Post stories about DUMB people you’ve met

Have we met, OP?

One time, I was a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In my acting technique class, our acting professor would ask us to share “To Be” moments — moments we’d have in life where we want to do something where fear can be in the way but we decide to be honest and act anyway. Example of a To Be moment, “I was at a party, there was a girl I wanted to talk to, but normally I don’t feel comfortable approaching girls without the help of Jim Beam, but I went and approached her and talked to her anyway.”

Well, there was this one girl in our class, let’s call her Naomi. She would constantly say the dumbest shit in class that would appall everyone and make them giggle.

One day, she shared her To Be story: “I was walking around at Target and I had this urge to fart, so instead of holding it in, I just let it out. And the woman behind me ate it.”

Our acting professor responded, “Naomi, that’s not a To Be moment, that’s just bad manners!”

Years ago, I was eating in a restaurant, and I could clearly overhear the conversation of the two gay guys at the next table. This was one of those times when there was a water shortage in the city, so restaurants wouldn't automatically bring you water, but would wait for people to ask for it. So one of the two gay guys asked for water in a somewhat annoyed tone, and then he turned to his friend and said, "I don't know why they don't just bring you water even if you don't ask for it. Because if you don't drink it, they just pour it into the sink and it goes back to where it came from." I was tempted to explain to him the flaw in the "logic" of his statement, but I thought better of it and remained quiet yet amazed by his stupidity.

In college, the professor was lecturing on the history of slavery in the United States, those who opposed it, and those who assisted escaped slaves. When discussing the Underground Railroad, a female classmate said, “Didn’t everyone hear it? Trains are loud.” True story, I promise.

Last week, I talked to a closeted guy I met on-line a number of years ago.

He's a physician.

He's a MAGA moron, who is unvaccinated (believes he's somehow immune to COVID-19), an anti-masker, and a supporter of that racist, sexist, irresponsible imbecile.

Complete idiot!

R5, are you sure he's a physician, or is that just what he told you?

R6...no, he's a physician.

When I was in 8th grade there were these two girls who were astonished to learn that Alaska and Hawaii were not right by each other due to them usually being located in inserts on the map of the continental US.

“You mean they’re not right next to each other!? I always did wonder why one was so hot and one was so cold.”

I had lived in England for a while and my co-worker back in the US said she couldn't handle living in another country. "I mean, do they even speak English there?", she asked.

I once had a friend's girlfriend try to convince me breathing was fattening.

I'm not sure if that wasn't more "fucking crazy" than it was "stupid" however.

An ex-boyfriend asked me to meet him at the pharmacy at CVS because he had to pick up his subscription.

We broke up soon after.

Years ago when I and my neighbor were around 30 years old there had been an earthquake somewhere and my neighbor informed me that the reason we had earthquakes was that the buildings were too heavy.

My freshman roommate at Cornell misidentified the false belief of these four in complex analysis:

(i) a bounded entire function is constant;

(ii) sin 𝑧 is a bounded function;

(iii) sin 𝑧 is defined and analytic everywhere on ℂ

(iv) sin 𝑧 is not a constant function.

In his favor he was gorgeous, hung, often nude, and later turned into a fun frat boy who tipped me off which brothers liked blow jobs from dudes.

I don’t think you know what day it is.

My parents. I'm not sure why these two thought getting married and making FOUR kids they couldn't afford was a good idea but here we are. Mother doesn't believe dinosaurs existed. Father believes he was abducted by aliens and had an implant put into his head. He recently had a brain MRI and they found a BB lodged in his head. He doesn't remember how it got there.

Both are narcissists. Both Trump supporters. Neither had more than a high school education. Grew up with my father telling us that the Rapture was going to happen soon.

I go on to Datalounge twice a day.

My otherwise reasonable friend insists that moot is in a moot point is pronounced MUTE.

R17, can't you just show your friend the correct pronunciation in a dictionary? And if your friend can't read the phonetic alphabet well enough to get it from that, you can call up the correct pronunciation on a computer and have it read to your friend.

OP that was a fascinating story. You should tell it at social gatherings.

My mother was concerned because the doctor told her she had 'lymph noids'. I said everyone had lymph nodes, they're part of your body. She seemed surprised.

She also thought New Mexico and 'Old Mexico' were two countries.

OP's story sounds more like someone with a learning or developmental disability, rather than a "dumb" person - the hint is being so much older than the other students. Not all developmental disabilities are visible from casual inspection by a 11/12 year old child.

A girl at my university thought, because of commentary that referred metaphorically to it, that JFK wore a hairshirt under his clothes.

As a teen I worked as a soda jerk/clerk at an old dairy in a bad neighborhood (Hey, Lower Cherokee Street!) A woman came in and asked how much a quarter cone cost.

For fun I used to attend meetings of obscure organizations. UFO Study Groups, Divine Science lectures, Rosicrucians, Rosary Circles - loved it. At a psychic research organization's demonstration of past-life regression during hypnosis, a woman who volunteered recounted being an Egyptian princess. She didn't remember her "past" after her trance. However, when the speaker told her what she had said, she became very upset and angry, demanding to know how she could get her treasure back, who she could sue, etc.

For balance, until I was 22 I thought the words in (the execrable) "God Bless America" were "to the oceans, white with snow." I was in WWII parody show in college and stood in front of the chorus and bellowed it out. DUMB.

I knew someone who believed until they were 14 that Nancy drew and The Hardy Boys were real people.

We haven't quite met, OP.

“Didn’t you see my turn signal?”

Said to me by someone who hit my car while making an illegal left turn.

We met Jack when he was just a little lad, 15 or so I think. He was a silly tart, in them days.

He'll be 27 next month. Reckon his teenaged self would have the man he is today on toast in a pub quiz, man.

But we love him to bits, anyway. Wouldn't change him for the world, even if he is proper hard work and a liability, like. Lucky he's gorgeous, that's all I'll say.

