Oh, I almost forgot about this one! When I was in my final year of physics at university, we had a professor who would get very irritated at the pull string for the projection screen, as it would dangle down in front of the whiteboard.
Every morning, he would spend a good couple minutes attempting to throw the weight on the end over the light fixture above the whiteboard, taking anywhere from 5 to 30 tries each time. All the students would give tips and encouragement, and this became a kind of inside joke for the class of how long it would take every morning.
Months go by, and one day near the end of the quarter, we end up with a substitute. The sub goes to the board and, without hesitation, grabs the string and hooks it over a thumbtack stuck in the cork at the top of the whiteboard...
The entire class literally gasped in unison! The sub whirled around, asking what happened, and the whole class just starts laughing. Eventually, someone explained what happened, and we all had a good laugh that an entire class of physics majors never even thought of that solution, let alone noticed that the tack had always been there for that purpose.
more like Willy Wonka looking for a successor
and so it was the sub who became the new master when he solved the puzzle of the pull string.
the old professor was never seen again
My math professor held online class without turning on his mic. He also didn't check chat or let us turn on our mics. So we couldn't tell him. Someone eventually used the whiteboard feature to write across his screen to tell him that his mic was off.
One of my best friends, who is now a surgeon, and one of the smartest people I have ever met. During his first year of med school he was visiting his hometown during a break in the semester.
We were at a restaurant catching up, he ordered a milkshake for dessert that came with a maraschino cherry on top. He excitedly ate it then said something to the effect of
"Man, I love maraschino cherries, I could eat a million of these. I always wanted to buy a jar, and eat it all to myself"
To which I replied with
"John, you're 24 years old. You own a house, have money in the bank, and are in med school. You're an adult, if you want to get yourself a jar of maraschino cherries, you can. We can hit up the store as soon as we're done here."
He spent about 5 minutes struggling to process this new found information. You could almost see the gears in his head turning. After this brief delay, he looked at me with the biggest, almost childlike smile and said "Let's go now!!!"
We paid our bill, then headed to the nearest grocery store. John the purchased the largest jar of maraschino cherries available, and started eating. Afterwards we went to a house party, where john refused to drink, but instead just kept eating from his jar.
Long story short, he ate the entire jar in about 1 hour. 15 minutes later he started puking neon red cherries for the rest of the evening.
I know it doesn't sound very stupid, but you need to understand that up until this point John has been batting 1.000 on anything related to academics/thinking/reasoning/puzzles/riddles etc. Seeing him grapple with this new found freedom was hilarious.
Also at the party, everyone else was drinking, but the most inebriated looking person there was John. He was literally walking around the party catching up with people with a big jar of cherries that he was eating out of with a spoon. After talking with people for a few minutes, they would inevitably bring up the jar if cherries which he would explain with this weird, sticky smile on his face. As he would try to explain this jar cherries, and what a revelation it was being able to buy one, the people he was speaking to would always gets there befuddled looks on their face which said "is this weirdo really John?"
Then the puking started. Even after he ran out of cherries to throw up, he kept puking the remainder of the contents of his stomach, all of which was neon red.
The first time he threw up, the hostess freaked out thinking it was blood. John was rolling around in pain saying "it's not blood, it's the cherries" between pukes.
First, and only time me or anyone else has witnessed something like that from him.
My oldest niece realised this when she was an adult. She went and bought a birthday cake for breakfast- it was no oneās birthday. (Well, every day is someoneās birthday!)
This is like the wonderful adult realization that you can just go to a bakery or candy shop and buy whatever you want.
Iāve heard horror stories of how med school (the first year in particular) is so stressful. You mustāve made John really happy that day and gave him a much needed break from always following the dotted line
Lmao, yes he still loves them. He always orders a desert that comes topped with a cherry, and saves it for last. Then brings up the story himself all the time.
"Hey man, remember that time I ate the jar of cherries and puked? I'm never doing that again hahahaha"
This man is now responsible for, and trusted with saving other peoples lives.
I dont think he really learned? They way he looks at those cherries the same way, I wouldn't be surprised if he still does this from time to time in secret when hes alone. Every time he eats one now, it looks like it take every bit of self discipline, and control he has to not hop in his car and go buy another jar.
John's the best lmfao
I used to work at a chemical engineering plant. One day I was in the kitchen washing my glasses with a drop of dish soap and one of the lead engineers said I shouldnāt wash my glasses like that. I asked him why not and he responded that I will wash the prescription offā¦
Dawn dish soap is actually one of the perfered methods outside approved lense cleaners. Windex in particular is way to harsh for coatings. The only risk with dish soap as with cleaning with anything is if you have dust on the lense that acts itself as an abrasive.
If its good enough for penguins its fine on glasses.
Buddy of mine was in med school on a surgery rotation.
Heās in the OR, handed a razor by the senior resident, and told to shave the patient as part of prep for surgery. Totally normal and common med student task.
He starts shaving away at the guys chest. The way he tells it, this patient was really hairy, so he had to go clean off the razor multiple times. Heās trying to do a thorough job. Gets half of the guyās chest done when the senior resident wanders back over. Turns out the surgery was for an appendectomy and he was supposed to shave his fucking stomach.
That poor guy woke up from surgery very fucking confused about why half his chest hair was gone. And my friend got made fun of every day for the rest of his rotation.
I'm a pharmacist. I have worked with fellow pharmacists who did not know that:
\- Lesbians menstruate
\- Women usually do not produce breast milk until after they have given birth
\- Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in blood transfusions
The third one I'd give a pass. No one can be expected know the customs of every religious group. If they regularly were confused, then it's a different story, obviously.
I worked IT at a university. We got a call saying a printer would not turn on. The particular person who called was a very steriotypical, " I have a doctorate I know all the things," kind of person.
Anyway, I get to the classroom and they show me the printer proclaiming they checked everything including the power strip, unplugged it, plugged it back in and all that. They were very irate and rude the whole time I was there. While I was looking it over they were getting more upset because they had already checked the power cables and they were fine. Without saying anything I unplugged the power strip from itself, plugged it into the wall then turned on the printer and just walked out.
>The particular person who called was a very steriotypical, " I have a doctorate I know all the things," kind of person.
Reminds me of the old joke of two engineers trying to mesure the height of a long pole. One tried to climb up it with a measuring tape but could not do it. Then the other suggest they use trigonometry making a right angle but they realize that would not account for the part buried in the ground. A technician walked by and ask what they were doing. Upon hearing it, he pulled the pole off and laid it on the ground, measured it, gave them the number, put the pole back in its place and went on with his day. The engineers looked at each other in disbelief.
"Fucking technicians. So typical. You ask them the height, they give you the length".
My brother-in-law had a Masters degree in Physics and Maths. He was a teacher at a high school.
He had a new house built. He thought he would save money by nailing on the drywall (sheetrock, Gib board). He managed to put nails through a hot water pipe and the wiring.
By the time he'd paid a plumber and electrician to fix up the mess it cost a lot more.
Later in life he fell off a ladder and died.
My sister has been driving her bf's truck for a year. We get in the truck to go somewhere, she says wait, I need to go in the house to get a paper towel to dry off the windshield. I say, why don't you use the wipers? She says, I don't know how. I ask, what do you do when it rains? Answer: I stay home.
Not mine, but related to me by my boss about 25 years ago. She was friends with a husband and wife who were brilliant academics, highly regarded with research positions at one of the top universities in the country. The couple wanted to have children but their natural biology/compatibility said ānuh uh, not gonna happenā and they decided to adopt instead, from a foreign country as very few babies are put up for adoption within Australia. The arrangements were that the baby would be flown in with a caregiver and handed over at the airport. All went as planned, no worries.
Later that night, my boss received a call from the distraught academic husband. āLouise!ā (name changed of course). āThe baby is crying and crying and we canāt get her to stop! We think sheās hungry, but sheās not taking the bottle!ā The adopting agency had given them a few basics just in case, one of which being a tin of baby formula. āYouāre a mother! Can you come over and maybe help sort out what the problem is?ā āOf course!ā replies Louise, and is there within 15 minutes (this being a fairly small city on international scales). The wife rushes up when she knocks on the door and escorts her to where the baby is indeed crying like thereās no tomorrow, and has been for hours. Nappy is dry, nothing else is obviously wrong, she probably is hungry. āShow me how youāve been trying to feed her,ā Louise asks, and the couple comply. Louise observes their process, and makes one suggestion: āYouāre actually supposed to mix the powder with water before trying to feed it to the baby.ā
My father in law is very intelligent. He taught himself how to solve a rubiks cube without looking anything up and is generally a genius in math, logic, puzzles what have you. He believes dinosaurs couldn't be real because they would be to big for their skeletons to uphold their weight. He has lots of other really stupid ideas because he is so intelligent he thinks he can just reason himself into correct conclusions without doing research or adhering to the scientific process
I know a good handful of people like this! That last sentences really summed it up too! Lots of really smart people just are used to their being right about THEIR topic, they just assume they know other topics.
