Flannels
On our bronze D of E we managed to persuade one of our compatriats that a flannel was a small brown woodland creature that lived in trees and was very shy. He was 15 at the time.
(Buftoon posted this on, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 14:24, Reply)

To one of my old flatmates - it isn't a 'gegabyte'.
Jennifer, or Jen. I think she introduced herself as Jen because the extra sylla-ma-bles in her own name confused her.
She was doing Aerospace Engineering at the same time I was studying English Language and Literature, so naturally she was the clever one. Of all the displays of ignorance you can imagine, the kind of person who's too thick to understand that they aren't intelligent provides the most laughs (as well as constant facepalming and a fear of them opening their stupid mouths again).
Apparently she was disqualified from ever actually being a pilot because one of her legs was too short. After a mere month of living with her, I decided that the truth was that her brain was too short.

She didn't cook. She couldn't cook. As far as I know, she lived entirely on Cheesy Pasta and the output of a takeaway that I can only compare to CMOT Dibbler's sausages. It's called 727. It's in Glasgow. Avoid. Anyway. Curious about her severely restricted diet (I wasn't trying to change her mind; her death from malnutrition would only have my life less stupid) I quizzed her about this one day.
Turned out she didn't know how cooking worked. At all. Not 'she couldn't cook'; she didn't understand the concept. I can't remember the exact phrases, but the gist was something along the lines of

"How do you know what ingredients to use? How can you heat them up all at the same time? I'd get confused. It doesn't make sense to me."
"So you can manage one thing at once right? Even it that one thing is just microwaving sachets of Cheesy Pasta?"
"Yeah, I suppose."
"Okay. Tell you what, me and Gav will show you how to make a simple curry. We can even use the microwave for most of it."
"I dunno..."
"Come on, it's easy. Get the rice out of the cupboard and put it in the bowl, set it on low for ten minutes and we'll start chopping vegetables."

Eight or nine minutes later...

"No, the narrower end is the sharp bit, you hold the other end and...what's that smell? Is something burning?"
"Shit, is Jen trying to think?"
"Shut up dickhead."
"Haha. No seriously."
"...it's the rice. It's all black. Jen didn't put water in it."
"I didn't know you were supposed to do that..."

Word of advice - when headdesking, make sure you have a nice safe sturdy desk to do it on. I ended up planting my face straight into a frying pan full of hot oil and sizzling onions in dismay*. That's why I'm so pretty** these days. But that incident pales into comparison to a discussion we had about computers. Jen was a computer whiz. Her daddy told her so. So when I claimed it was pronounced 'gigabyte', I was shot down in paroxysms of scorn.
"It's megabyte, so therefore it's gegabyte"
"Even though it's spelled with an i?"
"Yes."
"No, it's based on the Greek prefixes for thousand, million etc."
"No it isn't."
"I see. So presumably we also have kegabytes, tegabytes and so forth? Instead of kilobytes etc?"
"What's a kegabyte?" (or possibly 'yeah it is kegabyte'. I forget, but it's all the same really.)
"I'm going to murder you now, Jen."

Thankfully I don't see her much any more, but she's still an arrogant prat when I do. Sigh. Thank God for beer, eh?


*Not true. Thankfully. I was tempted though. Physical pain is nothing compared to the pain of dealing with the Truly Stupid
**Also not true, but that's sheer coincidence.
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 14:22, 5 replies)

DOCTOR!!! Sharon
While I was working on my M.A. and after a spectacular fight-cum-break-up with my girlfriend of the time, I ended up sharing a flat with a square-shaped girl from the Midlands named Sharon. Sharon was super-intelligent. She was working on a PhD in science... can’t be more specific than that, but all her books has shitloads of charts and MATHS and other technical twattery like that in them.

But despite the fact her brain was throbbing with facts, numbers, and INTELLIGENCE, Sharon was, well, a bit of a thicko.

