I have gotten a reputation at school to be smart and to know everything, so people always asked me about stupid questions or the answers to questions on tests. Once during Home Ec. I was spacing out, and a random person, whom I didn’t know, just came up to me and asked me a question I never heard. I said “Wha? BROWN!” Turns out it was what color fabric she should get, and I was right. I’m also held in awe because I can ‘read fast’ If you can read more then 2 pages in a few minutes, I guess you are a genius :rolleyes:
Jeeze, no pressure at all, eh John?
Not exactly lighthearted, but I’m hesitant to watch Jeopardy in front of people who don’t know me very well, because that look they get in their eyes when I answer questions that I have no business knowing the answer to is a little…disconcerting.
On the flip side, I recently worked with a guy who didn’t believe anything I said - after spending my life being the Trivia Queen, etc., his refusal to believe anything I said that he didn’t personally know to be true was irritating.
Once, a couple years ago, I was taking a class, and one of our assignments had to do with space design – how to best use the room in a given area, how to arrange furniture, and so on. The assignment required the use of diagrams, isometric views, and so on.
Rather than draw all that stuff, I fired up my copy of The Sims, and built the room in 3-D, furnished the room, and tested it for people movement, “flow”, and so on. I used screen captures to illustrate my report, rotated to show multiple angles, yadda yadda yadda. It really was easier than trying to draw all those freakin’ pictures. Looked more impressive, too.
Now, any moron can play The Sims. It’s a game. Requires no degree in computer engineering. My professor, however, did not know this, and assumed that I’d simply created the thing (despite The Sims logo in the corner of every picture) and I spent the rest of the semester convincing her that I was not the great computer whiz of the universe…
… I get this ALL the time. It’s equal parts irritating and flattering, it’s nice that they assume I’m smart enough to know the answer to just about anything (and I do mean everything) yet I do wonder WHY they assume I know everything and why they don’t find out for themselves instead of asking me. Yep, just as others have said… if you know the answer your some kind of wierdo brainiac that makes people feel just a wee bit intimidated and if you DON’T know the answer they either don’t believe you or are disappointed. All I can say is that I love to read, I retain alot of what I absorb and I have a good memory. I love to learn, it took me a LONG time to realize that most people do not love to learn and when you try to share knowledge with them they find it boring, resent it, feel stupid ect when all you were trying to do is share something neat.
Here is my ‘I can’t believe I pulled it off’ story. I was in Junior high biology class and my teacher divided the class into two teams for a kind of quiz game thing for extra credit. Now, I had read the biology book from cover to cover within the first week of class and we had been doing these quizes every couple of weeks before each test all year long. The team I wasn’t on went to extraordinary lengths to stump me, it was basically half the class vs. me and finally they asked a question like this “on page 218 there is a photo of a micro-organism, what is it’s latin name given in the caption beneath”. I nailed it, Vorticella. The teacher banned me from playing and just gave me the extra credit every test. Looking back on it I should have just kept my mouth shut during the games.
:snickersnicker: 
I’m part of the generation that was raised by the History Channel (“oooh, tanks” -who knew they were teaching you stuff?) and in my family and friends I’m usually the go-to guy for anything related to history or geography. I would be the same person for movie trivia, but a lot of my friends are also movie buffs in some ways greater than I amm so nichevo. I also used to read a lot when I was a kid -and would go on tyrades about “your” versus “you’re”- and so I’d get the “ur smart u no about dis” looks from my peers about spelling, grammatical questions, or what we were supposed to read in English.
Something I noticed: I’m sure fairly often guys who already have the reputation of “knowing about stuff” will sometimes use bigger/more convoluted words or phrases like “grammatical” instead of simpler ones, thus making you appear a lot smarter. In truth I said “grammatical” because I never did figure out if it went “-er” or “-ar”. Sure covers up the mistake well. Though maybe that’s part of the problem?
I get that quite frequently myself. My friends don’t mock me when I don’t know something though. If I can bullshit my way through an explaination, I might give it a shot. The funny thing is that a lot of times when I say that I don’t know, they just stop looking for the answer entirely.
Friends and family count on me to come through on anything related to current events, history, music, film, and to some degree, all-around general knowledge – and I often manage to come through. I enjoy being a trivia nerd, and I actually wish such requests would come up more often than they do.
Re. the OP’s query on succeeding in spectacular fashion… nothing in particular comes to mind. Although, I frequently anticipate the jokes on late night TV monologues and stand-up routines. I’ve also turned listening to NPR’s news programs into a sort of game, in which I try to recall a thematically related song or soundtrack bit for a story or interview.
Case in point: a recent NPR interview of a Yale forestry-degreed author of a book explicating geography as comprehensible to the layperson from the vantage point of jet travel (got that?) was immediately followed by a couple of bars of music related to the next item. But I wasn’t paying any attention to the next item, because I was lost in my sense of outrage that NPR blew the ideal opportunity to sample the 1978 Talking Heads song “The Big Country” for even just a few seconds. (I mean, really – how often do you get such a great lead-in for that one? NEVER!) So there I am: lost in my reverie, marvelling over the song reference that could’ve been, and softly singing the lyrics to myself, oblivious to what was now blaring from the radio.