I thought there was a Santa Claus u til I was 14

There isn't a Santa Claus U.????

How does he learn how to deliver all those presents?

He fucks his elves into submission

I was in a playwriting class back in the early 90's. This one woman brought in a one act play about AID's...but it was about lesbians with AID's and she had two women who gave it to each other...well, since the college and most of the people in class had been fully impacted by the AID's crisis, we sat her down to explain that there was only one possible case of a lesbian couple contracting AID's but both were drug addicts so it couldn't be verified that they gave it to each other orally. You just couldn't explain it to her!! I finally convinced her to make changes but she had one lesbian raped by a man but she still gave AID's to her lesbian partner. The night of the performance...inappropriate laughter brought on by the shrill acting and the intensely stupid writing. Years later, she invited me to a public reading of her published book of poetry expecting that she had scorched us all but I said to her "I guess you self-published. What a waste of paper...' and she hung up on me.

I had a middle school teacher aid that felt the need to point out obvious things in casual conversation, like after watching a historical play.. she felt the need to tell us those aren't the actual people and things like that. Looking back on it's possible she had aspergers but it was dreadfully annoying and it did often make her seem daft.

A woman in a tea house that complained about the tea being watery. They tried to accomodate her by offering stronger blends but it would turn out she wanted something thicker...

One of my friends had several little hyperactive, blonde haired, blue-eyed devils living with her.. so the only time we'd get any peace is if I offered them a dollar to go search their backyard for a four leaf clover. Sometimes, I'd have pleas to visit the next day because they'd surely find one. For a mormon, she had decent weed, so why not. Eventually they'd actually find one but they never caught on we were getting rid of them. .. this was spread out over years, so you'd think eventually.

An array of dumb people that believed in kooky metaphysical things. . . though most of that bordered on mental illness.

[quote] AID's

I used to be in a carpool that picked up the last member in front of his office building every evening. But he was never waiting by the carpool dropoff/pickoff area along the curb. He was always walking back and forth along the block, so we would have to wait for him to come back to our car. I finally asked him why he wasn't just waiting for us where he was supposed to so he could just get in the car and we could take off right away. He said, "Because the sign there says 'No Standing.'"

I gave an older couple some financial advice several decades ago and they told me I was obviously a complete fucking idiot because who would buy a technology stock at such a cheap price ($1.79/share) and it was, furthermore, so stupidly named? ('Apple')

I commented (complained, actually) on the Bermuda Gazette website about them reporting about a function for a recently deceased member at a local yacht club when there are any number of signs around the club that clearly say say 'No Wake Zone'.

We were at Yellowstone Park, waiting for one of the geysers to blow. A woman near us was impatient, constantly looking at her watch.

She called the park office on her cell phone and asked, "When are you going to turn this thing on?"

My friend was a white, blonde haired, pale skinned South African expat teacher in Canada. When she told her class of 7th graders that she was South African one girl asked her, "Why aren't you black?" My friend explained how both whites and blacks lived in South Africa. And continued teaching the lesson which was about another topic entirely. A half an hour later the same girl piped up, "But. your parents ARE black, right?"

In middle school, our assigned reading book was about the few people who survived an atomic war. One of my blonder classmates asked if this was a true story.

Years ago, a friend brought an incredibly dim twink to a party.

Somehow the conversation turned to the magician David Copperfield, and the twink asked:

"Do you think he really does magic, or are they just tricks?"

A friend flew in to Boston for a to meet friends in P-Town. He picked up a rental car and followed the highway signs to Providence, not realizing Providence, Rhode Island wasn’t the same as “Providencetown”, as he put it.

R11 Here Another memory of my dumb ex. We were walking down Fairfax just north of Melrose in West Hollywood towards the Farmer's Market, and we passed by some Hassidic Jews. He asked me if they were Amish. I think he pronounced it as Armish.

I've met so many people who believe that a man was conceived from a virgin birth and fathered by a god, and he and his father live in the sky.

I once had a teenage dog sitter come over to meet my golden retriever. When I told her she could let him out at any time because we had the invisible fence she said “oh so,like,only the dog can see it?“

My dad was poking fun of an acquaintance whose employer had reorganized him in a 'lateral move'. My dad told everyone that the guy had been moved down the ladder.

Dad thought 'rednecks' were Catholics, named so after the tight collars Priests wore.

Dad used to say water was fattening.

In my first university calculus class, one girl near the front was asking dumb question after dumb question. But the worst was when she asked the prof to explain, why, in one of the proofs, something multiplied by zero was always zero. The prof was frustrated and stunned but, to his credit, just said that further questions would have to be addressed outside of the lecture.

[quote]In middle school, our assigned reading book was about the few people who survived an atomic war. One of my blonder classmates asked if this was a true story.

Was the book Alas Babylon?

"AID's"

Oh, dear!

I was in software sales, and the end of the year was always a big push to get all deals closed. My boss called a meeting and told us he expected everyone to work 24/7, 5 days a week.

I’ll tell on myself. Years ago, after moving into a new house which had an area that was dark and virtually windowless, I actually said out loud, “I wish they made skylights for walls.”

Many years earlier, while on the phone with my parents, arguing about whether I should quit my job and go to grad school full time, the following conversation occurred:

Parents: “If you quit your job and go to grad school in New York, where will you live? How will you pay for your housing?”

Me (single, unmarried, no children of any sort, and very stupid): “I’ll just live in married student housing like we did when you were getting your doctorate, Dad.”

My freshman year of college I lived in a ten story dorm with two sets of stairwells and two small elevators. You learned a "rule" right away: If you lived on floors three and below, you should just take the stairs. Anyway, someone decided as a prank one April fools day to put signs on all four stairwell doors that said "STAIRS BROKE: USE ELEVATORS" So this one girl gets on the elevator with a bunch of us and pushes "2". There's audible sighs as we start going up to the 2nd floor one guy goes "Seriously?" and she turned and says "The stairs are broken!" and we all busted out laughing 🤣🤣

How painfully ironic that someone would repeatedly use the term "AID's" in a post about someone else's stupidity. I'm going to assume this person has no idea what "AIDS" stands for. Should be bother to explain?

