I work in restaurant, and I’ve encountered people who have done the following foolish things:
Putting metallic objects in a microwave.
Putting a plastic tray in an oven.
Putting on very thin plastic gloves that we use to handle raw meat (instead of oven mitts), and then attempting to remove very hot metallic trays from the oven. This caused my coworker to scream in pain.
I’m utterly shocked that anyone could live for at least 16 years (that’s how old you generally have to be in my state to work) in a modern First World country and not be aware that these are bad ideas.
Well older people were raised in an environment where they could injure themselves and learn from it. Learn not to do it again.
The current batch of young people has been protected from anything which could injure them - playgrounds have special designs to keep kids from being injured, Heck they even require special bark dust, which will not give them splinters!
Also I’m learning younger people see no need to read instruction manuals. So no wonder they are not too bright!
One of the springs on our garage door snapped. As awesome as I am, fixing this was beyond me. I told my wife it would require a professional. Her mother piped up with “why don’t you just duct tape the pieces back together?” The wife actually thought this was a good idea.
I was literally shocked speechless. I stared at them for what seemed like an entire minute. I’m certain they caused irrevocable damage to my brain.
How to stand in a line. More specifically, when people think that I don’t know how to stand in a line. Yes, I can see that the person in front of me is inching forward.
Are you sure those are all due to ignorance? I’ve done stupid stuff while cooking; it’s not that I didn’t know better, but when doing 8 things at once sometimes parts of my brain go on autopilot and I’ll reach for a hot pan without realizing it. And I’m sure a professional kitchen is more hectic than mine at home.
To be fair, I could imagine myself doing the things mentioned in the OP, not because I don’t know any better, but in a moment of distracted, brain-farty dumbness.
Wait, people actually read those things? (I’m 41, so maybe I fall under “young” for you, but I get surprised at how few people my age actually read the things. And, I confess, I usually don’t bother, either.)
To continue with the kitchen theme, I once had a housemate whose girlfriend committed at least 3 kitchen blunders at our house, based on not knowing things I thought would be common knowledge for someone in their twenties:
[ol]
[li]She put dish soap in the dishwasher[/li][li]She took a glass candy thermometer out of the hot oven and immediately plunged it under a stream of cold water, causing it to shatter[/li][li]She melted a rubber scraper by using it to scrape food out of a hot skillet (later I thought maybe she had only ever used the silicone kind, which could tolerate this) [/li][/ol]
Also, I don’t know how shocking this is, but I don’t think I knew until I was in my thirties that dishwasher detergent has bleach and abrasives in it, and that that’s the main reason certain things aren’t dishwasher safe. Until then, I think I’d always unconsciously assumed there was just something about being squirted with jets of hot water for an extended period of time that was bad for certain materials.
Once, having stumbled upon one case that I took to be aberrant, I conducted a straw poll of a few dozen maths graduates – there was a shocking number of individuals who believed that it was hot in summer because the earth was closer to the sun.
I could understand the dishwasher stuff. Actually, until your post, I didn’t realize certain things aren’t dishwasher safe. I just maybe assumed stuff that could melt maybe? I got my first dishwasher this year. It just wasn’t something I grew up around. My wife understands the machine a good bit more. I’m still continually amazed at how well it cleans out things I thought would definitely require hand-washing.
TBH, I’m a decade+ older than you, and my interaction with TFM is “Hand me TFM, I need to figure out why it didn’t work the way it was supposed to work. Oh, it wasn’t supposed to work that way. And now I have to replace it. :mad:”
I grew up doing dishes by hand - my mother wanted nothing to do with dishwashers. Fortunately, I’d heard horror stories from other folks about putting dish soap in the dishwasher, so I knew not to. But I was over 30 before I had a dishwasher, so I might have done the same thing.
Shortly after 9/11, in front of a bookstore, I heard two guys talking about current events. One of them admitted he didn’t know which came first – World War II or the Vietnam war.
I’m pretty unhandy, but by reading the instructions I have on occasion saved my spouse and b-i-l, both extremely handy and capable and confident that they need not read instructions, from calamitous errors.
You ever had one of those bad oven On-Cor meals? The kind that come in what, by all accounts, appears to be a coated paper tray for cooking in your oven? Based on that I can definitely see how someone might not know plastic melts in an oven. After all you can stick THAT in there and it doesn’t burst into flames or melt at all. And if never told not to, there’s always a first time for learning the silverware in the microwave problem. Plenty of issues come from parents simply saying “no, don’t do that” without ever explaining why. Cue adulthood or near-adulthood and now, “hey I can do things how I want, including all the stuff my parents never wanted me to do for some stupid reason.”
I also had no dishwasher experience for my whole childhood. Chalk me down for another that thought some materials were not dishwasher safe due to the heat because the few items that didn’t make it through by all accounts have appeared to be deformed by the heat. They were “top rack dishwasher safe” which was a to me as to what exactly was the issue. They didn’t make it through the top rack after all.
Anyway I’ll just reiterate the shockingly large misunderstanding about the seasons The Great Unwashed brought up. I’m not shocked that some people think that’s why - people believe all sorts of stuff. It’s how many. My college astronomy class had a poll with public results and a good 50% of the class thought “moving closer and farther away from the sun in orbit” was the reason why. That many!
In fairness, the Earth’s distance from the sun does change by over 3,000,000 miles over the course of the year (Perihelion: 91,401,000, Aphelion: 94,500,000). That’s not the reason for the seasons (that has to do with the tilt of the Earth, but at least it’s not super idiotic. (Although, Perihelion is in January, so if you’re in the northern hemisphere, it would be having the opposite effect of the seasons).
The idiots that claim if the Earth were 10 feet closer to the sun everyone would be instantly roasted to a crisp, therefore God must exist… those guys are nuts.
(I’m 41, so maybe I fall under “young” for you, but I get surprised at how few people my age actually read the things. And, I confess, I usually don’t bother, either.)
to me as to what exactly was the issue. They didn’t make it through the top rack after all.