I once had a coworker - in a laboratory filled with chemicals - who, after 9 months of employment, still did not know the phone number of the phone in the lab, the lab in which he worked every day. Never mind all of the various equipment and test procedures.
Just the other day, I had a coworker ask to use the phone in the lab. He told me that it must be broken, because it had some sort of weird noise in the speaker. It was the DIAL TONE!! He’d been using cell phones his entire life and did not know that land lines have a dial tone!!
My mom, who was born in 1913, was telling a much younger woman that when she was a kid there was no radio, because it hadn’t been invented yet. To which the younger woman replied, “Yeah, but you could watch TV, right?”.
On another message board I frequent, there’s currently a discussion about DNA test kits. I am stunned at the ignorance.
A lot of people don’t know that human chromosomes come in pairs, one of each pair from a father and one from a mother.
A lot of people think that siblings have identical DNA (and thus that there’s no need to test more than one sibling). The concept that siblings could theoretically share no parental DNA sends these people into frantic denial.
The thread hurts my head so badly, I had to quit reading it.
When someone I know from another state was fired for being lesbian, I mentioned it to a co-worker, she was appalled saying “well I hope she sues, that’s against the law”. Only to find out that her view is common, many people think being lesbian/gay is a protected class. I tell them it varies by state and sometimes by county or even city. And yes, Bob can marry Dave legally, but if his boss finds out he can be fired. This information astounds them.
But 0.3603 is not greater than 0.360 . 0.3603 > 0.3600 , but 0.360 doesn’t have enough precision to be able to tell which one is larger. 0.360 might be 0.3597, or it might be 0.3604 . If the schematic calls for a measurement of 0.360 , then 0.3603 is in spec, and if the designer meant for 0.3603 to be out of spec, he should have specified that.
My brother and I were taking a flight one time and we had a stop in Newark. My brother decided to call his girlfriend, who lived in downstate New York, from a payphone (this was back before cell phones were common). When he got back he commented that he was surprised the phone call had been long distance. I said “What did you expect? You were calling another state.” And he said “We’re not in New York?”
A co-worker of mine was going to New Hampshire on vacation, and asked me for my advice, as I was raised in Boston. She called me from there and said “How come you didn’t tell me there’s no black people here.” She’s black, but the thought never occurred to me. I was raised in a mixed neighborhood, and don’t see people in terms of their color.
The store I work in is owned by Hassidic Jews, and can be open on Sunday. I got questioned about this, and I’m always amazed when people don’t know that our county’s blue laws are Christian laws.
There aren’t in many sizing schemes- it goes straight from HH to J, presumably because otherwise I, l and 1 are too easily confused. And yes, L does exist as a commercially available bra cup size.
I worked with a guy, aged 17, at a coffee shop in an airport. He did not know what the Southern Hemisphere was. Or the equator. Or the poles. Several of us attempted to explain, but he just didn’t get it.
He came in all excited one day because he’d learned something new in his apprentice scheme; there are two sorts of wood, hardwood and softwood, and one’s from pine trees, but he couldn’t remember which. He was over 6 months into a carpentry apprenticeship.
Oh, and after a year of working in the airport, he could not name a single airline that operated from that airport. I asked him. He was genuinely dead proud because he got half the name of one. The shop was open layout, right opposite check-in desks for 4 different airlines, all covered in huge signs. Also, half the cabin crew and check-in staff used to buy drinks from us, plus there were countless announcements every day. He didn’t know what the departure boards were for either. The guy was the incarnation of oblivious.
Others went into the minutiae of Catholic mass readings around the calendar. One point is that Catholic view while it might fairly be called de-emphasizing the OT I’d say might be better be called viewing the OT through lens of NT. The emphasis is on readings foreshadowing the Christ and/or ones Jesus emphasized, or compared/contrasted His teachings with, etc in the Gospel. The emphasis on OT quasi-historical allegorical stories is generally quite low. The authority of OT commands which could be questioned in terms of Gospel sayings, likewise.
The other point more on topic is that what a lot of people surely know, but kind of act like they don’t know sometimes, and maybe some people really don’t, is that Roman Catholicism was Christianity in the West for centuries. And the Eastern churches it overshadowed (in the early days) and coexisted with (the schism with the Orthodox) tended to view that aspect, of the primary of the Gospels, pretty similarly in general. That wasn’t what they disagreed about theologically. Whereas the Protestants came along much later, and what a lot of people seem to think of as ‘Christianity’ is a relatively small (though fast growing in a lot of the world) branch of Protestantism generally from the US South.
There was no assumption for eons that a typical Catholic would have the kind of knowledge of the OT which Southern US origin Protestants think is relatively important. In the big picture the modern Catholic Church recognizes the original Protestant theme of the believer knowing and interpreting the scriptures themselves as a positive reform, and has imitated it. To some degree. But the idea of knowing all kinds of verses not so much, and the implied idea the OT as a whole is as important or stands equal to Christ’s teachings (which I’m not sure even the most extreme Protestants believe) definitely not. But a lot of non-Christians seem now to have an idea how ‘Christianity’ works mainly based on their idea (though again perhaps exaggerated) of Southern type ‘born again’ Protestant sects.
To not know the dates of World War I is quite reasonable, as long as it’s not wildly off. 1914-1918 isn’t a particularly easy time frame to store in memory.
What would be stunning would be if someone thought World War I took place after World War II, or something like that.
Agreed, for Sunday Mass there is often a connection between the three readings. At daily Mass, though, there is a more steady reading through sections of the OT, connected to the Gospel for that day or not. Sometimes the one OT reading will go on for pages as a long story is told. It has a nice rhythm to it as one is waking up early in the morning and the repetition of phrases helps.