I think most people probably don't know that AIDS stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. I think they don't even think about why something is named the way it is. Most people are not very curious about anything.

That stupid eleven-year-old girl, OP! How dare she not know!

My dad was.uneducated and would invent words that sounded like something he had heard before. Pre-ambugate -> to move or get going. Bulgry -> usually said about wild hair (may have meant 'vulgar'). Immaculent -> magnificent, often said about a stately home.

In 10th grade chemistry (honors AP, no less) a sub who never should have been a sub started telling our class that chemistry was important because all the chemicals in our food today were causing us to live shorter lifespans. She said look at Methuselah, he lived for 1,000 years. Nobody does that anymore. Because of the chemicals.

The entire class of about 15 students was dead silent. Not one single person (including me) dared ask a follow up to that. We all just nodded, knowing you can't win an argument with a crazy person.

Someone thought cancer stages went up to 10, so Stage 4 wasn’t that bad, right?

In the late 80s I was working as a set PA on a low budget film that featured quite a few model-turned-actors who were all around my age - mid 20s. The lead was a gorgeous, good-natured dummy who was playing a gorgeous, good-natured dummy - this was basically his first acting gig. He went on to minor TV stardom and has been the subject of a few DL threads.

Walking him from wardrobe to set one night he talked endlessly about how beautiful one of the actresses was and how badly he wanted to fuck her. “Why don’t you ask her out,” I suggested. “Do you really think she’d go out with me?” he said with honest doubt. “You are the star of this movie,” I reminded him. He lit up. “Yeah, you’re RIGHT!!”

A former coworker asked me why the snakes would be lying in the road in the mornings on our way to work (very long private driveway). I said, they're getting warm from the tar and the sun. She asked why they needed to do that. I paused and said they're cold blooded. She looked at me expectantly for more information. The job she had before was teaching elementary school for 30 years.

I heard this very loud redneck voice following behind me 8th Avenue in Chelsea on Halloween many years ago: "So they had all this chicken wire. And I said to him, 'Why do you have all that chicken wire?' And he said 'We're going to catch chickens.' So I said to him, 'That's stupid. You don't use chicken wire to catch chickens.' Then they left. And they came back three hours later -- AND THEY HAD CHICKENS!"

R58, I'm surprised she didn't next ask if they were rescue snakes!

They were r60! If they didn't move for the car, I would get out and bring them to the side of the road

Oh rescue-chick, I'm sorry, I draw the line at snakes. Even harmless little grass snakes. We can never be friends now and if there's any more talk of saving snakes. I'll have to put you on block.

But let's not go there because I enjoy your posts.

I met this couple at a party and the husband was telling everyone when she was out of earshot, that two men were saying bad things about pearl harbor. She got mad at them and told them they should not be talking about a woman like that.

I always loved it when comedians like Leno or Letterman would go out on the street and ask average people really easy questions that people don't know the answers to. Like Leno asked what country Canada was in and many didn't know the answer and one woman said Australia.

How amusing, R63!

(but I suspect 20% of the instances in this thread are humorous hoaxes)

About 15 years ago, my partner's father suffered a massive heart attack. We flew to his home state so he could see him one last time. He was on life support but brain dead. While my partner sat with his dad, I sat and waited with others. One of his closest friends, a man in his 70s said to me, "why don't they do a brain transplant?" It was a genuine question and I struggled not to laugh.

My sister who is not a dummy by any means can often seem so. When "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" came out in the theaters, she called me after watching it because I was in martial arts at the time. She seriously asked me, "So can some martial arts people fly like that?" I burst out laughing and told her she was a weirdo. She is one of the smartest people I know and it just struck me as so odd that she would think that.

Not really a dumb person, but dumb reasoning for an employee policy (OK, she was dumb, too). I worked at a restaurant in college where, if you worked a double, you weren't allowed to leave the building during your break. So if you got off at 2:00 and weren't back on until 5:00, you were expected to just hang out off the clock. I asked the manager why, and she said, "What if you got into an accident and couldn't make it back for your night shift?" Bitch, what if the people who didn't work lunch get into accidents before their night shift?

Years ago, I was at a party & approached two women, one much older, who spoke with an English accent. When she conceded to my question that she must be from the United Kingdom, the younger women, aggrieved, said, “I thought you said you were from England!”

90% of people in America are dumb. How about smart people we’ve met?

Back in the 1980s, I was in line at the discount day of performance tickets booth in Times Square (TCKTS). When the woman in front of me reached the window, she asked for "Barefoot in the Park with George."

I have a longtime friend, total sweetheart of a guy, and actually quite smart, but oh can he be clueless sometimes! I remember back in the days of AOL chatrooms, we’re out one night with friends, and I’m telling them about this guy I met on AOL and hooked up with. My sweet clueless friend asked if he was deaf. Ok, weird, but I answer no he wasn’t deaf. He then laments how lucky I am, all he ever meets on AOL are deaf guys, and he doesn’t know sign language. Mutual friends and I exchange puzzled looks. Ok, I’ll bite - I ask him how do you know they’re deaf? He replies because they keep asking me about ASL. After a good 10–15 minute laugh involving crying, snorting, holding ourselves against the bar to our sweet clueless friend’s bewilderment, I was able to explain that in AOL chat rooms “ASL” doesn’t mean “American Sign Language”, it means “age, stats, location”. You could literally see the recognition slowly spread across his face as the lightbulb finally went on.

He’s still the same sweet, smart guy - and yes, he still has these moments of cluelessness.

R66 He could have taken my brain. I don't need the damn thing!

Why are straight me so stupid?

r64 enjoy!

My mom is in her 60s and one of these days said she believed vampires were real at some point in history.

