Ignorance to Make You Gasp

By the millions, and we can't do anything about it.

Setanta, you posted whilst I was typing.

A couple other things I remember...at that part time cashier job, this was before credit cards where popular.

When someone handed you a credit card, you had to go to a phone, dial in a number (these were push button phones), and had to then punch in the credit card number for approval. Then you got a code you had to note. If you entered the number incorrectly, or there was a problem, an actual person came on the call and talked to you.

I used to hate getting credit cards. It was such a rigamarole. The people behind that person would be all impatient, and even the card holder would be, because no one was used to this process.

During college, I worked at the customer service counter over one Christmas, at a Sears.

They had this new, strange device called "a fax"....

Someone would fill out the credit application so they could bring home a washing machine for the little woman for Christmas. You had to put the paper on some kind of drum device that spun around and around. I was scared to death of the thing. I had no idea it was slowly reading, line by line, the application. To me it was just some kooky thing that spun and clicked and if you didn't put the paper in right it all went dinky dau fast.

I was working in a shoe store in a predominantly black neighborhood, putting out shoes on the shelves, and my work was taking me toward the front of the store. Suddenly, a woman approached me with a child's, small pink plastic purse in her hand, and a pair of maroon pumps which were about three sizes too big for her, and asked me if they went well together, all the time attempting to keep herself between me and the cash registers. (I'm sure that she was thinking: "Oh, white man in his thirties, store manager"--but i was just another retail clerk.) Curious, i brushed past her, and went to the front of the store. There was some joker at the first cash register, becoming very obviously frustrated, and saying: "No, you don't get it . . . just give me my twenty back and . . . " "No, it isn't your twenty, it's my twenty, and i gave you your change."--said the 17 year-old, unwed mother who worked there full-time in the evening. When he got a look at me, his eyes got big, his partner poked him as she walked by and they headed out the door. I quickly rang up the next customer and asked Tina (not her real name) what happened. She explained his scam, and i told her he was trying to run a twenty, and that he had planned to work up a pile of change in bills on the counter, out of her register, and to walk out the door with it.

She became incensed. She was raging in no time flat. She had been smart enough not to fall for the opening line of the scam, which is: "Say, wait a minute, i need some change, give me my twenty back." because she had enough common sense to recognize that it wasn't his twenty any longer. She looked at me and said: "He pulled that because i'm black and he assumed i'm stupid, right?" (He was black, too, not an accusation of racism here--necessarily.) She got hotter under the collar: "He pulled that because i'm a woman, and he thinks i'm stupid, right?" She got hotter and hotter: "He pulled that on me because i'm a teenager, and he thinks i'm stupid, right?" I prudently put the counter between Tina and me, she was gettin' really steamed. I would not have wanted to be the next quick change artist who tried that trick on Tina--it may have resulted in homicide.

Not all young people are dull-witted.

i try my best to get rid of change, and it's always fun to watch cashiers sweat

purchase item for $12.55, give cashier $22.55, she tries to give me back the $2.55, saying the $20.00 is enough, i say just punch it in, you'll see, to her amazement i get $10.00 back not the $7.45 she wanted to inflict upon me

i try to do this alot, since we have $1 and $2 coins in canada

buying something during a power failure is fun too, teaching the guy at the cash how to work out the tax

luckily it's 15%, i explain to him it's 10% plus half again

eventually i just tell him the amount and move on


remembering being out at a club one night to see a buddies band, the girl serving our area had clearly been hired as decoration and not for her math skills, she knew the price of any combination of domestic beers and mixed drinks, but throw an import beer in the mix and she became completely stumped, she started throwing out numbers, luckily we were feeling honest and didn't rip her off (too much)

it was the summer of 1964 - the first summer in our "own" house .
several of us neighbours decided that we should put up common fence between the houses so that we we could keep our kids in their backyards .
we decided on a cedar fence and bought all the lumber necessary .
since the fencelines were of varying lengths and heights , some way had to be devised to figure out how much everyone would have to pay .
btw those were the days when we had not gone "metric" - it was inches and feet .
our group consisted of of a math-teacher , a vice-principal , a draughtsman , a few others and yours truly .
the fence was up , a few cases of beer had been bought to still our thirst and it was time to "do the math" .
i was quite surprised to find out that even the math-teacher got stuck when it came to adding odd lenghts and multiplying by odd heights .
even though i was more used to working in the metric system , the german school-system (perhaps i should say the 'hamburg school sysytem') required that students be familiar with the system of 'imperial measurements' .
since the neighbours didn't trust my math , the draughtsman made a scale drawing of the fence and figured out how much everyone had to pay for their part of the fence .
we had no problem splitting the cost of the beer :wink: .
btw next summer the fence will need some repair , but the western cedar has stood up quite well for over forty years .
hbg

Guy is standing behind the counter in a lumber yard on a slow day, and he sees a car pull up with four guys in it. They sit out in the parking lot for a long time, talking, gesturing, and looking in the window.