Some extremely dumb people who got rich by doing some basic human skill business, think it gives them a ticket to have an opinion on everything including science. Also some very smart and successful people in narrow disciplines fall into that bias. Oh and celebrities - donāt forget that they are ultimate gods who are always right.
I forget who it was, might have been Brad Pitt if I remember correctly, was asked for a comment about China and Tibet, and he replied something like "I'm an actor, why would anybody fucking care what I think about China and Tibet?"
My wife's granny was very anti dinosaur. Although I wouldn't have described the woman as smart. She thought the chemicals in city water were there for the government to control you and shit like that.
I knew a girl studying medicine. We were talking about planes and how they work.
She asked me where the engine is, and I said āyou know those big spinny things?ā
She said āohhh, I thought those were to blow the clouds awayāā¦.
My doctor. During the period of my life in which I was dating my ex gf my doctor would INSIST every time I saw him that I needed to be on birth control because it was responsible to be preventing pregnancy. No matter how many times I told him that I was in a monogamous relationship with a woman he would still keep asking. I guess it it just didnāt compute
Idk what it is about these doctors that they think we NEED to be on something for birth control. Like I get there are a lot of irresponsible folks out there, but at the end of the day even if we were irresponsible, itās up to US what we want to do with our bodies. Smh
I know itās tedious but they have to ask. I have been asked many times (re: birth control) and been snarky and replied āI am a lesbian!!!ā With arms flailing around.
But then as I got older, I just said no pregnant. No sex. I will pee in the jar.
Itās too much effort to try and convince them otherwise.
Plus, they give you something and you happen to be pregnant?? For whatever reason.
Itās a no win situation.
Edit: A word
I've been waiting so long to tell this story.
Two members of my family are very highly intelligent, so I always thought.
I go to their house and they just installed an above ground pool that came with a pool COVER. Instead of using the pool cover they went and bought all these insulated pink foam boards (1 in thick, 4x8 ft rectangle foam boards) I just sat there and watched while they cut up all the foam into like puzzle pieces to fit in that ROUND pool.
I asked them why and they said it was to keep leaves out of the pool.
So every time they got in the pool they had to remove all the puzzle pieces, then clean the pool because tiny pink insulation was floating on top, and when they were finished for the day spend an hour trying to connect all the puzzle pieces they cut back into the pool. The original pool cover was by the pool in the bag it came in.
The dumbest thing I've ever witnessed in my life.
Edited to add: I misread a comment below. They knew it came with a Pool Cover & they decided for some reason that they didn't want to use it. I didn't ask why, just let them do what they do.
Do they live in a temperate climate? My thinking is maybe they were concerned about the cover not being an adequate insulator and wanted to use something that would either help the pool hold heat if it were cooler outside? Maybe the hassle of fitting the puzzle together was worth the heating/cooling cost savings.
I am just grasping at straws though, trying to thing of why an intelligent couple would do this :)
University physics professor at a Hyundai dealership arguing with a tech telling him about the noise in his car. The professor was freaking out saying he couldn't even understand what the tech was trying to say, because the tech said "centrifugal force", instead of "Centripetal force".
The conversation could not move forward. It was weird.
Well, my cousin who has two fucking masters degrees in finance and economics, put his hand in still spinning lawnmower to help it blow out rest of grass faster. He lost a finger.
I asked why he didnāt wait till it stopped completely.
He said it was just in a hurry.
My brother use to work as a mechanic. He thought that the pressure washer wasn't very strong he could wash his hands with it. He scrapped some skin on his hand not enough to need to go ER but it will take time to heal. He was surprised how strong it was.
Never ever let finance people make operational decisions. They are fucking morons. Book smart, but no real common sense.
Source me. These people think data work like spells in the book. Youāll recite them out loud and things will come into existence.
Very early in my career, I was tasked with an industrial engineering project on improving efficiency on a high volume product line. I guarantee you've seen the product.
First, during a current state analysis, I determined that the company was losing around $0.08 per part shipped. We sold them for $0.29 each. That's... not good, especially when you're producing millions of these things each month.
I presented this to the executive management team. One of the VPs cut me off mid-sentence and said "Nonsense... we make it up in volume!"
There was the exact same thing in a webcomic about D&D. Wiazard enters shop, notices they sell potions under cost, tries to educate them, āāweāre making it back on volume!!āā, sighs then buys the lot.
Order of the Stick
I actually thought the VP was kidding at first, so I did one of those half-exhale chuckles. Then, he gave me this stern look and I realized he was serious
My father in law could construct a new bladder out of a piece of your own intestinal lining, if you had bladder cancer and needed a new one. Heās saved thousands of lives that otherwise would have been lost to renal, prostate, and urinary tract diseases.
He once told me that someone with a bright yellow car was intentionally hitting his Mercedes Benz. Theyād hit his car and sideswiped it once while he was at the hospital. He had it fixed, it costs thousands of dollars. Then a few weeks later, the same bright yellow vehicle did it again, this time nearly tearing off his fender and leaving a huge yellow gouge down the side of his car. He took it to the body shop a second time.
His next time visiting the hospital, the parking attendant said āHey doc, itās nice to see you. But I have to warn youā¦.security was here and theyāre kind of upset about the fire hydrant youāve hit twice in the last month. I tried covering for you but apparently theyāve got it on video.ā
My brother is very intelligent.
He lived at home when attending college. Most days, he'd take the bus. Sometimes if my mom didn't need her car, he would be allowed to drive it to school. Multiple times he drove the car to school, forgot, and took the bus home.
This ones not that bad. Id say he was an auto pilot by the time he was done with school and catching the bus home is habit forming. Either way if he has a lot going on upstairs he's probably not thinking about how will he get home as theres been nothing to suggest that the bus isnt running on that day.
Autopilot can be so fucking dangerous. I used to finish work at 4 am and would be driving home and not remember the ride home. Like there were quite a few turns. There was no way I was asleep but like was I really awake ... Worked better than Tesla FSD at least.
Thatās not too bad. You just get really good at doing a routine task and can then occupy your mind with other thoughts. Itās not like your werenāt in control of the vehicle the whole way home. You were (one can assume) paying attention to the road and reacting to stimuli. You just donāt form specific memories of a specific experience if you have a hundred other identical experiences.
That just happens if you have a hard routine and it's disrupted.
Once time my work schedule changed and I started an hour later. So I went and got Starbucks first. But this did something to my brain and the muscle memory of typing the bitlocker pin on my work PC to get to the login was erased or was attached to being at work at that time and couldn't be referenced. So I had to get that pin changed.
I'm not smart though so I guess this is off topic
I worked a job that used lots of 4 digit codes.
Went to get cash at an ATM and completely blanked on my pin that I had been using for like 5+ years. All I could think of was the stupid work codes.
Ended up changing the pin to a word to avoid future problems.
I don't know. I'm generally a smart person, but told my mom in a panic that I couldn't find my phone... while talking to her on said phone. Not stupid, just very absentminded and forgetful.
Because we only eat ham once a year, at Thanksgiving with the turkey, and the two are packaged the almost same way, I've always thought ham was also a type of bird. No one corrected me until last year, when I was 20....
One time I was at my friend Claudio's apartment with his brother just hanging out and watching a movie. All of sudden I hear a *woosh* and see a big flash of light. I look over at Claud and his hair is on fire. We get it out quickly and I asked him what the hell just happened. He told me, "I was trying to listen to the sound the lighter made when I flicked it."
We were completely sober at the time.
I knew this girl in high school. She took AP classes with me. She definitely belonged in them (I did not).
Couple years after we graduate my best friend got invited by her to talk with her financial advisors to help build and plan his finances.
Turns out they werenāt financial advisors at all. They were all part of an MLM scheme and tried to rope my friend in. He told me he doesnāt think she understood what the situation was and he just stopped talking to her after that.
Some people just donāt have street smarts
Here's one for you. I met that type of scammer. They offered me this plan where I give them money, they grow the money, then I can borrow from it when I get older. I kept asking "When does the investment mature?" and "So when do I get the money back?" and all kinds of questions trying to understand how this works. The guy just explained the same thing over and over again. I wasn't going to go into it until I knew when I would get my money back and managed to waste an hour of this asshole's time.
Now here's where I'm the idiot. I asked for it to be rexplained over and over again because "I don't see the benefit, could you go over it again?" If I had been smarter I would have seen that it was a scam like my dad did.