I don't know if my father's suffering from mild cognitive impairment -- it's possible, he's in his early 70s -- but during the past several years I've become astonished by his lack of very basic reasoning and problem solving skills, so much so that I'm sometimes astonished that he was able to go through life without any major problems, and in fact was very successful in business. I've always known he was fundamentally incurious and not much of a reader (I think he has a learning disability that was never diagnosed), and maybe he was always a little dumb and I never noticed before, but it's really off the charts lately.

A few months ago, he was looking to buy some pictures to put up in his new condo. He emailed me a link to a Monet reproduction, one of the ones that's printed on canvas. He said something like, "I don't know why a Monet is so cheap! It's only $150!!" (or something).

I was flabbergasted -- not only that he didn't realize that it's a reproduction, but that he actually believed an original Monet would be for sale on a random home decor website. Zero critical thinking. And this thing is happening A LOT lately.

But hey, at least he had some idea who Monet was.

R72, I actually love people like that. Whip smart, but clueless about some things. I think that's very attractive, actually

I worked with a girl who borrowed a friend's car, returned it and parked it in a no parking zone. As you would expect, she received a ticket. She was really upset that the friend who owned the car expected her to pay for the ticket. Her logic was that it wasn't her car so why should she pay.

A former coworker once asked me where I was going on vacation. When I said New England, she asked what the difference was between New England and England.

My mother once asked me If I had ever heard of someone named Drank Here. She saw the name in the credits at the end of a TV show and didn't know who it was. I was at her house one day when said show was on. The credit was for the production company, named Dorothy Parker Drank Here.

I once wrote a business e-mail to an executive of a company. I wrote something along the lines of "We have been informed you will exhibit at the fair XYZ in June and would like to prepare your press releases. Do you happen to know the hall and booth number already?" The reply read "Yes, I know," without giving the information. It wasn't a joke, just complete incapability of abstraction. I met plenty of people like that in my life who cannot understand courteous demands that aren't worded explicitly, and many don't understand equivalences or comparisons. To every comparison, they will reply "... and what does that have to do with me?" - not because they're offended but because their minds cannot bridge the gap. And no, the people I mentioned above are not autistic, not that they know of or anyone would guess. Many are colleagues of my partner's or people I have to deal with professionally.

It's not about formal education (I know several people without any formal school education who don't have these problems and who aren't dumb at all, by any definition). I also don't think I'm a very intelligent person, and it's not that I'm getting off on feeling smart because others are dumber.

I'm not a pedagogue or a developmental psychologist but usually, the sense for more abstract concepts develops on our way to adulthood. I always assumed that something went fundamentally wrong with people who skipped this particular step in their development. How can you even live if you think "The doors should be shut when you leave" does not also imply that you have to close them if they are open for example? I also fear that we as mankind are getting dumber, in this specific way at least, in a time where everything is spelled out, where subtlety is undesirable, and irony and sarcasm have to be explicitly marked with an /s because people cannot be trusted to abstract that an unfitting comment might actually be ironic.

I’m from Scotland, and I lived in London for many years. I once met a woman who asked me in all seriousness if Edinburgh was on the Northern Line.

A woman in my building, while discussing current political situation in the USA proclaimed “it’s a doggy doggy world”. I asked her to repeat herself. Yes, I heard her correctly.

That's rough, r83!

R83 Was she wearing underwear? Just keep her out of the Rusty Anchor.

OP- I don't know about DUMB people I've met but there are plenty of dumb politicians. For instance Donald Trump is a DUMBBELL as is the mayor of NYC , Eric Adams. Nitwit Junior aka George W Bush is a simpleton.

R86 "... you have met." Have you met any of those?

[quote]I met this couple at a party and the husband was telling everyone when she was out of earshot, that two men were saying bad things about pearl harbor. She got mad at them and told them they should not be talking about a woman like that.

Was it Lana Turner? Because this is an old joke told about her.

[quote] My mom is in her 60s and one day said she believed vampires were real at some point in history.

Ok, I’ll bite. Where is the proof that concludes vampires definitively can’t or couldn’t ever exist? Seriously, why is this completely impossible? It’s very unlikely, granted, but out of the question?

R54/R44 worst case Ontario, he just didn’t get his Grade 10.

My mother in law says she's gonna sue X person for definition of character. And she calls the glove compartment, glove department lol. I'm thinking, the glove department is at jc Penney.

WAck thread alert!

R91, lol. Is she black?

Not being racist; I'm black.

Nah, R93, we're actually Chicanos here in Chicago. She was raised in the projects, and didn't finish high school so, there's that.

[quote]A woman in my building, while discussing current political situation in the USA proclaimed “it’s a doggy doggy world”. I asked her to repeat herself. Yes, I heard her correctly.

I think the more common malaprop form of that expression is "doggy dog world," which I've always found kind of adorable even if it is stupid.

I worked with an older woman. One day she was standing in front of the vending machine with a puzzled look on her face. It was one of those vending machines where the front is all glass and when you select the item by selecting it's letter and number (A3, B4, etc) it gets pushed forward and drops to the bottom for you to pull it out. She was flummoxed because she wanted the bag of so-and-so chips but the corner of the bag was hanging over the Letter/# combination. I told her to select B3 since it was between B1 and B5. She looked at me and said "Ok, I hope you're right...."

Danny Thomas is a lesbian!

In the market check-out, the cashier was examining the order divider looking for the barcode because she thought it was an item I was purchasing. Granted, it was a different looking one than all the rest, different shape and had an advertisement on it.....I just said, I changed my mind and didn't want it anyway, so she said OK and threw it in the box under the counter (I assume with the rest of the items to be re-shelved).

R36 - Non- cellphone versions of this story have been circulating for at least 50 years.

And then there was the moron that walked off the cruise ship in Ketchikan, walked the 100 feet to the information booth, and asked how many feet above sea level the town was.

I have a friend who can’t comprehend fractions beyond one half.

