I did not know that.
The poster with the email friend with the hotmail and yahoo accounts reminds me of the many people who have asked me to call them from work on my “800 line.” Because it’s a free call. You know, because it’s free when they call me.
The confusion here, I think, is because of WATTS lines. I don’t exactly know what they were (or are) but it seems like they were, back in the olden days, flat-fee business lines which you could call in or out of as much as you wished during a specific time period. People continue to think that 800 lines don’t cost businesses anything, which of course isn’t true.
Yes, but you would have had the intellectual humility to accept the fact once you were told by an authoritative source. Therein the difference between you and the non-Doper. 
Or I would agree to disagree until I got off my horse and googled it.
No matter how pampered someone’s life is, I refuse to believe they’ve never once heard the term, “screw in a lightbulb.” Or seen it done in a movie or television show. Or described in a novel or short story.
We’re talking about changing a lightbulb, not docking with the International Space Station. Anyone could figure it out inside of two minutes if they applied themselves.
I’ve changed plenty of lightbulbs in my life, and I don’t know how long it takes them to cool down. I’ve never tried timing them before. I don’t think this is a relevant excuse.
I think you’re being far too forgiving to this person. Short of being raised in a country that doesn’t have electricty, there’s absolutely no excuse for being an adult and not knowing how to change an lightbulb.
This goes back a long time. My aunt who never had any formal education had the following gems for comments:
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When told that man had succesfully landed on the moon, she refused to believe it. Her argument - "The moon keeps changing size and disappearing. The astronauts would fall off!
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Her daughter was showing her a globe and telling her that this is what our earth looked like and then pointed to the country where they lived. My aunt retorts- “Come now, we live “inside” this earth. Wouldn’t we “fall off” if we lived oustside as you suggest!”
WATS lines (note the spelling of the acronym, which stands for Wide Area Telephone Service) are briefly described here. Toll-free numbers are also known as inward WATS lines – of course, as you know, the business pays for them even though customers are not charged.
I just did a little informal survey and I am apparently the only person around here who just learned today that pineapples don’t grow on fucking trees. Damn.
I’m 22, from the middle class, and have been living on my own for the last four years. I STILL have trouble changing light bulbs, but that’s just because that stupid fishbowl thing with the screws adds another layer of crap to figure out and screw around with. So yeah, depending on the setup for the lightbulb in question, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that someone who has had far less experience messing with the things than I did by the time I was 20 to have to ask for help.
Hmmm…I had no idea that my comment about not knowing how to screw in a light-bulb would become such an issue.
Couple of things to help everyone understand the situation:
- It was in an office, but it was a regular 60-watt bulb (the “bulb” shaped ones that go in almost every houselamp).
- The intern in question grew up in Hawaii but spent 4 years living in New York City while in college and, so far, 2 and a half years in Bloomington.
- It’s a light-bulb. It’s not changing the oil in your car. It’s not wiring for a ceiling fan. It’s a light-bulb. If you can use a laptop (as is required at our law school), you can use a light bulb.
It’s possible, though, that I’m just viewing this through my own prejudices and can’t fathom that other people had different, more pampered upbringings. Maybe I just expect too much from people. I know that people in NJ and Oregon don’t pump their gas, but I would assume they could figure it out themselves just by seeing it done so many times. I thought the same sort of thing would apply to light bulbs. I dunno.
Who knows? I was just throwing my 2 bits in cause they were making noise jangling in my pocket. I just had a visualization in my head of a light bulb with little arrows on it, denoting which way to turn to insert and remove it. You think anyone would buy it?
It’s okay; my husband also thinks they grow on trees.
As someone who spent the first 15 years of her life in NJ and then moved to OH, I can tell you that I did, indeed, learn how to pump gas. I had to have someone show me how to do it the first time I tried, though.
And I’m not particularly stupid, as some other things I’ve managed to do would show.
Things like pumping gas, changing lightbulbs, and using screwdrivers are learned skills. Most of us learn them early, but some of us don’t. Those of us who didn’t learn them early on in life aren’t necessarily stupid. (Yes, those of us who have made efforts to learn these skills but just haven’t picked them up after several attempts are idiots. But people who haven’t had any need to learn how to do little things most of us think of as routine aren’t necessarily all that dumb.)
I’ve been to places where most people didn’t know how to do many of the following things:
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Use screws to build anything or disassemble anything. In fact, several people who I showed a screw to were amazed that such a thing existed. But, really, that’s not so odd, when you think about it. It took Archemides to invent the screw, so the concept can’t be all that intuitive.
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Drink from bottles.
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Use a spray pump.
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Make appropriate amounts of eye contact with officials when making a request.
On the other hand, these people considered me a total moron for not being able to do any of the following things:
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Subdue and kill a catfish, once it was on board the canoe.
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Look at the mineral clay ground and tell when my foot would sink in deeply and when it wouldn’t.
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Keep my balance on wet mineral clay, some of which acted like quicksand, and some of which didn’t.