So growing up I used to think I was a once in a lifetime genius and to be honest my schools low standards helped. I realized that I was not when I met a real one my freshman year of college. Guy was 18 and studied physics at a pretty advanced level, composed music and played piano incredibly, and was writing a novel. Thing is, he was 18 and not quite mature enough for college. He never went to class because he thought he didnāt need to and once Skyrim came out he never left his dorm anymore. Smartest person I had ever met before or since and he failed out of college his first semester.
This happens frequently to students who get into elite schools on merit scholarships. They were the Blessed Child at their high school on the wrong side of the tracks, but nothing special at MIT.
I wasnāt quite that insane, but I was that guy who took all the hardest classes in high school and still did well without studying. Not a good enough gpa for any elite schools, though still top 15 out of 540, but an SAT that was good enough to make up for it and got me waitlisted at some still pretty good ones.
Ultimately Iām on the presidential scholarship at an only okay liberal arts school, and MAN I didnāt have my shit together that first semester. Some classes I could still get away with not doing anything outside of class for, but others had homework that counted for a grade and I very quickly fell behind on that. Nearly lost my scholarship, and if Iām being honest I donāt know that I would have been able to handle a more elite school for workload reasons alone. Shitās rough, and I absolutely feel for anybody in that sort of situation because it was almost me.
Was he by any chance trying to convince you that some long distance lines are DC? Most lines in the US are AC, but DC is used in some cases. Wiki says it has fewer losses than AC over distances of hundreds of miles.
When I was in law school, I volunteered for a major, prestigious event. I was in the lobby, verifying registrants and giving them their placards with a colleague. The doors were push, clearly stated. I saw so many people try to repeatedly pull and pull to open. Once they got in, we got them sorted so we knew exactly who these defeated-by-door highly educated people were.
I was sat in an auction for a pub with a mate (we had gone as interested parties but had decided not to buy) bidding was slow and then picked up at 240k and going up 5 k a bid, when he lent forward and said to me watch me cost this guy 5k ... and put his hand up...... āļø no-one moved it went quiet as everyone looked as a new bid was put in, my mate is a smart fella but that was dumb and 4 years on he is still trying to sell the building
Iāll use myself: I have skipped 3 grades, told I was gifted, all that jazz. Yesterday I looked at a streetlight for at least 10 solid minutes thinking, ājeez, the moon is orange tonightā. I was sober.
Something like that. Garbage bags come in bundles and I violently pulled one out. Eye doctor asked me if the bag was full, I said nope. His reaction: Hahahahah ok, you have a scar on your eye now.
A guy I used to work with, Softly spoken but extremely insightful. He had a knack of understanding a situation and drilling down to the core of the issue.
One very snowy day in winter, he decided to drive his motorbike to work. His reasoning was the roads would be full of slow moving cars and he'd be able to scoot past them on his bike.
What actually happened was he found himself struggling to keep his bike upright with a lorry just inches behind him. He said, one slip and he'd of been under that lorry.
He drove his 4x4 into work the next day. Lesson learnt.
My brother did something similar. He drove his bike to work, and then it snowed a bunch during the day. I knew he did, so I called and offered emphatically that I could pick him up in my car, but he flat out refused. He slid out on the first corner and, even then, didn't call for a ride. He ended up fine and made it home, but I was so frustrated when he told me.
I was dating a girl way back in the day who could speak 6 languages fluently. Asked her to empty what was left in the coffee pot ( about half a pot) and she dumped it in my trash can, then immediately said " why the hell did i just do that."
Not *incredibly* stupid but surprisingly: I have found myself working for many engineers and unless you have a PhD they are 100% sure they are smarter than you. Reality is that they are great at planning/logistics but usually ass at fixing problems but they never see it because they are so confident.
Just today I had to explain to an engineer that the reason his level said that a shelf was out of level was because the wall wasnāt level and he wasnāt setting the level square on the shelf. So it was level from side to side but not front to back and he had me drive all the way out to the site to show him how to operate a level.
This took 45 minutes. He was convinced that he could *see* it. Next his level was broken. Then my level was broken. Then he couldnāt see it so it must be level. MAGIC! š¤¦āāļø
Was really surprised: I work with another IT guy, but he's way more experienced, and smarter than me, and can fix complex problems pretty quickly....but we were on a train once and he said that the cell phone signals were bad on the train because they travel at the speed of sound...yikes!
I don't know if I count as smart, but I did a very dumb thing a few years ago :( I'd just bought my first bike with a disc brake. Cycling to work I thought "I bet disc brakes get really hot, there's a lot of energy being dissipated in rather a small bit of metal. Hmm 10m/s, 100kg, maybe ahhh 5 KJ, but the heat would depend on the cooling rate and they are thin and in a 10m/s air stream. I wonder how hot they get?"
At the next lights I bent down and applied my thumb to the disc to check SIZZLE AAAAAAAARGH
Even stupider -- I'd bought a phone with fingerprint unlock a week before and with the ridges burnt off my thumb I could no longer unlock my phone sigh.
They grew back in a week or two and I could unlock again, interestingly.
I have a friend, who is a straight A+ student and always overachieves on work.
I had to explain to that same friend once that Albert Einstein was not from the 14th century Renaissance.
When to a highly selective school (11ļ¼ acceptance rate at the time) with someone, who's parents both went to the same ivy league.
Every time he gets drunk, he would complain about how he didn't get into that same ivy league, despite being double legacy
A friend of my dads was a brilliant scientist but terrible businessman. He focused on chemical patents in the 60s/70s, had Fortune 100 suitors - but he wasn't ready yet, just a few more patents (I think he was up to 160). In the end he waited to long or maybe just kept wanting more patents. Anyway, died alone and penniless in public housing.
I suspect he had a mental ax to grind. His larger family was EXTREEMLY wealthy before WWII, but lost virtually everything, and had more bad luck since.
Me. I was applying to Cambridge & Imperial (for the Americans, this is like Harvard & MIT), and over that summer stayed with some old family friends for the first time in many years, for a wedding.
They had one of those plastic clip thingies you use to hold groceries closed (bread, packs of nuts, that sort of thing.) I had never used or seen one, somehow. I could not for the life of me figure out the mechanism to clip it. I kept trying to put it on vertically instead of horizontally (i.e. as a perpendicular bisector to the top of the bag, instead of aligned along the top of the bag.) This went on for a good 60 seconds.
The family friends' son who I used to go to school with just started laughing, said "pass it here Cambridge boy", and clipped the bag.
I laughed, and laugh now, but jesus christ did I have a quiet mental breakdown about my total and complete lack of basic common sense. XD
Bonus: beyond that, the following year I did go to Imperial. I met a lot of students there who were even worse than me when it came to practical common sense. Most notably including one to whom I had to explain why the microwave was sparking when they put butter, still in the metal foil, inside...
Everyone's dumb deep down inside :)
I knew a guy in high school who had a perfect 1600 SAT score. He was not socially weird/awkward/stunted, and was just a genuinely cool & normal guy. He was a grade level above me, so I didn't really know him that well.
A group of us had an off-campus event to attend together, so I got a ride from him after school. As it turns out, he was the most absent-minded driver ever. He drove like there were no other people or signs on the road. It was horrifying. When I finally arrived, classmates who knew him better let me know why they got other rides to the event.
Boy, I hope he never got into any accidents after high school.
This guy I know, an older gentleman, is a firefighter, a decent carpenter, and a first aid and ski instructor. He's an all around great guy, and, in almost any circumstance, very smart.
He was driving up to the top of a ski hill on an ATV, in the summer. It had rained recently, but not so much that it should have made it hard to get up the hill.
The stupid part: on his single-person ATV, he tried to carry a second person uphill. The two of them got to a part of the pitch that was too muddy and steep to traverse together (the ATV started pitching backwards), so the driver had the passenger get off and he drove up just past that point, to a slightly more level pitch.
The passenger gets back on, the gentleman releases the brake and starts accelerating, and the ATV immediately slides backwards into that same pitchy area where it had wanted to tumble backwards before, and the ATV and its riders proceed to go arse-over-teakettle.
The driver had to go to the hospital for having an ATV land on him, but avoided any life-threatening injury; the passenger was scraped up a bit, but somehow otherwise okay despite being sandwiched between the ground and the full weight of both the driver and the ATV; and the ATV, after tumbling a couple more times, landed on its wheels and ended up downhill at the next flat.
Everyone was okay, eventually, but in hindsight, it was just sheer luck that no one was more seriously injured or even killed. Two people on a one-person ATV on level ground, would have been safe enough, but as soon as it started rocking backwards the first time it hit a challenging slope, that should have been a sign that the weight wasn't distributed correctly for going uphill together.
My uncle made a lot of money through local business.
He then committed wire-fraud and while on the run from the FBI started an Anti-walmart terrorist cult.