It’s probably a good thing I live alone. 
:rolleyes:
“I see the shapes
I remember from maps.
I see the shores
I see the whitecaps.
A baseball diamond
Nice weather down there…”
like lokij, I find it both irritating and flattering that people expect me to know the answers. My dad was a great one for this, he once asked me out of the blue if waterlilies had stems. I thought about it for about 30 seconds and then cited my copy of Thumbelina where the goldfish chewed through the waterlily stem and sent Thumbelina downstream. I was about 7 at the time & I’m still amazed he accepted that answer. As so many have said, my sisters and I were encyclopedia readers and dictionary readers. I doubt I ever used those World Books for more than 10 school reports, but Mom certainly got her money’s worth out of those books, even if it wasn’t exactly as expected! I will still read anything, even the back of the cereal box.
I work as a subsitute teacher currently. I am amazed at how the kids expect me to know the answer. They have the book, they’ve been in this class for weeks but I walk in and they expect me to explain intransitive verbs to them. The absolute hell of it is that I can and do explain it. Where they get such faith in me, I don’t know. They will even ask me for help in other classes. (Not math, though. I’ve got them trained.)
I get embarassed, however, when I use a word or a phrase that I think is pretty mainstream and someone stops me and asks me to define it. I’ve even had teachers do that, which I hadn’t expected.
Every now and then, I will get into a discussion and I just startle myself with what comes out. Sometimes I hear myself come up with something really great as I am saying it, without ever having thought it before. Those times are really cool. 
Too bad I can’t remember it later.
Oh, God, yes…I work in IT. I do mainly mainframe stuff, unix, some NT and W2K stuff…I like what I do, and I’m really good at it. I did about a year of PC support, too. So now I’m supposed to be an expert on desktop stuff. Now, folks, I HATE desktop support. I don’t tinker, build machines, load OS after OS on my machines…I really, really HATE that stuff. So why am I everyone’s first choice for PC support when viruses, etc. hit?
Now, I am really good at trivia and obscure crap like that. But I still don’t know everything!
My immediate thought was “every game of Trivial Pursuit.” Invariably there’s answers that I surprise myself with and to which people say “how the hell do you know that?”
However when you asked for more lighthearted fare, I remembered one day in the dorms when some of the people on my floor, girls against boys, were playing “Outburst” (I think that’s the game). You’re given a topic and you call out various answers and the other team checks them off a prefabricated list as you go. Like the topic could be stringed instruments and your team would be yelling out “guitar! lute! ukelele!” and hope they’re on that list. Anyway, our team declined the topic on one side of the card which meant we had to take the topic on the other side. As the boys team turned it over, they started laughing like “oh they’ll never get this.” The topic was Beatles’ albums. The rest of my team said “oh crap” and I said don’t worry, I got this one. Timer begins, and I start spouting off the names and the boys team was absolutely stunned. I paused to think of more names when one of the boys pointed to a name on the list and said “damn look at that one.” As soon as they said that, I thought “what’s a hard name to remember?” and then exclaimed “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!!” Those were some surprised faces. 
I hope this fits your wishes, Fish.
Another two puzzlements:
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when people treat you as really scary-smart for knowing relatively basic things, like what the capital of Alberta is, or what continent Angola is on, or who my MP is, or that Quebec City is not located near the Arctic Circle, or who the premier of Nova Scotia is, or when the Spanish Civil War was, or how to do simple arithmetic in your head, or how to get to the Olympic Stadium by metro. Things that anyone who follows the news or who got an education or who’ve lived in this city any length of time should know.
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when people ask you questions that could have been answered by one second of research. This one guy on MSN messenger is constantly asking me how to get to different places by transit when there’s a simple program on their website to give him that information. Which I’ve told him about. sigh I think I’ve just about got Hamish trained to use a dictionary rather than asking me, though.
It gets even more annoying as you get older and your peers seem to get more helpless and lazier as they get older. When they do this to me I wish I could find out about anything they know about, and just pepper their asses with questions about it. Well YOU know everything about XXX , so tell me …
I was in a thrift store the other day and this short haired, bleached blond woman about my age asked me about the right electrical cord for a stereo she was buying. I told her where she could get it and the dam burst. She hauled out every piece of crap in her basket for my opinion and TOLD me, and did not ask me, TOLD me, she was going to do this. “Well since you know so much, I’m going to pick your brain about my other things!”
I was polite but drew the line when she wanted me to step on a scale for her to test it. What the hell gives people the right to think they can treat other people like their own personal information monkeys without so much as a “by your leave”.
Or when you’re young and you know the answer, people stare at you and say, “How did you know that? That was before your time.” So was the Civil War, but we all know about that.
The excuse people use to be ignorant, “Oh, well it was before my time” drives me up the wall but that’s for another time.
Me, too, on all points. We had big floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at the bottom of the steps in our basement when I was a child, and I can remember sitting on the bottom step, just flipping through the World Books and reading random pages. They were so interesting! Didn’t everyone read the encyclopedias?