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Know, by looking at the above-ground parts of manioc plants, when the manioc roots were ready for harvest.
Really, after that experience, I don’t judge anyone’s lack of skill in just about anything. You never know what that person’s background is, or what experiences they’ve had or haven’t had.
My experience in getting to know my boyfriend, and becoming familiar with his background, convinced me further that what each person considers common knowledge often isn’t all that common. My boyfriend’s a bright guy. He speaks 5 languages, managed to get his way through grad school and a first postdoc and is well on his way to making a name for himself in his field. But he didn’t know how to put a screw into a wall until he met me. And it took him a few tries at it before he got it down.
Lots of devices that we think of as easy to use are often non-intuitive. Analog clocks, for example, aren’t designed for ease of use. For many of examples of non-stupid people having problems in learning to use common tools, utensils, etc., check out Donald Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things.
The Psychology of Everyday Things also has pretty good explanations for why some common objects are hard to use, even though some people have learned how to use them with little to no difficulty.
In Britain and much of the Middle East (the only places outside the US that I’ve had to change lightbulbs in) a “push-then-twist” locking-type mechanism is used, rather than the American screw-in style.
You know, there are two tabs on the bulb and you push them into two slots, then twist slightly, and then stop pushing and the bulb pushes the tabs back out into a “locking” slot.
I would show you a diagram of this, but Googling “light bulbs + foreign” just gets lots of medical texts about people with light bulbs lodged in the rectum.
All that said, I managed to figure out how to change an American light bulb in about eight seconds the first time I had to do so.
Case 1: BE, my best friend since K1. In Spain, most pools are public or semipublic spaces, rather than private. She was preparing to take the exam for her driver’s license. She’s always been one of those people who mutter when they study, so when she was doing the practice tests she’d read the question loud enough for myself and her brother (neither of whom was preparing for the license nor had one) to hear; then she’d read the possible answers; then she’d read them again; then she’d frown and hum and haw; then she’d start reading them again, at which point her brother K and myself would say “the answer is c, damnit, can’t you study in silence!”
Finally she gave us extra test sheets to fill. She’s take all to the teacher and have him grade them, ok? But we had to shut. Up. And let her study. OK. So, she went on as usual and instead of yelling we just rolled our eyes to infinity and filled in our test sheets.
So, she takes them to the teacher. The teacher grades them and says “I have bad news and very bad news, which do you prefer first?”
BE: “Uuuuh… the regular bad.”
T: “You would have flunked.” (gives her her sheet back, with the wrong answers marked)
BE: “And the very bad.”
T: “They would have passed. Perfect scores for both.” (hands her our sheets)
Now, given that K was one year younger, do you really think that he’d seen more traffic signs than BE? The reason why she didn’t recognize the “cows crossing” sign is not that she hadn’t seen one (there’s one on the way from the town where we lived to where her grandparents live, and another on the way back, so she’d see one about 100 times/year): it’s that she traveled through life with half her brain off!
Case 2:
My college’s “pass of the equator trip” was to Greece. Quite a few of my classmates were from rich families. Family businesses represented included internationally-recognized wineries, soaps, perfumes and clinics. About 14 of us were in a restaurant in Athens where you could see the whole kitchen from the lunchroom. Suddenly, one of the other girls starts freaking out “oh! OGH! Oh that’s GROSS!”
Us: “What happens, what’s wrong?”
Girl#1: “He’s washing lettuce with his hands!”
Girl#2, who sat with her back to the kitchen: “EW, gross!”
Us: “You mean that guy? That’s all he does, wash lettuce, what’s he supposed to use, his navel?” and finally “lemme guess: you two think that toilet paper refills itself!”
Girls: “ehm… what, it… doesn’t?”
They were completely serious. They also lived in 5000sqft (500m2) duplex flats, with live-in cook, maiden and chauffeur, a bedroom for each family member and a whole separate section (including separate entrance and lift) for “the service”. Theirs were the kind of families where the father has 2 cars (regular and new, or regular and hunting) and 1 big bike, the mother another, each child gets a brand-new car for his/hers 18th Bday (that’s the driving age) and each live-in member of the service has his/her own car (inherited from the family).
Funny thing is, the people from the richest families, unlike those two, knew where the toilet paper spares was in their houses (yes, plural: a family had one in Barcelona, one in Madrid, one in Brussels, one in Andalusia, one at the beach, one in Andorra…)
See, I never even thought about how pineapples grew until I saw the plants myself in Tanzania. My friends all pleaded ignorance as to their origins as well. But they wouldn’t have insisted that they grew on trees - the difference between ignorance and stupidity is when ignorance becomes wilful and adamant, it is stupidity. I think.
Search on Google images for bayonet light bulb or use this [link](http://images.google.com/images?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=bayonet%20light%20bulb&sa=N&tab=wi lodged in the rectum.)
Don’t feel bad. I thought they grew on trees too. In fact, I used to draw them as a kid…growing on palm trees, next to the coconuts.
points and laughs
Mind you, there, but for the grace of spending a couple of childhood years in Singapore, go I.