I used to stock shelves at a grocery store and our crew was pretty casual and we joked around a lot since there were barely any customers 3rd shift. One night a bunch of us were in the same aisle stocking and we were joking hard about some random thing & I flung an insult at one of them, and he goes "Yeah well you're a lamofo!" We were like "What the fuck is a 'laemofo!?" And he says "you know, like a 'lame mofo!' And we're all laughing and I said "how do you spell that?" He shouts: "LMFAO!" Apparently he didn't know it was an abbreviation for something, he just thought it was a new insult name and had used it before in front of people 🤣

My late Mother once told me that only dumb people get Alzheimer's.

When I worked the Tech Helpline in my company's IT Dept., we wrote some calls down as PBKCs -- problem between keyboard and chair.

r89, I certainly hope you are joking...otherwise you belong here in this thread.

Have there been people in history who have drank human blood? Yes, there have been. Can they turn into a bat and fly into your room at night to suck the blood from a human and are immortal?

Nope.

Why are Canadian University students so stupid? It's definitely a trend I've noticed over the past couple of years, seems kind of sudden. They've never heard basic historical information, they spout off ugly stereotypes like it's nothing, they lack proficiency in both English and French.

I had one, without blinking a eye, tell me that she had been taught in high school that American men commit suicide because they are irrelevant white men in a multicultural society. She was of asian decent and apparently attended a public high school in Ontario. I had a kid who claimed to be bilingual who couldn't write a full sentence in French and also hadn't heard a slew of common idiomatic phrases before like "the great blue yonder."

"who have drank"

"of asian decent"

Oh, dear x3!

The receptionist at my old job was trying to help solve a crossword puzzle I was doing, so I was reading out the clues. One was a three letter word about a flightless bird with the answer obviously being "emu". She suggested "hedgehog".

She was one of the dumbest people I knew but I gave her a pass for being nice and not an arsehole, like dumb people usually are.

My sister and her husband sent money to Trump.

My mom called her bedroom dresser the chester's drawers. My brother was mortified when he moved out and went to buy new furniture. He asked the salesman if he could look at chester's drawers.

r110 that's hilarious

Sin(z) is not bounded, R13, but considering most people never make it to complex analysis at all, thinking it is, based on high school trig, is hardly a super dumb statement...

Of course you may, R110.

In one of my first jobs my supervisor corrected me when I described a neighborhood as urban. She said it wasn't urban, it was in the city.

A hairdresser was describing why the renovations on his apartment were taking so long while he was cutting my hair, and he kept saying the contractor was very "articulate", just very very "articulate"...

Toward the end of the story, I decided that he meant to say the contractor was very "meticulous"...

r115 you reminded me ... I was getting a haircut the day after the 2016 election and (obviously) already in a pissy mood. One of the hairdressers in an adjacent station kept talking about the "electrical college."

It didn't help my mood.

R114, she might have been saying that for political reasons. Was she a cunt? Dumb blonde? What was her typical personality?

[R114], she might have been saying that for political reasons. Was she a cunt? Dumb blonde? What was her typical personality?

Have always suspected that my Boomer hick father is Aspergic or NPD something, but now I'm wondering if he's also stupid and profoundly lacking awareness.

Today, discussing how irritating and manipulative and non-empathetic my grandmother/his mother-in-law is (which is true, but I don't need lectures on it), he went on what was almost a ranting soliloquy on the topic, getting angrier and more vile and alarmingly threatening with every few minutes, then only after a half hour started calming down and letting me, his too-patient daughter, get a word in edgewise. Because that's what your kid is, apparently. That's what a woman is. Somewhere to dump your negativity.

When he'd got enough off his chest, he threw out more open conversational prompts such as, "she [my grandmother/his MIL] just never listens, or let anyone else speak", "she's fucking crazy and self-absorbed, isn't she? It's all about her feelings, all the time, even when she's talking shite", and "she talks so much and it's always with an agenda, like she's trying to talk people into submission", I kept responding with what I thought were quite blatantly rude and pointed comebacks about him-- e.g. "yeah, I find many people are like that", "listening properly is a rare skill", "there's nothing more annoying than someone who just goes on and on". Either I am a paragon of tact and it went over his head that I was openly criticising his hypocrisy and lack of awareness, or he cares so little for my opinion that he just ignored it and launched onto another rant.

I know of a few billion people who claim to believe in a god and ultimate meaning but whose lives do not appear to reflect any effect from their assertions.

Other than occasional-to-daily OCD practices or the Big Bad Dude gonna git 'em.

About 250 million Americans, for a start.

Not really interested in women who don't walk out of the room when their asshole fathers go off.

But then there's usually something stinkingly off about father-daughter relationships. I see the daughters often being the gamers and snipes.

But, as noted, not interested.

R121 noted, thanks for stating your boundaries.

Technically, it counts as an example, though, whether you like it or you don't. My Dad apparently can't detect sarcasm aimed directly at him in real-time--pretty fucking dumb of him, if you ask me.

And it's easy to make sweeping assumptions and criticise situations you aren't in, have no context for, and can't understand. Good luck with the blanket misogyny, though, bro. That will serve you well in life and a society that is over 50% comprised of women.

My niece says she’s not going back to school this year. She says “they’re a bunch of liars”.

I'm tittering to myself at R121's mild cuntiness.

I met a group of dumb old Dataloungers who can't tell the difference between actors and they role they have played.

R122, another cunt that wants the last word in an exchange having nothing to do with HER issues with everyone around her because she's, you know, a cunt.

And very dumb. Like R119. Any chance to shoot a nail into Daddy.

R126, stop your bullying, cunt. You don't own DL.

When I was in college, my friend Donna and I went shopping one afternoon at TJ Maxx. The cashier who checked us out noticed the vintage I LIKE IKE button on Donna's jean jacket and asked, "Is that him?" (referring to me).

My brother and his wife from the east coast visited me in San Francisco.

We stayed in SF at my place for a few days and took a nice long road trip up to the beautiful Oregon coast.