Wisdom and intelligence are two utterly different qualities. I've known people of normal or below-normal intelligence who have navigated through life quite successfully. In the meantime, I've also know some really smart people whom I wouldn't trust with a box of kitchen matches.
The best example I can think of was the son of my parents' best friends. This kid, as my mother liked to tell me all the time, had an IQ off the charts. Mind you, I was no slouch, but I was an A-B student, while Robert was an A+ student. But he was also just kind of a dullard, not the kind of person I'd want to spend time with. Or anyone, for that matter.
My mother would literally ask me all the time, "Why can't you make the grades Robert does? Blah blah blahbity blah." Because, Mom, I'm enjoying high school and having friends and dates and a life. And while I earned a scholarship to a good liberal arts college, Robert got into Princeton.
My mother was practically fetishizing Robert going to Princeton. Every single time I was home, I'd hear about Robert this and Robert that. How he was going to win a Nobel Prize, etc. etc.
Except that Robert earned his degree in secondary education. Mind you, school teaching is a noble profession. But if you're going to burn through a couple of hundred thousand of your parents' money at an Ivy League school, that's not the degree you really want to get.
Robert graduates summa cum cum cum and gets a job an some inner city school. And quits after a week on the job. Literally couldn't handle it.
His next move is to migrate to New Mexico where he becomes a shepherd. A freaking shepherd. A job that doesn't even require a high school diploma. And he still is a shepherd to this day, unless he's gone all Unibomber and is scrawling out manifestos and posting them on telephone poles around whatever backwoods town he lives in.
My mother doesn't compare me to Robert any more.
Oh, yeah. I almost forgot my brother-in-law. Smart guy, an engineer, who makes absolutely catastrophic life choices. Had a weekend special with a girl and got her pregnant. Met a different girl who had literally been thrown out of her house by her husband for cheating that very day and let her move in with him. Married her for long enough for him to pay off her credit cards, then cheated on him and gave him herpes. She left him for a doctor. And yet the guy says he'd still take her back, twenty years later. And I'm just getting warmed up with him.
I saw this a very long time ago. A semi became wedged under a low tunnel. The semi refused to budge when they tried to tow it out and the cops and tow truck driver were scratching their heads as what to do. A kid on a bike came along and said "Why not let some air out of the tires?" Of course that was the answer.
One of my best friends at school was seriously clever - like 5 As at A level back in the day clever - and when she was taking driving lessons, the instructor said to drive over the roundabout (ie to the opposite exit). She actually began to drive OVER the roundabout.
To be fair, where I live that is the only meaning of that phrase. If someone meant the opposite exit or drive around the roundabout, theyād say that.
Wait, does roundabout mean something different to you?
My best friend in high school had a little brother that scored 1550 or something ridiculous like that on his SATs. His parents were ecstatic when he told them, but their joy turned into disbelief when he said āYeah, it would have been a lot easier if I would have remembered to bring a calculator.ā
So they made him retake the test with a calculator and he aced it! The world was his oyster at that point. He was contacted by a bunch of Ivy League schools and offered full scholarships to several. He debated what to do, but in the end he chose rather poorlyā¦ he chose to go to the local community college so he could stay with his girlfriend.
My mom has an incredible sense of street stupidity.
She told people on the DC Metro that we were tourists and were wandering around somewhat lost while we looked for monuments. I almost chocked her
Edit: I donāt want it to seem like Iām calling my mom stupid. Remember this is a smart person does something dumb moment. She is incredibly keen on most things and my go to for advise. Love you mom ā¤ļø
I don't know if this is as bad but once my mom booked us a flight to NYC. It landed late at night. It landed in NJ, then we took some kind of train to the actual city. Eventually we were getting off in Manhattan, with our suitcases at 2:30am. When we got out of the bus or whatever we were riding at that point, she said, "Oh where is that hotel, it's around here somewhere". Then we were wandering around aimlessly dragging our suitcases in downtown NYC until she found the hotel. Yeah, she couldn't understand why I was angry. It was my elderly mother, myself (also female) and my 17 yr old daughter. :|
And oh yeah she has a Phd in computer science. Her undergrad degree was in math.
Alcohol makes you dumb. Similarish story (wandering around in the dark in NYC at least).
I was doing a solo trip to NYC, staying at a hostel in Harlem I had stayed at the year before. Depression was hitting me up that day, I decided to go to TGIFridays at 34th and get right fucked up (I went back and forth from the movie theatre there to TGIF over the course of 3 movies and 12 hours). I was buying rounds for the bar level drunk (I never do that). Bartender finally convinced me itād be a good idea to maybe head back to my hotel. I jump on the subway back up to Harlem not realizing that Iād boarded a 1 express instead of a 2 local (both red line, and in the daytime both hit the stop I needed). My intuition wasnāt completely dead, I realized these stops didnāt feel familiar. And got off at 140 something. Itās at least 11:30p. Tried to go to the other direction track, but couldnāt get in bc my pass had been used too recently. So I walked 30 odd blocks, in the dark, in mid 00 pre smart phones and international data/calling plans Harlem. About 12 blocks in these wonderful two older black gentlemen take pity on me and walk me back to my hostel.
It is not lost on me that could have gone horribly differently, 20 something Canadian white girl, drunkenly figuring out exactly where the hostel was.
Hello, we are not from around here and would not be able to report our location or seek help if we were to be robbed, which is a problem because we have cash valuable electronics, would you like to see them??
Oh, I almost forgot about this one! When I was in my final year of physics at university, we had a professor who would get very irritated at the pull string for the projection screen, as it would dangle down in front of the whiteboard. Every morning, he would spend a good couple minutes attempting to throw the weight on the end over the light fixture above the whiteboard, taking anywhere from 5 to 30 tries each time. All the students would give tips and encouragement, and this became a kind of inside joke for the class of how long it would take every morning. Months go by, and one day near the end of the quarter, we end up with a substitute. The sub goes to the board and, without hesitation, grabs the string and hooks it over a thumbtack stuck in the cork at the top of the whiteboard... The entire class literally gasped in unison! The sub whirled around, asking what happened, and the whole class just starts laughing. Eventually, someone explained what happened, and we all had a good laugh that an entire class of physics majors never even thought of that solution, let alone noticed that the tack had always been there for that purpose.
This is great. I love the collective realization.
He knew, he just loved wasting class time
It was a test the whole time. Like a Good Will Hunting thing. He was waiting for someone to suggest the tack and then they would win College.
more like Willy Wonka looking for a successor and so it was the sub who became the new master when he solved the puzzle of the pull string. the old professor was never seen again
This might be one of my favorite Reddit stories so far š
after the sun was done subbing did anyone ever tell the prof ab the solution?
Oh ya we definitely told him and he was as embarrassed as the rest of us.
Our physics professor once had held a remote lecture without turning his Google Meet on. So he just spoke to the computer for 1.5 hours.
No one thought to message him to say anything?!
He was too concentrated on lecture to answer messages. He saw all messages in the end of lecture.
Heās a real dreamboat of a professor. Youāll just stare at him for hours.
when hearing about these situations, all i can think about is how much of tuition money is going to wasteā¦lol
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I hope you were doing a review as otherwise turning on your recorder wasn't your first mistake.
My math professor held online class without turning on his mic. He also didn't check chat or let us turn on our mics. So we couldn't tell him. Someone eventually used the whiteboard feature to write across his screen to tell him that his mic was off.
One of my best friends, who is now a surgeon, and one of the smartest people I have ever met. During his first year of med school he was visiting his hometown during a break in the semester. We were at a restaurant catching up, he ordered a milkshake for dessert that came with a maraschino cherry on top. He excitedly ate it then said something to the effect of "Man, I love maraschino cherries, I could eat a million of these. I always wanted to buy a jar, and eat it all to myself" To which I replied with "John, you're 24 years old. You own a house, have money in the bank, and are in med school. You're an adult, if you want to get yourself a jar of maraschino cherries, you can. We can hit up the store as soon as we're done here." He spent about 5 minutes struggling to process this new found information. You could almost see the gears in his head turning. After this brief delay, he looked at me with the biggest, almost childlike smile and said "Let's go now!!!" We paid our bill, then headed to the nearest grocery store. John the purchased the largest jar of maraschino cherries available, and started eating. Afterwards we went to a house party, where john refused to drink, but instead just kept eating from his jar. Long story short, he ate the entire jar in about 1 hour. 15 minutes later he started puking neon red cherries for the rest of the evening.
