents and we’d hang out - go to the park, skating, for long walks - and I adored him and spending time with him. He was a hugely positive influence on my life and an all-around wonderful man.
A few years ago I was telling the guy I was dating at the time about my godfather and how great he was to me when I was a child and that’s why as an only child myself I try to “pay forward” that kindness to my friend’s kids.
The guy scoffed and said “Hmph. Pedophile.”
I was, literally, speechless. That guy was also immediately dumped. I couldn’t believe that anyone could say such a horrible thing about my cherished memory.
I had one just the other day. I was at an event for my company. I work for a company that does a lot of stuff for babies. I don’t have any kids myself, and never will, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s important all the same.
It’s a literal stranger, and in the course of small talk, she says, “Do any of you have children?” I said no, and I have this spiel I go into, how I love being an auntie and spoiling them rotten and sending them home (true!) and she looks me in the eye and says “You really should have your own. It gives you a new appreciation.”
A new appreciation of what? Now I used to get comments like these all the time in my twenties but they’ve slowed down now as I get older, and I used to have some pat responses down. It’s been a few years and I had no response at all, so I just stood and stared at her. Since that was the only response my brain could come up with, I just let the silence stretch out between us.
Really, who says that? Why is that small talk? Are you going to help me take care of my kids? I’ll have to dust off my Miss Manners I guess: “How kind of you to take an interest.”
I had, not a godfather, but a friend of the family who loved playing with me when I was little. As far as I can remember, it was all good clean fun, and I loved him to bits. I had somebody imply something similar about him. He was a twenty year old man and I was just a child but is it really so hard to believe a young man might not find a little girl cute just to play with like normal people?
My aunts have all kinds of stories about him. Like the time I peed on him. 
Thanks, auntie.