And yes, every so often I startle myself with what I know. I stop and think, “How do I know that?”
When someone actually asks, “How do you know that?” I usually give the answer everyone else here gives: “I read a lot.”
But I can’t code worth a damn…
:smack:
“Do you know how I know all these things? I get them out of books!”
When I was a kid the Disney Channel used to run little education cartoons hosted by Jiminy Cricket, and that’s what he used to say. I’ve quoted the line myself a few times, but no one’s ever gotten it. Ah well.
It’s true, though. I’ve gotten the ol’ amazed “How do you know that?” plenty of times, and it’s usually because I read it in a book (or online, these days). I’ll never understand why more people don’t just look things up in books. When I was a kid, my younger sisters were always asking me questions about stuff and having me look up the answer for them if I didn’t know offhand. By the time I was in my mid-teens it occurred to me that they were old enough to look things up themselves, and told them so. “But it’s so hard to find the right part!” Like it’s any easier for me! (Although I guess it was easier for them if I did it.) But everyone in the world can’t have the excuse of having grown up with an older sibling who was always reading the encyclopedia/dictionary anyway.
Of course, I haven’t limited myself to just learning things from reference books. No, you can pick things up from even quite lowbrow fare, and there have been a few times when I’ve been proud to know some obscure fact but less proud of where I got the information from!
For instance, I have twice in my life been asked what “xanthous” means. This isn’t a word that comes up in ordinary conversation or reading. On both occasions this was by people who were trying to find words in the dictionary that they didn’t think others would know. On both occasions all were amazed that I could provide the proper definition from memory. I know the SDMB membership well enough to know that many of you not only know that the word means “yellow”, but know for exactly the same reason I do. My awesome mentals powers also indicate to me that at this very moment you are feeling a little embarassed about your geeky adolescent reading habits, aren’t you?
One of my cousin’s wives thinks I am a font of botanical knowledge just because I know the name of common plants that grow in the southern US. Hell, I’m talking about stuff that grows all over the place down here. I get emails with pictures of plants from her all the time with the question “What is this?” If I don’t know I look in my big plant book. It’s a “coffee table” book that I was given when I graduated from college. (Oh Wow! Just what every 21 year old who has just graduatede from college needs! :D)
At work, people think I am a walking font of Georgia gographical knowledge. I’m always being asked weird stuff like in what county is such and such town located. Georgia has 159 freakin’ counties (waaaaay too many). I can answer questions because (gasp!) I can look it up on the handy dandy map of the state of Georgia that I happen to have. I found this great store of knowledge that is said map for free at the library. I am a genius!
Plus, there is that “certain message board” I frequent where there seems to be a whole lot of smart folks who know all kinds of stuff about stuff. Place claims it’s fighting ignernce. Any of y’all know which board I’m talking about? 
I get this at work all the time. “Well, you know…” Just because I know a lot, they think I know everything.
The one that comes to mind is when the Big Boss wanted to do a mailing and said to little old white atheist me “You know what the Black churches are.” I can’t begin to tell you what is wrong with that statement.
My mom always used to tell my brother and I, you’ve got the brains, he’s got the brawn. Don’t tell your kids that, please.
Of course my wife got the same thing, kinda. She got the looks, her sister got the smarts. Now my wife is the one with the Masters and her sister is a waste of flesh.
People don’t realize how damaging these things can be to kids.
One instance stands out just because it was so incomprehensible to the other party that I could not be of any help.
It’s 1985. My (idiot) brother-in-law is living with me and my (then) wife.
His girlfriend (equally an idiot) shows up at our doorstep, unnanounced, at a very late hour. She needs to see Jeffrey.
He comes out of his bedroom and she greets him by spitting out a story about how she was leaving the store over there and she ran over one of those concrete barriers in the parking lot and why do they even put those things there anyway so she was going home and she heard her car making a funny sound underneath and what on earth could that be so she came over here wanting to know if Jeff could help.
(yes, it sounded about like that)
Well, Jeff has ZERO mechanical ability. And while I’m doubtful that I’ll be able to be much help (I can do regular maintenance on a vehicle; oil change, tune up, etc) I’ll go out and take a quick look-see.
So, out to the curb I go, in the rain, with flashlight in hand. Get on my hands and knees and peek under the car. I see a trickle of red running from under her car and into the gutter. She’s bashed up her transmission and the fluid’s running out. I doubt she’ll be able to even limp the car home.
I come back inside and tell her that I think her best bet is to call a tow-truck.
She replies “Can’t YOU fix it?”
I told her I have no idea how to fix a transmission. Moreover, I don’t have the tools or parts to do so. It’s late at night. No place to get parts, etc.
“But, can’t you FIX it?!”
I repeated “No, I can’t.”
She’s getting frustrated “But you’re a GUY! Can’t you just FIX it?!”
I looked her right in the eye, stepped very close to her and took a deep breath.
"NO! I shouted. Then I turned on my heel and left the room.
From the other room, I could hear her yelling at Jeffrey to “DO SOMETHING!”
They broke up that night. The next morning, the car was gone from in front of my house.
Have NO idea what happened to her or the car.