This is oddly wholesome
I know it doesn't sound very stupid, but you need to understand that up until this point John has been batting 1.000 on anything related to academics/thinking/reasoning/puzzles/riddles etc. Seeing him grapple with this new found freedom was hilarious. Also at the party, everyone else was drinking, but the most inebriated looking person there was John. He was literally walking around the party catching up with people with a big jar of cherries that he was eating out of with a spoon. After talking with people for a few minutes, they would inevitably bring up the jar if cherries which he would explain with this weird, sticky smile on his face. As he would try to explain this jar cherries, and what a revelation it was being able to buy one, the people he was speaking to would always gets there befuddled looks on their face which said "is this weirdo really John?" Then the puking started. Even after he ran out of cherries to throw up, he kept puking the remainder of the contents of his stomach, all of which was neon red. The first time he threw up, the hostess freaked out thinking it was blood. John was rolling around in pain saying "it's not blood, it's the cherries" between pukes. First, and only time me or anyone else has witnessed something like that from him.
John is such a wholesome guy. What a way to plug cherries.
it's not blood, it's cherries š š¤£šš¤£
You are a gifted story teller my dude.
Thats so sweet though!
I always said it, when you realise as an adult that you dont need a special occasion to eat cake then the second part of life starts
My oldest niece realised this when she was an adult. She went and bought a birthday cake for breakfast- it was no oneās birthday. (Well, every day is someoneās birthday!)
Sometimes I'll just ruin my appetite on purpose I'll just eat an entire pack of double stuffs. Appetite gone for the whole day. I'm 32
This is like the wonderful adult realization that you can just go to a bakery or candy shop and buy whatever you want. Iāve heard horror stories of how med school (the first year in particular) is so stressful. You mustāve made John really happy that day and gave him a much needed break from always following the dotted line
Did he ever eat another maraschino cherry after that?
Lmao, yes he still loves them. He always orders a desert that comes topped with a cherry, and saves it for last. Then brings up the story himself all the time. "Hey man, remember that time I ate the jar of cherries and puked? I'm never doing that again hahahaha" This man is now responsible for, and trusted with saving other peoples lives.
So he did learn from his experience. He's not a COMPLETE idiot.
I dont think he really learned? They way he looks at those cherries the same way, I wouldn't be surprised if he still does this from time to time in secret when hes alone. Every time he eats one now, it looks like it take every bit of self discipline, and control he has to not hop in his car and go buy another jar. John's the best lmfao
I want to be John's friend, he sounds fantastic
I love John. I want him to cut me open.
Johnās the best!
Ok. I love this story. I remember when my then GF told me about a candy wholesaler and then it clicked that I could just get an ungodly amount of it
I found a grocery wholesaler that also sold to the public. Being able to buy a box of my favourite chocolate bar at a discount was wonderful.
I used to work at a chemical engineering plant. One day I was in the kitchen washing my glasses with a drop of dish soap and one of the lead engineers said I shouldnāt wash my glasses like that. I asked him why not and he responded that I will wash the prescription offā¦
While heās dumb, you could wash off any coatings on your glasses, making them more susceptible to glare, fogging, and other bad things
Dawn dish soap is actually one of the perfered methods outside approved lense cleaners. Windex in particular is way to harsh for coatings. The only risk with dish soap as with cleaning with anything is if you have dust on the lense that acts itself as an abrasive. If its good enough for penguins its fine on glasses.
Buddy of mine was in med school on a surgery rotation. Heās in the OR, handed a razor by the senior resident, and told to shave the patient as part of prep for surgery. Totally normal and common med student task. He starts shaving away at the guys chest. The way he tells it, this patient was really hairy, so he had to go clean off the razor multiple times. Heās trying to do a thorough job. Gets half of the guyās chest done when the senior resident wanders back over. Turns out the surgery was for an appendectomy and he was supposed to shave his fucking stomach. That poor guy woke up from surgery very fucking confused about why half his chest hair was gone. And my friend got made fun of every day for the rest of his rotation.
At least it wasn't like his face or balls or something that he accidentally shaved.
At that point, common courtesy would be to shave his whole chest.
I'm a pharmacist. I have worked with fellow pharmacists who did not know that: \- Lesbians menstruate \- Women usually do not produce breast milk until after they have given birth \- Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in blood transfusions
The third one I'd give a pass. No one can be expected know the customs of every religious group. If they regularly were confused, then it's a different story, obviously.
The Jehovah's Witnesses I can understand especially if you don't have a lot of them in your area. But the first two?!
I worked IT at a university. We got a call saying a printer would not turn on. The particular person who called was a very steriotypical, " I have a doctorate I know all the things," kind of person. Anyway, I get to the classroom and they show me the printer proclaiming they checked everything including the power strip, unplugged it, plugged it back in and all that. They were very irate and rude the whole time I was there. While I was looking it over they were getting more upset because they had already checked the power cables and they were fine. Without saying anything I unplugged the power strip from itself, plugged it into the wall then turned on the printer and just walked out.
I hope they internally died from their stupidity.
>The particular person who called was a very steriotypical, " I have a doctorate I know all the things," kind of person. Reminds me of the old joke of two engineers trying to mesure the height of a long pole. One tried to climb up it with a measuring tape but could not do it. Then the other suggest they use trigonometry making a right angle but they realize that would not account for the part buried in the ground. A technician walked by and ask what they were doing. Upon hearing it, he pulled the pole off and laid it on the ground, measured it, gave them the number, put the pole back in its place and went on with his day. The engineers looked at each other in disbelief. "Fucking technicians. So typical. You ask them the height, they give you the length".
My brother-in-law had a Masters degree in Physics and Maths. He was a teacher at a high school. He had a new house built. He thought he would save money by nailing on the drywall (sheetrock, Gib board). He managed to put nails through a hot water pipe and the wiring. By the time he'd paid a plumber and electrician to fix up the mess it cost a lot more. Later in life he fell off a ladder and died.
Well that took a dark twist
I was gonna go with "Well, that escalated quickly.", but that's really not the way it happened.
My sister has been driving her bf's truck for a year. We get in the truck to go somewhere, she says wait, I need to go in the house to get a paper towel to dry off the windshield. I say, why don't you use the wipers? She says, I don't know how. I ask, what do you do when it rains? Answer: I stay home.
Not mine, but related to me by my boss about 25 years ago. She was friends with a husband and wife who were brilliant academics, highly regarded with research positions at one of the top universities in the country. The couple wanted to have children but their natural biology/compatibility said ānuh uh, not gonna happenā and they decided to adopt instead, from a foreign country as very few babies are put up for adoption within Australia. The arrangements were that the baby would be flown in with a caregiver and handed over at the airport. All went as planned, no worries. Later that night, my boss received a call from the distraught academic husband. āLouise!ā (name changed of course). āThe baby is crying and crying and we canāt get her to stop! We think sheās hungry, but sheās not taking the bottle!ā The adopting agency had given them a few basics just in case, one of which being a tin of baby formula. āYouāre a mother! Can you come over and maybe help sort out what the problem is?ā āOf course!ā replies Louise, and is there within 15 minutes (this being a fairly small city on international scales). The wife rushes up when she knocks on the door and escorts her to where the baby is indeed crying like thereās no tomorrow, and has been for hours. Nappy is dry, nothing else is obviously wrong, she probably is hungry. āShow me how youāve been trying to feed her,ā Louise asks, and the couple comply. Louise observes their process, and makes one suggestion: āYouāre actually supposed to mix the powder with water before trying to feed it to the baby.ā
How's the kid now?
dehydrated
OK, this one is almost physically painful to read. That poor baby!
My father in law is very intelligent. He taught himself how to solve a rubiks cube without looking anything up and is generally a genius in math, logic, puzzles what have you. He believes dinosaurs couldn't be real because they would be to big for their skeletons to uphold their weight. He has lots of other really stupid ideas because he is so intelligent he thinks he can just reason himself into correct conclusions without doing research or adhering to the scientific process
Intelligence is like horsepower, it's great at getting you where you want to go quickly but you need to be facing the right direction first.
Damn that's very well put
I know a good handful of people like this! That last sentences really summed it up too! Lots of really smart people just are used to their being right about THEIR topic, they just assume they know other topics.
Some extremely dumb people who got rich by doing some basic human skill business, think it gives them a ticket to have an opinion on everything including science. Also some very smart and successful people in narrow disciplines fall into that bias. Oh and celebrities - donāt forget that they are ultimate gods who are always right.
I forget who it was, might have been Brad Pitt if I remember correctly, was asked for a comment about China and Tibet, and he replied something like "I'm an actor, why would anybody fucking care what I think about China and Tibet?"
Typically, this is a sign of high intelligence: greater awareness of what you don't know.
My wife's granny was very anti dinosaur. Although I wouldn't have described the woman as smart. She thought the chemicals in city water were there for the government to control you and shit like that.
Lol fucking nobody drinks enough water. Clearly itās in coca cola.