Finally, a guy gets out walks in and up to the counter, and says: "I need some four by twos."

Guy says: "You mean two by fours?"

"I don't know, just a minute."

He goes back out to the car, leans in the window, and a long conference ensues, after which he comes back in and says: "Yeah, that's it, I need some two by fours."

"How long you want 'em?"

Pause . . . then the guy heaves a big sigh, and says: "I don't know, just a minute."

He goes back out, leans in the window, and an even longer conference ensues. Finally he walks back in, and . . .

"Long time . . . we're buildin' a house."

I knew a guy who would eat stuff out of dumpsters behind stores, the stuff that had passed the expiration date, and when I confronted him one time and asked him how he could take such a risk, he said, "There's nothing wrong with this stuff. Germs can't get inside because it is erratically sealed.

We also had a wood expert when we installed hardwood floors in an
upstairs bedroom that was somewhat odd shaped and an adjacent
walk-in closet. The one-man contractor could not figure out the
square footage for the entire project and based on the price he'd given
us for the installation, he would have lost quite a substantial amount
of money, if we had not explained to him, how to do the math.

My pet peeve is at the drive-thru when I buy a hamburger "plain" for
the dog, as he doesn't particularly care for the condiments. It seems,
most young kids don't know what that means. The smarter ones will
ask again what "plain" means, but the challenged ones just give me
a regular hamburger with pickles, and the whole works.

the 2x4's are becoming "less 2x4" all the time .
i added some shelving in the basement and wanted to extend from the 40 year old 2x4's - seems that the 'new math' has shrunk the 2x4's .
hbg

depends on whether they are rough sawn or not..

I once ordered a plain hamburger at one of those fast food joints and the voice on the speaker said, "Excuse me?"

"I said I want a plain hamburger please."

"Did you say plain?"

I was getting a little aggravated by now and I normally don't like to lose my temper around people who are preparing your food, but I just snapped and yelled, "YES...PLAIN! PLAIN! A PLAIN DAMNED HAMBURGER! THAT IS ALL I WANT. ONE PLAIN HAMBURGER!"

The voice comes back in says, "One moment, I have to talk to my manager."

My words of protest went unanswered and I had to wait for several minutes. Finally his voice comes back, "One plain hamburger. Please pull ahead."

I pulled up to the final window and paid the guy 1.45 and waited for my burger. I could see the cook working on it and watched carefully for any dripping saliva, but he actually seemed be concentrating quite heavily on the project at hand.

"How much work can there be to make a friggin' hamburger?", I thought.

Finally the guy puts the hamburger on the rack, the other guy picks the bag up, carries it over and hands it to me and says, "Have a nice day."

I drive around to the other side of the building and pulled the hamburger out of the bag. Then I took the top of the bun off so I could apply some salt and pepper and was stunned at what appeared before me.

On the bun, was a hamburger pattie.

And it was cut into the perfect shape of a plane. Wings and all.

The teenaged baby sitter arrived and we gave her instructions. Heres a tin of spagettii for my daughters supper. Just heat and serve.

Teen slowly and carfully looks around the kitchen.......where is your microwave? she asks

Me: We dont have a microwave.
Her: But how will I heat it
Me: On the stove
Her: oh! of course how silly of me.... (brow furrows) should I take it out of the tin first?

At this point I'm wondering if I really should leave my child in this kids care.

But that's nothing, hamburger. Nothing, I tell you. In case you haven't noticed, plywood has also shrunk. Lucky devils that we are, we now have access to undersize router bits at $30.00 - $40.00 a pop to accommodate the undersize plywood, just in case we want to fit it into a dado.

I knew a guy who came home drunk and put a pizza in the oven. He then staggered to the couch and watched tv while smoking a cigarette and waiting for the pizza to finish.

