I usually asked; “Is it going to be a comprehensive final, or is comprehension not required?”
I’m sorry you get asked about the dike.
But I don’t understand the problem with the driving question.
I live in England and have played chess many times in the Hoogovens chess tournament at Wijk aan Zee (now sponsored by Tata Steel.)
For the first few years, we did drive there (taking a car ferry to France.)
Of course now you can use the Channel Tunnel - so it’s certainly possible to sit in a car for the whole journey.
You may be amused by an anecdote about the time I stayed with a charming Dutch family at the chess tournament. I had got a train from Amsterdam to Beverwijk and noticed in a railway map that there was a station at Schevenigen. Well this is also a chess opening in the Sicilian Defence.
So I tried to make conversation with the family (being Dutch, they all spoke English perfectly 
), telling them about the town. It took several goes before they realised what I was talking about, aince I couldn’t manage the throat noise you chaps use and was pronouncing the name as ‘shev -in -gen’!
You’re overthinking this. It really was as simple as knowing whether zero is even or not.
And the issue isn’t whether the question is “fair” or not. “Is zero even?” is a mildly dumb question for a 10 year old to ask. For a 20+ year old Computer Science major? It’s quite a ways up the scale.
Asking “What was President Lincoln’s first name?” is a fair question. But it’s a quite dumb one for adults in the US and a seriously dumb one for a college student majoring in US history.
I have mentioned this stupidity several times here over the years. And people somehow want to defend this dumbness. It is getting really … weird … in this regard. But I shan’t speculate.
Isosleepy’s location is in Pittsburgh. People ask him if he drove there from the Netherlands. So, yes, that is a rather silly question, until that trans-Atlantic highway ever gets built.
Right. I can take calls to my desk phone from my cell. I don’t, because that might encourage people to call me. But it’s not new technology.
Again, I’m not a medical doctor. As I already posted,
(Bolding added for emphasis.)
To elaborate:
Me: “I had cancer” (in conversational context).
Yutz: “Did they get it all?”
Yet I can schlep many gallons of milk at once if they’re in bags. Not many if they’re not. This was more of an issue when my parking spot was a long way from my apartment.
You could carry all your small items separately too and not have to deal with a heavy bag or waste a bag.
A couple from my college bookstore days:
“Where are the blue books?” Usually asked within five feet of the large blue book display, right under the big “BLUE BOOKS” sign hanging from the ceiling. (My guess was that a significant portion of the people asking had no idea what a “blue book” was, they were just told in a class that they needed to go buy one at the bookstore for an upcoming exam.)
More than once I had a college girl come up to me with an article of clothing in her hand and ask me “If you were a guy, would you wear this?” (Hint: the dumb part of the question wasn’t the “would you wear this” part.)
I spent many years working in a small coastal town that had a nice little harbor, with many moored boats. Twice, I was asked by tourists how we keep all the moored boats pointing in the same direction. The harbor master would quip, “we have a guy that takes care of that.” 
Also, in Maine, if you harvest a deer, moose or bear during hunting season, you have to take it to the closest available place to have it “tagged” by a state agent. These are usually general stores, outdoor-supply stores or the like. These places are given yellow, state issued signs designating these places as “Game Inspection Stations” and are how the state tracks the annual harvests. One local shopkeeper, known for his smart-assery, would answer the inevitable question from unsuspecting tourists, “What’s a Game Inspection Station?” with a standard answer of, “See, you bring in your Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, Parcheesi, whatever, and we’ll go through it and make sure you have all the cards, money, dice, little dog piece, top hat, car, whatever…” This was also a place where the local lobster fishermen hung out, so there was usually an audience.
If you were lucky enough to be in the store when one of these exchanges took place, you’d have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing out loud, he was very convincing and serious.
It’s an arbitrary set with some made up definition that could easily have included or not included zero, it could have excluded negative numbers, etc.
If someone had asked me to provide the definition for the following things, i would have failed at all of them:
1 - Whole numbers
2 - Natural numbers
3 - Even numbers
Again, you do not know the actual questions used and are purely guessing to come up with a excuse that is still very, very inadequate.
Binary numbers and parity are very important in Computer Science. If you don’t know that zero is even you are in deep, deep trouble.
It’s like not knowing the atomic number of hydrogen when you’re an upper division Chemistry major. Hardly obscure trivia.
Not to mention that, if you sit near the copying machine, everyone assumes you know how to fix it.
More of a comment than a question, but …
I used to have a beautiful Dalmatian that was born deaf. She was a beautiful dog, a liver spot with bright blue eyes. I trained her with hand signals (I also had a Lab that I was training for obedience competition, so it wasn’t as hard as it might have been). Tess was sharp, and was almost always focused on me. Even out and about off lead she’d keep checking in and looking for/at me and she happy a really good recall on her.
Inevitably someone would watch Tess look at me, me give her a Come Here hand signal, watch her come barreling at me, and say “Wow, she does so well for being blind!
When I was a teenager, it was “are you girl?”
I was shy, and polite, so I never answered “ask your wife.”
From my public library days: “Is the copier working?”, while looking right at a copier with an out of order sign.
Actually the stupidest question would be for them to shout, "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH???’
I had a co-worker once ask me which came first, the American Revolution or the Civil War.
I can see their point. As somebody who works near Ted, you’re a likely source for information about him. And if they’re at Ted’s desk, you’re likely to be nearby.
I’ll grant that the more accurate question would be “Do you know where Ted is and, if so, where is he?” but I think “Where’s Ted?” is an inevitable conversational shortcut.
Of course it’s obvious. With the exception of people born on February 29th whose original birth date only exists 25% of the time, no one’s birth date varies from year to year.
I know you’re joking, but my brother in law was born on Christmas Eve, and I always make a point of getting him two presents.