We were driving through the Avenue of the Giants, a beautiful redwood forest several hours north of SF and pretty close to the Oregon border when my brother's wife says..."hey are we still in San Francisco??"

One of my coworkers stopped going to lunches at pricy restaurants because it was just too exuberant for her budget.

[quote]The cashier who checked us out noticed the vintage I LIKE IKE button on Donna's jean jacket and asked, "Is that him?" (referring to me).

Why yes, yes it is. May I present the 34th President of the United States. T.J. Maxx shoppers and staff, please meet President Dwight D. Eisenhower!

[quote]R76: My mom is in her 60s and one of these days said she believed vampires were real at some point in history.

It's possible that she was imperfectly re-stating something which periodically reoccurs in the news this past decade or so, about the discovery of medieval bodies which had been treated as though they were vampires (i.e. staked down, beheaded with the head placed between the feet, buried face down, or with a brick inserted between the jaws), which certainly attests that the 𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑓 in vampires was real enough. She simply might not have made the distinction.

I sat next to a girl in high school who had moved to our town from Madison, Wisconsin. High school, remember. She was telling me and another guy next to her one day that she had moved from Madison, Wisconsin which was the capital of Minnesota.

You see, Wisconsin is the capital of Minnesota. Madison is the capital of Wisconsin. So she was from the capital of Minnesota.

High school.

A famous podcaster just announced that Anne Hehe is in a coma and has been "incubated".

When I was growing up, we had a neighbor named Brenda who swore up and down that Lisa Todd, one of the bimbos on [italic]Hee-Haw,[/italic] was Elizabeth Taylor's daughter. My mom tried to explain that Liz's daughter was [italic]Liza[/italic] Todd and that Lisa Todd was too old for that to make sense, but Brenda wouldn't be convinced.

One of my mom's best friends during the 1960s was married to a redneck whose mother was staggeringly ignorant. One time they took her to a drive-in movie and she said, "Why, that there ain't nothin' but a big old teevee screen." She also believed Apollo 11 was staged in the desert, and she had some weird beliefs about the Catholic church. Ex: She believed that after a Catholic wedding, the priest who officiated (or, as she called him, "The Father") had to sleep with the bride on the wedding night.

Continued from the previous post ...

When my parents were newlyweds in the late '60s, they lived in a trailer park in south Louisiana. One of their neighbors was a gal named Doodles who was country as hell. When Jayne Mansfield got killed, she told my mom that Jayne was "mupilated" in the car crash and the impact "cut her neck off."

Another time, Doodles called the local health department after somebody's septic system backed up. When they answered the phone, she said, "Hello, I wanna report a nasty place."

[quote]You see, Wisconsin is the capital of Minnesota. Madison is the capital of Wisconsin. So she was from the capital of Minnesota.

I don't get it, what piece of information did she misunderstand to believe that Wisconsin was the capital of Minnesota?

Speaking of geography, I've posted on DL before about these sad encounters:

At the Post Office, the clerk searched her Domestic Parcel Rates chart for the price to mail my package to New Zealand, and didn't know what to do when she couldn't find the location listed after New York;

At the AAA office, the clerk apologized that she had no maps and guidebooks for New England because they only carried material covering locations in America.

R15, a BB can't penetrate a human skull.

R137 She literally said "Wisconsin is the capital of Minnesota." She seemed to think "capital" meant a place that is in charge of another place, so Wisconsin was in charge of Minnesota in her mind I guess. We had to look at the map in our textbook and show her that Wisconsin and Minnesota were different states colored in with different colors, and that Minnesota had its own capital city. She learned so much that day.

When I was in college and still under 21, I could go to a nearby Air Force base for medical stuff as my father had been in the service for 20 years. One visit I was at the front desk of the clinic and mentioned I was transferring to a college in Canada and idly wondered if there was a US military base near it and the clerk snapped, Ma'am, this is the US Air Force! I guess she'd never heard of Newfoundland (not that it was anywhere near my school). Or, Japan, Germany, South Korea, The Philippines (at the time).

R132, I think there were instances of people buried alive while in a coma that would have led to the “undead” myths. The same factor played into the idea of a “wake” - several people sitting around watching the body for hours looking for any signs of life.

It occasionally still happens today.

Many of these situations start out as "blond moments" in any one of our minds. None of us are immune to stupid thoughts.

The difference is that smart people know to question their hot take assumptions and learn quickly, never revealing out loud to others how silly we can be at times. Dumb people believe that what they say is valid or worth exploring, never questioning their own logic.

[quote]She literally said "Wisconsin is the capital of Minnesota." She seemed to think "capital" meant a place that is in charge of another place, so Wisconsin was in charge of Minnesota in her mind I guess.

So, aside from everything else, why did the think Wisconsin was the capital of Minnesota specifically? Did she think Wisconsin was also the capital of any other states? Did she have a severe learning disability?

I recently had an argument with my father's second wife, Barbara, about his mother, my grandmother.

Barbara announced that I didn't need to be concerned about my grandmother's medical history since we weren't related. Since my grandmother was adopted by her maternal aunt, Barbara was convinced we shared no genetics.

My brother, his wife and I were going to Sedona for a visit and someone asked my SIL if we were going to see the vortices. She said, "No, we're going to see the Carlsons".

People who believe there's a spirit watching over all of us and judges us based on how good we are.

I worked with a man who always went with his wife to France for their annual vacation. I was speaking to his secretary once when she mentioned that the couple would be leaving on vacation next week -- I said "Are they going to France, as usual?" and she said "No, this year they're going to Europe".

I did meet someone once who didn't know West Virginia was a separate state from Virginia

R138, there’s a dim Detroit radio sports talk show host who, when talking about Zeeland, Michigan native Jim Kaat’s recent induction to the MLB HOF, would continually refer to Kaat’s hometown as “New Zeeland.”