Apparently he nodded off, the cigarette dropped from his mouth and landed between the cushions, and then the guy walked to the back of his house, crawled into bed and passed out.

This is taking place in a duplex and the guy next door, a little later on, smells smoke, and walks next door to check it out. He glances in the window and see smoke pouring from the couch and the oven. (Not only was the pizza burning in the oven, but the box and plastic wrap as well)

The guy starts pounding on the door and since no one answered and the door was unlocked he lets himself in, runs to the couch, and pulls the cushion off.

Bad idea.

Flames shoot halfway to the ceiling as the cushion literally explodes into a ball of flames in the guy's hands.

He throws the cushion out the door, tries to beat the fire out of the couch, all the while screaming, "John! John! Your house is on fire!"

In the back of the house, my buddy continues to sleep. Smoke is now filling the house and the neighbor is forced to flee and run back home, call 911, and get his family out of the house.

The fire department arrives and they race into the smoke with their masks on and find my friend, now turning various shades of color, still slumbering blissfully.

They grab him and proceed to carry him from the house as he mutters feeble protests. He said something like, "It's only my pizza burning. Put me down, dammit."

They managed to get the fire under control, but there ended up being extensive damage to the property.

And he never got to eat the pizza.

A friend of mine likes to use colloquial expressions but something in his brain doesn't register them correctly and they always come out wrong! He doesn't know they're wrong until I point it out to him. Here are a sampling of some of his unconscious gems:

We went into a store to do a couple of things and he said, "I figured we could come here and kill one bird with two stones".

We were waiting for something and he says, "well, you know what they say, a watched clock never boils".

I got him back for something he did to me and he said "this time the shoe's on the other hand!"

He walks among us...

Hi all, First, I'm compelled to say that I do see a difference between stupidity and ignorance. Don't get me wrong, stupid people can, indeed, be ignorant, but so can smart people.

Generally I'm appalled at the absence of basic education in the US. In fact, my parents were appalled at the absence of basic education I was getting. Everything is relative. I also am uncomfortable with technology seemingly removing the need for people to think about or understand what they are doing. However, time marches on.

When I was in college, my geology professor started each semester by handing out maps of the United States. The outlines of the states were delineated, but the names of the states were missing. He asked us to fill in the blanks. He told us not to worry. We wouldn't be graded. When we were done and the maps had been collected, he explained that when he arrived at the city university in the Big Apple, he quickly learned that kids in New York City had some very strange ideas about what was where. Fact is, we had no idea what was where. Geography had been eliminated from the city school curriculum in exchange for something called social studies. (This was one of the things that appalled my parents.) He went on to explain that he took home the maps and that he and his wife laughed themselves sick looking at where Noo Yawk City kids thought things were.

Some years ago I went to the local video store to return a tape. The cash registers weren't working. The clerk was in a panic. I told him to calm down. "How much is the tape?" I asked. "Three seventy-four including tax." I gave him a five. He stared at me. I told him to give me $1.26 change. He said, "How do you know?" I told him I figured it out in my head. "Oh, wow."

Amusing? Maybe. But horrifying. I don't know whether he was stupid or not. But he had become so dependent on technology in his job that he was incapable of figuring things out. Horrifying.

A week ago, my son ran in a big race. I took him down there and waited at the starting line with him until the race started. Several groups went before his 2k race. There was a 5k, a wheelchair race, racewalkers, then the 2k...each five minutes apart. An announcer on a very loud speaker told each group when to line up, and which races would come next.

There was a group of college-age girls behind us in the 2k group, wearing their race numbers on their college T-shirts. We all watched the racewalkers line up and start, then the announcer said we would be next.

One of the girls watched the racewalkers start and asked her friends, "Are we gonna hafta WALK the 2k?" None of them seemed to know the answer, so they turned to me. (I was the only "older" person close by, so naturally I must be the authority, right? ) "Do you know if we have to walk the whole way?"



I should have said yes. I really should have. I mean, I had a camera with me and everything.

As I read and thought about the comments here, it occurs to me that there are three separate issue: stupidity, ignorance, and not thinking. Not applying what we know. Allowing technology to function as our brain cells. Or simply not learning how to apply what we know and never being in a situation that forces us to think.

I don't understand this. She knew she was in a race, but didn't know if there was motorised transport to the finish? But if she had to go on foot, she didn't know she had to hurry, i.e. run?