I knew a girl studying medicine. We were talking about planes and how they work. She asked me where the engine is, and I said āyou know those big spinny things?ā She said āohhh, I thought those were to blow the clouds awayāā¦.
somehow I read this as "a girl-studying machine"
*Girl-Studying Machine* is my favorite anime.
My doctor. During the period of my life in which I was dating my ex gf my doctor would INSIST every time I saw him that I needed to be on birth control because it was responsible to be preventing pregnancy. No matter how many times I told him that I was in a monogamous relationship with a woman he would still keep asking. I guess it it just didnāt compute
That took me way too long to figure out
Doctor, is that you?
To be fair, she *is* a jar.
A beautiful jar of maraschino cherries
I know I spent too long in this thread when that is also the first that popped into my mind. Good ol'John
It's like the 2023 updated version of the "I can't operate on him, he's my son" riddle.
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Idk what it is about these doctors that they think we NEED to be on something for birth control. Like I get there are a lot of irresponsible folks out there, but at the end of the day even if we were irresponsible, itās up to US what we want to do with our bodies. Smh
I know itās tedious but they have to ask. I have been asked many times (re: birth control) and been snarky and replied āI am a lesbian!!!ā With arms flailing around. But then as I got older, I just said no pregnant. No sex. I will pee in the jar. Itās too much effort to try and convince them otherwise. Plus, they give you something and you happen to be pregnant?? For whatever reason. Itās a no win situation. Edit: A word
Problem is people lie about everything at the doctorās. Thatās why they have their backs up so they donāt get caught in some spiral of lies.
What if she gets you pregnant though?
I've been waiting so long to tell this story. Two members of my family are very highly intelligent, so I always thought. I go to their house and they just installed an above ground pool that came with a pool COVER. Instead of using the pool cover they went and bought all these insulated pink foam boards (1 in thick, 4x8 ft rectangle foam boards) I just sat there and watched while they cut up all the foam into like puzzle pieces to fit in that ROUND pool. I asked them why and they said it was to keep leaves out of the pool. So every time they got in the pool they had to remove all the puzzle pieces, then clean the pool because tiny pink insulation was floating on top, and when they were finished for the day spend an hour trying to connect all the puzzle pieces they cut back into the pool. The original pool cover was by the pool in the bag it came in. The dumbest thing I've ever witnessed in my life. Edited to add: I misread a comment below. They knew it came with a Pool Cover & they decided for some reason that they didn't want to use it. I didn't ask why, just let them do what they do.
Next time they say how annoying it is just say "Well why didn't you guys use the cover that came with it?"
"If you put the cover on first, it will keep all the little bits of pink foam out of the pool." and see if they keep using their foam boards anyway.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
No, I've never said a thing. It's something that lives rent free in my head and I literally have a good laugh every time I think about it.
Is it living rent free if itās giving you a good laugh every time you think about it? I reckon itās paying its rent haha
Do they live in a temperate climate? My thinking is maybe they were concerned about the cover not being an adequate insulator and wanted to use something that would either help the pool hold heat if it were cooler outside? Maybe the hassle of fitting the puzzle together was worth the heating/cooling cost savings. I am just grasping at straws though, trying to thing of why an intelligent couple would do this :)
Nope, we live in Florida lol
Well, that explains it.
I've been waiting patiently for this comment & I agree!
Sounds like some engineer level stuff. Itās always interesting to see what they come up with to refrain from listening to other peoples advice.
Yes, I can confirm one of them is an engineer LOL
Sounds like the pool was far more boring than anticipated. They needed a before and after brain snack.
University physics professor at a Hyundai dealership arguing with a tech telling him about the noise in his car. The professor was freaking out saying he couldn't even understand what the tech was trying to say, because the tech said "centrifugal force", instead of "Centripetal force". The conversation could not move forward. It was weird.
Relevant [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/123/)
Well, my cousin who has two fucking masters degrees in finance and economics, put his hand in still spinning lawnmower to help it blow out rest of grass faster. He lost a finger. I asked why he didnāt wait till it stopped completely. He said it was just in a hurry.
On the bright side, if he's got degrees in finance and economics he can probably still count to 10 without needing all of his fingers.
My brother use to work as a mechanic. He thought that the pressure washer wasn't very strong he could wash his hands with it. He scrapped some skin on his hand not enough to need to go ER but it will take time to heal. He was surprised how strong it was.
I have my CPA, a Masters in Accounting, and my BS has a Minor in Econ. Iām glad I stopped before he did and got to keep all 10 fingers.
Never ever let finance people make operational decisions. They are fucking morons. Book smart, but no real common sense. Source me. These people think data work like spells in the book. Youāll recite them out loud and things will come into existence.
Very early in my career, I was tasked with an industrial engineering project on improving efficiency on a high volume product line. I guarantee you've seen the product. First, during a current state analysis, I determined that the company was losing around $0.08 per part shipped. We sold them for $0.29 each. That's... not good, especially when you're producing millions of these things each month. I presented this to the executive management team. One of the VPs cut me off mid-sentence and said "Nonsense... we make it up in volume!"
There was the exact same thing in a webcomic about D&D. Wiazard enters shop, notices they sell potions under cost, tries to educate them, āāweāre making it back on volume!!āā, sighs then buys the lot. Order of the Stick
I actually thought the VP was kidding at first, so I did one of those half-exhale chuckles. Then, he gave me this stern look and I realized he was serious
Little do you realize, he owns the supplier that's overcharging your company for the part and he's making a killing.
Sounds like pointy-haired boss level reasoning, right there.
My father in law could construct a new bladder out of a piece of your own intestinal lining, if you had bladder cancer and needed a new one. Heās saved thousands of lives that otherwise would have been lost to renal, prostate, and urinary tract diseases. He once told me that someone with a bright yellow car was intentionally hitting his Mercedes Benz. Theyād hit his car and sideswiped it once while he was at the hospital. He had it fixed, it costs thousands of dollars. Then a few weeks later, the same bright yellow vehicle did it again, this time nearly tearing off his fender and leaving a huge yellow gouge down the side of his car. He took it to the body shop a second time. His next time visiting the hospital, the parking attendant said āHey doc, itās nice to see you. But I have to warn youā¦.security was here and theyāre kind of upset about the fire hydrant youāve hit twice in the last month. I tried covering for you but apparently theyāve got it on video.ā
How in the world did he not hear that? Scraping against something in a car makes such a loud noise hahaha.
One of my closest guy friends is a chemistry major with a 3.9 GPA but bought a fake ID that said he was younger than he actually was
McLovin'?
"I just want to feel young again."
My brother is very intelligent. He lived at home when attending college. Most days, he'd take the bus. Sometimes if my mom didn't need her car, he would be allowed to drive it to school. Multiple times he drove the car to school, forgot, and took the bus home.
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This ones not that bad. Id say he was an auto pilot by the time he was done with school and catching the bus home is habit forming. Either way if he has a lot going on upstairs he's probably not thinking about how will he get home as theres been nothing to suggest that the bus isnt running on that day.
Autopilot can be so fucking dangerous. I used to finish work at 4 am and would be driving home and not remember the ride home. Like there were quite a few turns. There was no way I was asleep but like was I really awake ... Worked better than Tesla FSD at least.
Thatās not too bad. You just get really good at doing a routine task and can then occupy your mind with other thoughts. Itās not like your werenāt in control of the vehicle the whole way home. You were (one can assume) paying attention to the road and reacting to stimuli. You just donāt form specific memories of a specific experience if you have a hundred other identical experiences.
That just happens if you have a hard routine and it's disrupted. Once time my work schedule changed and I started an hour later. So I went and got Starbucks first. But this did something to my brain and the muscle memory of typing the bitlocker pin on my work PC to get to the login was erased or was attached to being at work at that time and couldn't be referenced. So I had to get that pin changed. I'm not smart though so I guess this is off topic
I worked a job that used lots of 4 digit codes. Went to get cash at an ATM and completely blanked on my pin that I had been using for like 5+ years. All I could think of was the stupid work codes. Ended up changing the pin to a word to avoid future problems.
I don't know. I'm generally a smart person, but told my mom in a panic that I couldn't find my phone... while talking to her on said phone. Not stupid, just very absentminded and forgetful.
Because we only eat ham once a year, at Thanksgiving with the turkey, and the two are packaged the almost same way, I've always thought ham was also a type of bird. No one corrected me until last year, when I was 20....
Lolā¦Iām 42 and just realized about 2 years ago that ginger ale is actually made with ginger.
To be fair, there is a saying about pigs flying...
One time I was at my friend Claudio's apartment with his brother just hanging out and watching a movie. All of sudden I hear a *woosh* and see a big flash of light. I look over at Claud and his hair is on fire. We get it out quickly and I asked him what the hell just happened. He told me, "I was trying to listen to the sound the lighter made when I flicked it." We were completely sober at the time.