R144 She did not have a severe learning disability. She seemed confused about whether Minnesota and Wisconsin were fully separate states. It had to be demonstrated to her that all states are distinct from each other and Minnesota definitely had its own capital (that was not Wisconsin.) I don't know why or where this came from. Again, she had lived in Wisconsin at least a few years immediately prior.

R136 DOODLES sounds like a DL ICON!!!! More Doodles stories please!!!

20% of the examples given in this thread refer to "dumb" people.

70% of the examples given in this thread refer to people who happen to be ignorant of a particular fact.

10% are people that the poster dislikes.

R153, I agree that there's a difference between being dumb/stupid/lacking intelligence and just being ignorant of a certain fact. Even an idiot can memorize facts without understanding them -- and even the most brilliant people are ignorant of some facts.

However, an adult who remains ignorant of basic facts about the world he lives in when he's been surrounded by readily available education his whole life is just choosing to be uninformed. An employee of the PO or AAA who doesn't know what New Zealand or New England are is willfully ignorant of basic facts required by the job -- making that choice was a dumb thing to do.

R151, if she first of all didn't know that Wisconsin and Minnesota were separate states, and further didn't understand that capitals are CITIES within states, then i would say she had a severe learning disability, even if it hadn't been diagnosed.

[quote] an adult who remains ignorant of basic facts about the world he lives in when he's been surrounded by readily available education his whole life is just choosing to be uninformed.

Dear R154. That readily available education is available immediately via Google. There's no point in leaning STUFF, parrot-fashion, which will have no impact on managing one's own life.

We may be superior intellectuals who were raised by superior families with the notion that we must know everything … but that is an impossible ideal.

R156, 'knowing 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔' ≠ 'knowing everything.'

One needs to know sufficient to be able to make a prudent judgement that something needs looking up/verifying online.

The truly empty mind is incurious by nature.

[quote] The truly empty mind is incurious by nature.

Yes, and that's their issue. I believe 85% of the population are as mindless as sheep. I only ask that they stay away from me and that they refrain from being taking positions of power.

Years ago, some friends went to see a display of one of the surviving copies of the Magna Carta at the National Archives in Washington.

There were long lines, as you can imagine, to file past this document from 1215 that was displayed under heavy protective materials. Just as they got to the document, the woman directly in front of them looked at the Magna Carta and wailed, "BUT I CAN'T READ IT!"

Someone in the crowd who was clearly tired and had no more patience said, "It's in Latin, you dumb bitch!"

R148, it's clear to me that they meant "elsewhere in Europe". I think you just wanted to project 'dumb' onto this person, when maybe they were just lazy in their language in responding to your inane question.

That's happening a lot in this thread. Folks want to have someone to judge.

My friend Robbie said, “Ryan is my cousin but I’m not his cousin.”

Sure, Jan.

How about the dumb whores who think PrEP protects them from everything from identity theft to the clap to Monkeypox.

R160, I knew the secretary for over 20 years and she really was dumb. Very sweet woman and everyone loved her, but dumber than dirt.

R135/R136 again ...

When my mom was a teenager, she had a friend named Shirley, who was dating a blind boy against her mother's objections. Shirley told my mom that one evening while they were having a phone chat, her mother asked her, "How can he talk on the phone? He's blind, ain't he?"

Some classmates and I went on a trip to France the summer after our high school graduation. While we were visiting one of the castles, Chenonceau, we were walking by a pond covered in duck wort that had some ducks swimming in it. One of the girls suddenly exclaimed, "Hey, maybe they call it duck wort because that's what keeps the ducks floating!" We all really struggled not to burst out laughing.

I had my own dumb moment later in the trip, though, when I saw a man call, "Viens!" to a dog, and it came. My unfiltered mental reaction was, "Holy shit, that dog speaks French!" I immediately facepalmed myself. I was starting at an Ivy League school at the end of that summer.

R165 I had the same stupid initial reaction to seeing toddlers speak French as a teenage exchange student 🤣 "Holy shit, that baby spoke French!"

T133/135/164. I too am a southerner and appreciate the endless entertainment provided by those among whom we live. Moved to California and miss the laughs.

These stories about DUMB people are just SO entertaining.

I have been laughing for days.

Knew a woman who believed that eyelashes could take root on noses and faces if they weren’t immediately removed. She believed the same was true of pubic hairs. She habitually mispronounced the name of her own hometown, Pascagoula; she replaced the letter c with a b. Sweet woman, though.

How come I don't know as many entertainingly dumb people as all you?

An acquaintance bitching about her light bill. "thanks Biden; worst economy EVER" - we're in Texas so blame ERCOT and Abbott.

A young woman at work was taking her new pet cat to the vet for distemper shots, which she hoped would cure his unfriendly disposition toward the family's pet dog.

This is about the dumbness inculcated by growing up wealthy and sheltered: First year law school. After the 1st semester, after the Christmas break, in January I had returned to the classroom for our Property course, which lasted all year, in a great big amphitheater. A woman who sat in the row behind me was already there, standing at her desk, and I said hello and asked her how her holidays had been. She came closer and said she had had a good time and said that, during the break, she had gone to visit one of our classmates who was a new friend of hers, who lived up in Virginia. I asked her if she'd had a good time there, and she said "Yes, it was nice," and then she hesitated slightly, and paused. She leaned closer to me and said quietly, "But, you know, one morning I stepped out of their back door and I realized something odd: you could *see* the house of the people next door!" I was completely confused, and had no idea what she was trying to say, and it suddenly hit me that she had *never* spent the night in a house where another house was close enough to be seen from the property where she was staying. It was mind-boggling. At first, I thought she must have been joking, but she was just as serious as she could be. I just nodded slightly and let is pass. I tried to imagine the kinds of people who would end up being her clients as an attorney. Most likely, all royalty..

Get some sleep hon at R173.

Years ago, I was fueling up a large vehicle at a gas station. My tank was on the left side, to explain this along. The pump ahead of me was out of order, but the other two on the other side of the island were empty.

