What is the most clueless thing you've been asked?

"What does it mean when it says 'replaced'?"

And she was accepted to the school by the same standards as I was, theoretically.

literally millions of times

"Does your tan ever fade?" This bright boy was expecting this line to sweep me into his arms, apparently.

OUTSIDE OF AUSCHWITZ!

(on Valentine's Day) "I heard of Leady Godiva, but I didn't know she made chocolate!"

"Ron left the house in an uprage!"
Me: Is that anything like an outroar?
"Yes. EXACTLY."

Maybe these people are lonely?

As we shuffled about in the dark, dank stone bowel, staring at the grafitti carved into the walls (days being counted off, names and things, a real sense of history and eerie trapped feeling pervaded), this American tourist piped up loudly with "where are the emergency exits?".

Watch for the warning signs:

a) your office hires an annoying, precocious, wise-cracking child
b) members of your office start marrying off, especially if any two of them used to bicker all the time and are now marrying each other (bonus warning points for mishaps, hilarity, and/or shenanigans)
c) Fonzie jumps his motorcycle over a shark in the conference room
d) Tom and Jerry start talking
e) Norm's wife shows up
f) people like Julia Roberts, Gina Gershon, Bruce Willis, or Brad Pitt start showing up in February or May

The stupidest thing certainly was the other day I was walking out of the gym. This dude tells me he has to walk back to Portland. (Keep in mind, I'm in Seattle... Portland is around 140 miles away). He asks me how he can get back to Portland without a car (because his "bros" deserted him and one of them took his wallet). I point to him the bus station which is a few blocks away, and told him how to get there in detail. he says "I ain't paying no fucking $28 for a lousy bus ticket! I'm gonna have to walk back to Portland, man!"... I kinda shrugged and walked away. He started chasing me and saying "HEY WAIT UP! I NEED TO ASK YOU FOR SOME HELP!". I grrrrrr-ed, turned around, and said "Sorry, guy, I don't have any money.". And he said "I'm NOT ASKIN' FOR YOUR MONEY, MAN. I just need to know where Interstate 5 is. TELL ME WHERE INTERSTATE 5 IS! PLEEEEEEAASE!".

Interstate 5 was just a block behind him towering over the entire area making a huge din of whizzing cars, being the only major freeway in the city proper.

I couldn't bear to point it out to him.

Thats hilarious ... you should submit that to rinkworks.com Luna :)

You suck. ;-)

Context: the status of a book. Sometimes it says 'not checked out' = self-explanatory. Sometimes it says 'due [date]' = self-explanatory. Every so often it might say 'replaced'...

"Are you drunk?" asks the cocktail waitress.

This one got relayed to me the next day.

This goes without saying. But you forgot good cheese and Mac computers.

1. Is that your real name? (about my real name, obv.)
2. Are you related to Ringo Starr?
3. Are you related to Ken Starr?

4. What *grade* do you teach? (University, in the sociology dept.; but of course all females must teach grammar school, hence the question)

5. So is that social work? / So is that psychology? (NO, sociology is neither of those things, it a common mistake but gets annoying-- like when I was an undergraduate majoring in Social Anthropology at UCLA and everyone kept asking me about Egyptian mummies. This is much like annoying an astronomer by asking if they are an astrologer)

6. Do you play bass/drums/guitar? (No, I'm just lugging it onto the stage for fun)

Friend goes to bar: "I'll have a gin and tonic please"
Barwench: "umm... whats in one of those? I don't know how to make one"

Orbit I think if you say you're a "teacher" instead of a "professor" that would elicit that question. Perhaps if you're not a phd then maybe "lecturer"?

I fear my standard of cluelessness makes me an alien. :-( *hides*

Customer: (Hands me recept from The Other Big Hardware American Hardware Chain)

Me: You're not in (that other etc.)

Customer: Are you sure?

This is so utterly and completely tragic. I've never been in a bar and even *I* know how what's in a gin & tonic -- the name relays all the ingredients!

And Orbit, I LOVED sociology! I am SO glad they had that as a core curriculum requirement at the school I went to (for my first degree). There's this upper-level CS class one can select as an advanced CS credit course and it's totally all about a mixture of CS and sociology. I am SO taking that next year.

This is probably at least a good chunk of it, but is it usually people who've been to college who ask? I have old-school aunts and whatnot who still ask me "what grade are you in now?", when I'm on my second graduate degree and haven't been in a numeric grade in 13 years.

"because the German train system was so efficient."

See, now that's stupid as well. This has to be one of the biggest myths that got shattered over the 6 weeks out of the last 9 months I've spent in Germany whilst visiting Madeline. At one point I waited for a train for over an hour while the board said it would be 30 minutes late causing me to miss my flight back home.

At least in the UK you seem to get an apology for your train being late, and possibly later some kind of compensation. I spent two months trying to get a refund from Deutsche Bahn, but they didn't even apologise at the time, or later. I think at least 50% of the trains I caught were 5-10 minutes late.

However, the long distance trains are fantastic compared to the rubbish we have to put up with in the south-east, but I believe they get a huge wadge of government funding compared to over here so they have every reason to be.

Basically, what is clueless here is travel agents using 12 hour clocks.

http://lolbamas.com/blog/agro-defens-cats.jpg

5 or 6 people in a room, including my (white) friend wearing a RocaWear hoodie with a really fabulous colorful print, and my shockingly and cluelessly naive and unintentionally racist friend:

"Um... isn't that brand for a certain kind of people?"