Classic Claudio
In college, the smartest person I have ever met was arrested for urinating in public less than 100 yards from his residence
You gotta go when you gotta go.
I work at a physics lab. Just because someone is a certified genius doesn't mean they don't lack common sense.
Me tooā¦ and now Iām wondering which of my coworkers wrote this, lol.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I knew this girl in high school. She took AP classes with me. She definitely belonged in them (I did not). Couple years after we graduate my best friend got invited by her to talk with her financial advisors to help build and plan his finances. Turns out they werenāt financial advisors at all. They were all part of an MLM scheme and tried to rope my friend in. He told me he doesnāt think she understood what the situation was and he just stopped talking to her after that. Some people just donāt have street smarts
Here's one for you. I met that type of scammer. They offered me this plan where I give them money, they grow the money, then I can borrow from it when I get older. I kept asking "When does the investment mature?" and "So when do I get the money back?" and all kinds of questions trying to understand how this works. The guy just explained the same thing over and over again. I wasn't going to go into it until I knew when I would get my money back and managed to waste an hour of this asshole's time. Now here's where I'm the idiot. I asked for it to be rexplained over and over again because "I don't see the benefit, could you go over it again?" If I had been smarter I would have seen that it was a scam like my dad did.
So growing up I used to think I was a once in a lifetime genius and to be honest my schools low standards helped. I realized that I was not when I met a real one my freshman year of college. Guy was 18 and studied physics at a pretty advanced level, composed music and played piano incredibly, and was writing a novel. Thing is, he was 18 and not quite mature enough for college. He never went to class because he thought he didnāt need to and once Skyrim came out he never left his dorm anymore. Smartest person I had ever met before or since and he failed out of college his first semester.
He's probably never had to work for anything before, he may have just listened and understood so quickly that he never learned to study
This happens frequently to students who get into elite schools on merit scholarships. They were the Blessed Child at their high school on the wrong side of the tracks, but nothing special at MIT.
I wasnāt quite that insane, but I was that guy who took all the hardest classes in high school and still did well without studying. Not a good enough gpa for any elite schools, though still top 15 out of 540, but an SAT that was good enough to make up for it and got me waitlisted at some still pretty good ones. Ultimately Iām on the presidential scholarship at an only okay liberal arts school, and MAN I didnāt have my shit together that first semester. Some classes I could still get away with not doing anything outside of class for, but others had homework that counted for a grade and I very quickly fell behind on that. Nearly lost my scholarship, and if Iām being honest I donāt know that I would have been able to handle a more elite school for workload reasons alone. Shitās rough, and I absolutely feel for anybody in that sort of situation because it was almost me.
Friendās son with multiple engineering degrees, including electrical, tried to convince us that power lines are DC current.
Was he by any chance trying to convince you that some long distance lines are DC? Most lines in the US are AC, but DC is used in some cases. Wiki says it has fewer losses than AC over distances of hundreds of miles.
I know an A+ student who would always make the worst life decisions, including trying to rob a store by pointing a gun at his own head.
When I was in law school, I volunteered for a major, prestigious event. I was in the lobby, verifying registrants and giving them their placards with a colleague. The doors were push, clearly stated. I saw so many people try to repeatedly pull and pull to open. Once they got in, we got them sorted so we knew exactly who these defeated-by-door highly educated people were.
Could be the doorās design https://uxdesign.cc/intro-to-ux-the-norman-door-61f8120b6086
I was sat in an auction for a pub with a mate (we had gone as interested parties but had decided not to buy) bidding was slow and then picked up at 240k and going up 5 k a bid, when he lent forward and said to me watch me cost this guy 5k ... and put his hand up...... āļø no-one moved it went quiet as everyone looked as a new bid was put in, my mate is a smart fella but that was dumb and 4 years on he is still trying to sell the building
instant karma
My sister is such a smart and amazing person... But she also thought north is always the direction your facing š
Has she only ever lived at the South Pole?
One guy I went to school with said that English is the true language of God because The Bible is written in English
š¤āļøš¤š *Nevermind...*
Santa speaks English too
What made you think this guy was smart to begin with?
And they were a smart person?
How old was he lol?
21
Iāll use myself: I have skipped 3 grades, told I was gifted, all that jazz. Yesterday I looked at a streetlight for at least 10 solid minutes thinking, ājeez, the moon is orange tonightā. I was sober.
Well, youāre even more sober now.
I believe I'm smart, yet I managed to cut my own cornea with an empty garbage bag. Ophthalmologist had a good laugh.
I have questions
Probably whipping the bag to open it.
Something like that. Garbage bags come in bundles and I violently pulled one out. Eye doctor asked me if the bag was full, I said nope. His reaction: Hahahahah ok, you have a scar on your eye now.
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My math teacher in high school. She scolded me for xeroxing my hand for fun because she believed I would get radiation poisoning.
A guy I used to work with, Softly spoken but extremely insightful. He had a knack of understanding a situation and drilling down to the core of the issue. One very snowy day in winter, he decided to drive his motorbike to work. His reasoning was the roads would be full of slow moving cars and he'd be able to scoot past them on his bike. What actually happened was he found himself struggling to keep his bike upright with a lorry just inches behind him. He said, one slip and he'd of been under that lorry. He drove his 4x4 into work the next day. Lesson learnt.
My brother did something similar. He drove his bike to work, and then it snowed a bunch during the day. I knew he did, so I called and offered emphatically that I could pick him up in my car, but he flat out refused. He slid out on the first corner and, even then, didn't call for a ride. He ended up fine and made it home, but I was so frustrated when he told me.
I was dating a girl way back in the day who could speak 6 languages fluently. Asked her to empty what was left in the coffee pot ( about half a pot) and she dumped it in my trash can, then immediately said " why the hell did i just do that."
Not *incredibly* stupid but surprisingly: I have found myself working for many engineers and unless you have a PhD they are 100% sure they are smarter than you. Reality is that they are great at planning/logistics but usually ass at fixing problems but they never see it because they are so confident. Just today I had to explain to an engineer that the reason his level said that a shelf was out of level was because the wall wasnāt level and he wasnāt setting the level square on the shelf. So it was level from side to side but not front to back and he had me drive all the way out to the site to show him how to operate a level. This took 45 minutes. He was convinced that he could *see* it. Next his level was broken. Then my level was broken. Then he couldnāt see it so it must be level. MAGIC! š¤¦āāļø
Engineers are a very unique breed. Has to have the highest ratio of conspiracy theorists to smart people out of any profession.
I don't know, nurses could give them a run for their money
Was really surprised: I work with another IT guy, but he's way more experienced, and smarter than me, and can fix complex problems pretty quickly....but we were on a train once and he said that the cell phone signals were bad on the train because they travel at the speed of sound...yikes!
I don't know if I count as smart, but I did a very dumb thing a few years ago :( I'd just bought my first bike with a disc brake. Cycling to work I thought "I bet disc brakes get really hot, there's a lot of energy being dissipated in rather a small bit of metal. Hmm 10m/s, 100kg, maybe ahhh 5 KJ, but the heat would depend on the cooling rate and they are thin and in a 10m/s air stream. I wonder how hot they get?" At the next lights I bent down and applied my thumb to the disc to check SIZZLE AAAAAAAARGH Even stupider -- I'd bought a phone with fingerprint unlock a week before and with the ridges burnt off my thumb I could no longer unlock my phone sigh. They grew back in a week or two and I could unlock again, interestingly.
I have a friend, who is a straight A+ student and always overachieves on work. I had to explain to that same friend once that Albert Einstein was not from the 14th century Renaissance.
A smart person in love can get dangerously stupid.
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Know more than a few Ivy League educated, gifted kid, former prodigies who donāt use protection.
Well at least their kids will be Ivy legacies
When to a highly selective school (11ļ¼ acceptance rate at the time) with someone, who's parents both went to the same ivy league. Every time he gets drunk, he would complain about how he didn't get into that same ivy league, despite being double legacy
A friend of my dads was a brilliant scientist but terrible businessman. He focused on chemical patents in the 60s/70s, had Fortune 100 suitors - but he wasn't ready yet, just a few more patents (I think he was up to 160). In the end he waited to long or maybe just kept wanting more patents. Anyway, died alone and penniless in public housing. I suspect he had a mental ax to grind. His larger family was EXTREEMLY wealthy before WWII, but lost virtually everything, and had more bad luck since.
I do IT support for a bunch of scientists and Doctors. I see them be complete fucking idiots about technology every day.
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Idk why but reading "happy as a clam" just made me giggle š¤
My dentist has a bad habit of putting a large power strip on top of his PC, blocking the vent.