A women in a small vehicle was waiting behind me. (For what, I wondered). I motioned to her that she could 180° over to the other side. (As in, go by me - turn around to the other pumps on other side of island, voila, fuel up).

Stuck her head out window and waved. “Hi, I’m just waiting my turn!”

(What?) Well, it’s empty on the other side, I said.

“No, I have to fuel on this side, because my gas cap is on the left.”

No reasoning skills, no logic skills. They’re out there. Waiting in a lineup at an empty gas station.

R175, maybe she was also just lazy and didn't want to drive and maneuver her car.

In high school there was a chemistry teacher who liked to play jokes on students. One day in the middle of a class he gave a girl a beaker and told her he wanted her to fill it with air from a bottle that was at the back of the chemistry lab. She took the beaker, poured the air from the bottle and brought it to the front of the class and gave it to the teacher. Students were laughing, but she remained clueless. The teacher told her that the air from the bottle had gotten out of the beaker because she forgot to cover the beaker.

She immediately went to the back of the class, "refilled" the beaker with air from the same bottle and this time put a piece of paper towel on the top of the beaker and returned it to the teacher. By this time everyone was howling with laughter and she kept asking, "What? What?"

R177 I guess you had to be there.

I knew a girl who was rooming with a friend of mine. Their toilet broke and wouldn't flush, even by dumping a bucket of water into it, so they had to get creative. The friend basically took a shit at her gym or at work for a day or so, while they waited for the building to send a plumber. The roommate girl resorted to taking brown paper shopping bags they had accumulated from buying groceries and shit into them in her room, then tossed them down the garbage shoot afterward (along with the toilet paper she used to clean herself, I guess). Several days later my friend reported coming home from work and seeing the roommate walking back toward her room with one of the paper shopping bags she had just taken from where they were kept in the kitchen. She asked her what she was doing with the bag, and the roommate sheepishly replied that she needed to take a shit. My friend, stunned, told her that the toilet had been fixed and was working again for the last two days. The roommate just never thought to check for herself or ask about the status.

Why in the hell would you post that story r179?

Because this person was stupid, R180?

[quote]I had lived in England for a while and my co-worker back in the US said she couldn't handle living in another country. "I mean, do they even speak English there?", she asked.

When I was 17 I was in America and some stupid gurl asked me if we spoke English in England?

I was once staying with an ex-friend. I asked her if she had any eggs in the house and she said no, she was cutting back on dairy.

I worked in public health for several years and encountered dozens of people who couldn't understand the differences between race, demonym, and ethnicity terms. It was difficult as fuck for me at times.

Not someone I met, but I recall the years-ago CSPAN caller, a woman with a strong southern accent, railing against "HOMOs." In context, her health-related outrage was about HMOs.

I had a friend who thought that Lincoln was assassinated in a movie theater.

I heard of this guy who thought he was booking an event at the Four Season Hotel, but it turned out it was Four Seasons Landscaping.

R179? The "garbage shoot"?

Maybe I should write a story on DL mocking stupid people about you.

R179 I'll have you know that in local councils and land-owners in the late 29th century would erect signs saying 'Rubbish May be Shot Here'.

They wanted people to 'shoot' stones, broken bricks and non-putrescible rubbish to use as landfill on swampy, unusable land.

R183, eggs have long been grouped with dairy products under dairy. It's what we were told in school. Nobody claimed eggs were made of milk though. They are also grouped together for marketing purposes.

This thread is no longer fun.

Yes, we want more stories about DUMB people so we can laugh at them.

When my nephew's umbilical cord fell off, my sister-in-law would show it to their friends who didn't have kids yet and tell them it was his foreskin she'd kept before he left the hospital. Many believed her.

^Did she cook the umbilical cord?

It's the fashion now.

[quote]Somehow the conversation turned to the magician David Copperfield, and the twink asked: "Do you think he really does magic, or are they just tricks?"

Maybe his question related to Copperfield's assistants?

This was on Livejournal so it's been abandoned for a while, but it was totally in the spirit of this thread.

R177 I would have loathed your teacher. Teachers who teach by making examples of a student’s idiocy care usually desperate to be liked. I never respected them.

R188 Yes, you got me. Or, rather, autocorrect did. Unfortunately you cannot edit posts after the fact. Oh well.

At a bookstore in Los Angeles many years ago, my partner asked, "I think what I gave you is the correct title. The author's name is Kilpatrick." After shuffling through microfiche cards for a while, the clerk responded, "I can't find anything under last name Patrick, first name Kill."

R142 In third world countries to this day, a lack of top medical equipment leads to a misdiagnosis. Most often, there has been a lack of oxygen to the brain, far longer than a person could be expected to recover.

Thus, when a person “wakes up,” it’s not really going to be a life worth living due to brain damage. There are stories every year from (again) third world living conditions of someone rising in their casket. Odds are against them lasting much longer afterwards.

There are also caskets that have been raised in the past, for whatever reasons. The corpse had pulled their hair out in a last ditch panic before they suffocated underground.

Brain damage was ensured in those conditions. The kindest thing that could be done without life saving tech available, is to drain the blood at the funeral home so the deceased is left undisturbed. Yet some cultures won’t do it. It’s a shame really.

I had a very close work friend (rip) who went to tour Graceland & various places near there, including a former plantation. She came back & was telling me stories about the horrors of slavery, how poorly they were treated, the terrible living & working conditions,etc. I was very sympathetic, but kind of nonplussed, as I knew all of that already. She was a good 20 yrs my senior, but it was all new to her, she was SHOCKED by what she’d learned. I couldn’t believe she didn’t learn any of this in school, or even just from pop culture movies & stuff(Roots, hello!).

I thought she was pulling leg at first or something when she started explaining stuff, like it was completely mind-boggling that this is, or should be, common knowledge. “Did you know that slaves lived in really cramped shacks? They worked umpteen hours a day? If they slacked off they were whipped? I had no idea!”

Fwiw she was an evangelical Repub conspiracy theorist.