"There are stores in Ethiopia?"

"Do you think in english or in spanish?"

Wait, I need more context to know why that one's clueless. I remember asking my parents that basic question as a kid, and they had slightly different answers!

See also there is food in Ethiopia?

I think we could have a whole separate thread devoted to questions about the continent of Africa.

wait, Africa isn't a country?

wait, there are cities in Africa?

there's a "c" in Africa?

where's the "t"?

When I worked at the radio station, I answered our call-in line during the middle of the afternoon when there were no local shows on. The man on the other end seemed in his later years and sounded a bit agitated:

MAN: "I'm very sorry to bother you, but can you answer me this one question please?"
ME: "I'll try. What's up?"
MAN: [pause] "Can you tell me who the vice-president is"
ME: "Who the vice-president is?"
MAN: "..."
ME: "It's Dick Cheney."
MAN: "Uh-huh." (Another voice in the room. Phone hangs up.)

Spooked me a bit since I figure I'll be making the same phone call here in about 40 years.

It was probably just Scott Bakula checking where he'd turned up.

P.S.: I've always been really fascinated by that question about thinking, because it's one of those tricky philosophical language/cognition/consciousness questions that's actually experienced by people all the time -- surely loads of long-term immigrants go through some point where their thinking and internal monologue starts to convert across languages, but I've never talked to anyone who can really describe the process. I can mostly imagine how it works, and it's probably very simple and straightforward as it happens, but it's an odd and interesting thing.

Yeah, the English / Spanish question is very far from clueless.

Well, it could be if you were talking to, say, a Latino who'd grown up in the U.S. and didn't even speak much Spanish, or something, which is why I feel like there's some missing context here

The question was directed towards someone from Laos.

Yup, that'd do it, too

Maybe the person who asked the Laotian that question was dyslexic.

The public phone rings at work. I answer it, and an older man asks me who the vice-president is. I pause for a full thirty seconds before telling him "Dick Cheney, I guess." He thanks me and hangs up.

― Pleasant Plains (Pleasant Plains), Tuesday, 5 August 2003 20:22 (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Spooked me a bit too... Making the same post 5 years later?

It haunts me to this day.

What's the thing you've been asked that you thought was the most clueless thing to be asked but it turned out not to be clueless and showed you up as the most clueless you have ever been shown up as?

What's the thing you've been asked that you thought was the most clueless thing to be asked but it turned out not to be clueless and showed you up as the most clueless you have ever been shown up as?

If I asked you to explain this, would that be it?

Basically, what is clueless here is travel agents using 12 hour clocks.
ummm what this lady asked me was completely unrelated to ANYTHING. all she wanted to know was the answer to her clock conundrum. she didn't have any travel plans with the company and hung up once she was satisfied with 12 PM being 12 noon. I hadn't given her a time of '12 PM' at any earlier point and as far as I know, nobody else in the office did either... because for the record, the agency did use 24-hour clocks for flights etc etc.

that is all.

ok, that is retarded.

"do you do abortions on cats"

a call to a women's clinic

Did you say yes?

Obviously a niche in the market there.

i said "are you nuts"

"we use a table"

haha

hahaha

Jeez why couldn't she just drown them in a sack like any other normal crazy cat lady.

Why vote?

Your ILX looks all weird, kenan.

my stylesheet? Yeah, I keep meaning to fix it up and send it to Keith, but... I haven't.

Problem is what's posted is just my Greasemonkey hack stylesheet, and it was never really finished.

it was a man, trayce!

"There are stores in Ethiopia?"

Srsly asked by an American lady (in the 80s, so who knows?) "They eat with fork and knife here?" (Here being Belgium, Europe).

"Do you think in english or in spanish?"

When I was in my mid-teens I would think in English. (I'm Dutch speaking.)

at my previous job (computer programmer) I get this phonecall:

me: Hello
caller: Hi, are you the best mechanic in Montreal?
me: um, no
caller: ok bye

Is he black?

Head of HR on seeing new recruit for the first time, from the back.

Two colleagues who were present had the following Q&A immediately afterwards.

- Who was that?
- She's the human resources manager.

Silence.

(Oh, and yes, he is as it happens black.)

"I was told he would be southeast Asian"

It was probably just Scott Bakula checking where he'd turned up.

― nabisco, Monday, October 27, 2008 12:57 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Had it been Scott Bakula, all he would have had to do is look down at a table and see a newspaper with the headline CHENEY SWORN AS VICE-PRESIDENT before uttering "oh boy."

(It took me one day to think of this, another 12 hours of me mulling the fact that such a headline was never written except maybe as a sub-head, and another 10 hours of me forgetting to find this thread again.)

lol

It took me one day to think of this, another 12 hours of me mulling the fact that such a headline was never written except maybe as a sub-head, and another 10 hours of me forgetting to find this thread again

Worst Barenaked Ladies song ever.

or, best.

"Why are your eyes blue?" was I asked aged 10. I really had no clue as to what I should reply.

that reminds me of one of my co-workers this summer, who said to another on a break, "your eyes are really blue. do you ever feel like when you look up at the sky, they're recharging?" not clueless, just really cute.