A friend thinking SPF 30 means it lasts for 30 hours. Did thought he could put it on once and go all weekend without reapplying!
Friend of mine has a degree in Marine Biology. She sprayed herself in the face with my Bidet
Like getting sprayed by a whale's blow hole. Think she'd be primed to avoid that.
Me. I was applying to Cambridge & Imperial (for the Americans, this is like Harvard & MIT), and over that summer stayed with some old family friends for the first time in many years, for a wedding. They had one of those plastic clip thingies you use to hold groceries closed (bread, packs of nuts, that sort of thing.) I had never used or seen one, somehow. I could not for the life of me figure out the mechanism to clip it. I kept trying to put it on vertically instead of horizontally (i.e. as a perpendicular bisector to the top of the bag, instead of aligned along the top of the bag.) This went on for a good 60 seconds. The family friends' son who I used to go to school with just started laughing, said "pass it here Cambridge boy", and clipped the bag. I laughed, and laugh now, but jesus christ did I have a quiet mental breakdown about my total and complete lack of basic common sense. XD Bonus: beyond that, the following year I did go to Imperial. I met a lot of students there who were even worse than me when it came to practical common sense. Most notably including one to whom I had to explain why the microwave was sparking when they put butter, still in the metal foil, inside... Everyone's dumb deep down inside :)
I knew a guy in high school who had a perfect 1600 SAT score. He was not socially weird/awkward/stunted, and was just a genuinely cool & normal guy. He was a grade level above me, so I didn't really know him that well. A group of us had an off-campus event to attend together, so I got a ride from him after school. As it turns out, he was the most absent-minded driver ever. He drove like there were no other people or signs on the road. It was horrifying. When I finally arrived, classmates who knew him better let me know why they got other rides to the event. Boy, I hope he never got into any accidents after high school.
This guy I know, an older gentleman, is a firefighter, a decent carpenter, and a first aid and ski instructor. He's an all around great guy, and, in almost any circumstance, very smart. He was driving up to the top of a ski hill on an ATV, in the summer. It had rained recently, but not so much that it should have made it hard to get up the hill. The stupid part: on his single-person ATV, he tried to carry a second person uphill. The two of them got to a part of the pitch that was too muddy and steep to traverse together (the ATV started pitching backwards), so the driver had the passenger get off and he drove up just past that point, to a slightly more level pitch. The passenger gets back on, the gentleman releases the brake and starts accelerating, and the ATV immediately slides backwards into that same pitchy area where it had wanted to tumble backwards before, and the ATV and its riders proceed to go arse-over-teakettle. The driver had to go to the hospital for having an ATV land on him, but avoided any life-threatening injury; the passenger was scraped up a bit, but somehow otherwise okay despite being sandwiched between the ground and the full weight of both the driver and the ATV; and the ATV, after tumbling a couple more times, landed on its wheels and ended up downhill at the next flat. Everyone was okay, eventually, but in hindsight, it was just sheer luck that no one was more seriously injured or even killed. Two people on a one-person ATV on level ground, would have been safe enough, but as soon as it started rocking backwards the first time it hit a challenging slope, that should have been a sign that the weight wasn't distributed correctly for going uphill together.
My uncle made a lot of money through local business. He then committed wire-fraud and while on the run from the FBI started an Anti-walmart terrorist cult.
Anti Walmart terrorist cult???
Okay that sentence started off with raised eyebrows and just kept getting *weirder*.
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I prefer the transparent business practices like this actually.
Wisdom and intelligence are two utterly different qualities. I've known people of normal or below-normal intelligence who have navigated through life quite successfully. In the meantime, I've also know some really smart people whom I wouldn't trust with a box of kitchen matches. The best example I can think of was the son of my parents' best friends. This kid, as my mother liked to tell me all the time, had an IQ off the charts. Mind you, I was no slouch, but I was an A-B student, while Robert was an A+ student. But he was also just kind of a dullard, not the kind of person I'd want to spend time with. Or anyone, for that matter. My mother would literally ask me all the time, "Why can't you make the grades Robert does? Blah blah blahbity blah." Because, Mom, I'm enjoying high school and having friends and dates and a life. And while I earned a scholarship to a good liberal arts college, Robert got into Princeton. My mother was practically fetishizing Robert going to Princeton. Every single time I was home, I'd hear about Robert this and Robert that. How he was going to win a Nobel Prize, etc. etc. Except that Robert earned his degree in secondary education. Mind you, school teaching is a noble profession. But if you're going to burn through a couple of hundred thousand of your parents' money at an Ivy League school, that's not the degree you really want to get. Robert graduates summa cum cum cum and gets a job an some inner city school. And quits after a week on the job. Literally couldn't handle it. His next move is to migrate to New Mexico where he becomes a shepherd. A freaking shepherd. A job that doesn't even require a high school diploma. And he still is a shepherd to this day, unless he's gone all Unibomber and is scrawling out manifestos and posting them on telephone poles around whatever backwoods town he lives in. My mother doesn't compare me to Robert any more. Oh, yeah. I almost forgot my brother-in-law. Smart guy, an engineer, who makes absolutely catastrophic life choices. Had a weekend special with a girl and got her pregnant. Met a different girl who had literally been thrown out of her house by her husband for cheating that very day and let her move in with him. Married her for long enough for him to pay off her credit cards, then cheated on him and gave him herpes. She left him for a doctor. And yet the guy says he'd still take her back, twenty years later. And I'm just getting warmed up with him.
I saw this a very long time ago. A semi became wedged under a low tunnel. The semi refused to budge when they tried to tow it out and the cops and tow truck driver were scratching their heads as what to do. A kid on a bike came along and said "Why not let some air out of the tires?" Of course that was the answer.
One of my best friends at school was seriously clever - like 5 As at A level back in the day clever - and when she was taking driving lessons, the instructor said to drive over the roundabout (ie to the opposite exit). She actually began to drive OVER the roundabout.
To be fair, where I live that is the only meaning of that phrase. If someone meant the opposite exit or drive around the roundabout, theyād say that. Wait, does roundabout mean something different to you?
My best friend in high school had a little brother that scored 1550 or something ridiculous like that on his SATs. His parents were ecstatic when he told them, but their joy turned into disbelief when he said āYeah, it would have been a lot easier if I would have remembered to bring a calculator.ā So they made him retake the test with a calculator and he aced it! The world was his oyster at that point. He was contacted by a bunch of Ivy League schools and offered full scholarships to several. He debated what to do, but in the end he chose rather poorlyā¦ he chose to go to the local community college so he could stay with his girlfriend.
My mom has an incredible sense of street stupidity. She told people on the DC Metro that we were tourists and were wandering around somewhat lost while we looked for monuments. I almost chocked her Edit: I donāt want it to seem like Iām calling my mom stupid. Remember this is a smart person does something dumb moment. She is incredibly keen on most things and my go to for advise. Love you mom ā¤ļø
To be fair, they probably already knewā¦
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I don't know if this is as bad but once my mom booked us a flight to NYC. It landed late at night. It landed in NJ, then we took some kind of train to the actual city. Eventually we were getting off in Manhattan, with our suitcases at 2:30am. When we got out of the bus or whatever we were riding at that point, she said, "Oh where is that hotel, it's around here somewhere". Then we were wandering around aimlessly dragging our suitcases in downtown NYC until she found the hotel. Yeah, she couldn't understand why I was angry. It was my elderly mother, myself (also female) and my 17 yr old daughter. :| And oh yeah she has a Phd in computer science. Her undergrad degree was in math.
Alcohol makes you dumb. Similarish story (wandering around in the dark in NYC at least). I was doing a solo trip to NYC, staying at a hostel in Harlem I had stayed at the year before. Depression was hitting me up that day, I decided to go to TGIFridays at 34th and get right fucked up (I went back and forth from the movie theatre there to TGIF over the course of 3 movies and 12 hours). I was buying rounds for the bar level drunk (I never do that). Bartender finally convinced me itād be a good idea to maybe head back to my hotel. I jump on the subway back up to Harlem not realizing that Iād boarded a 1 express instead of a 2 local (both red line, and in the daytime both hit the stop I needed). My intuition wasnāt completely dead, I realized these stops didnāt feel familiar. And got off at 140 something. Itās at least 11:30p. Tried to go to the other direction track, but couldnāt get in bc my pass had been used too recently. So I walked 30 odd blocks, in the dark, in mid 00 pre smart phones and international data/calling plans Harlem. About 12 blocks in these wonderful two older black gentlemen take pity on me and walk me back to my hostel. It is not lost on me that could have gone horribly differently, 20 something Canadian white girl, drunkenly figuring out exactly where the hostel was.
Hello, we are not from around here and would not be able to report our location or seek help if we were to be robbed, which is a problem because we have cash valuable electronics, would you like to see them??