This came to light during the first week I took up residence in her spare room. I found Sharon, sweaty and trembling from flu, sat in front of Supermarket Sweep (this was probably enough proof enough in itself), but then I noticed Sharon was doing something quite frankly absolutely fucking terrifying. She was chewing on something. Then she’d spit out this wadded ball of spit-covered stuff into a cup and...

... “What are you doing, Sharon?” I asked, unable to peel my eyes away from her. Witnessing this weird activity had the same effect on me as watching a woman fuck a dog on the web; it was both disgusting, vomit-worthy but strangely fascinating in equal measure.

“I’m recycling germs to boost my immune system,” said Sharon as matter-of-factly as possible, as she reached for another of her endless supply of screwed-up snotty used tissues and proceeded to feed this new bogy-encrusted phlegm rag into her mouth, where she chewed on it like a cow munching on grass with a far-off look in her eyes.

And over the next few weeks I discovered Sharon really did live in a wibbly-wobbly mindfucked world of her own.

Evolution was a myth. Kellogg’s Frosties had a special highly addictive ingredient (like crack) in them to get you hooked so you bought more Frosties. We all had at least seven ghosts who were our own personal ghosts who follow us around and looked out for us. She swore on her mother’s life that dogs couldn’t walk backwards. Loads of weird shit like this.

After surviving being Sharon’s roomie for a couple of months our lease expired and we both had to move out. Sharon had a HUGE bed that resembled a scary torture device made out of dense wood which would probably have survived a nuclear strike with only a few scratches and a bit of minor charring. I had a couple of my mates round to help us move out – Sharon to her own place in Narnia, me to somewhere where people didn’t still believe in the fucking tooth fairy.

“This is too big,” said my mate. “We’ll never get it down the stairs.”

We stood and regarded the damn thing for a while. “How’d you get it up here in the first place, Shazza?” I asked.

Sharon couldn’t remember. We stood round and looked at this lethiatan of bedroom furniture for a bit. Then Sharon had an idea.
Moments later we’d placed our mattresses outside Sharon’s bedroom window, one storey up from ground level. My mate Blackpool Ben was down on the ground waiting as the rest of us manhandled the bed (which now resembled a medieval trebuchet), out the window so it teetered on the sill.

“I’m not sure about this, Shazza,” I said.

Sharon then babbled some shit about maths and forces and fuck knows what – apparently she’d done a few calculations and the damn thing should’ve come to a nice padded rest on the mattresses below with the delicacy and tenderness of two fit lesbians have a bit of a kiss...

So we tipped the fucker out and watched as it sailed through the air, landed dead square in the centre of the mattress pile, and even as Sharon started to tell us how fucking clever she was and my mate Ben down below approached the bed to secure it...

... the bed recoiled with alarming speed and velocity off the homemade trampoline and shot off to the side, knocking Ben clean off his feet, scything through him, and then it landed... Directly on Ben’s crumpled body. He didn’t even make a sound. All we could see from Sharon’s bedroom window were a couple of Doc Martened feet sticking out – it was like that scene out of the Wizard of Oz with the wicked witch of the west and the house, only our wicked witch was heavily into utility boots, crappy bright green Day-Glo socks and baggy stonewashed jeans.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Sharon sounded really perplexed as the rest of us rushed out to make sure our mate hadn’t been killed in a freak falling furniture accident.

Didn’t have too much to do with Sharon after that brief cohabiting period – she did my fucking head in. I remember the last time I saw her in a bar in Manchester she said: “Remember your friend and the bed? You wanna know something hilarious? I remembered afterwards that bed wasn’t mine! It was in the flat when I moved in! Isn’t that hilarious?!?”

No, Sharon. No, it wasn’t. (Well, ok, a little bit – Ben wasn’t badly hurt and to this day I think he may – while that huge bed frame was hurtling towards him – have actually pissed his pants).

Sharon went on to get her PhD. She’s probably sat in an office or a lab somewhere now telling some poor random tosser that we could help replace the hole in the ozone layer if we collectively held our breath for a couple of minutes a day...
( SpankyHanky, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 14:21, 1 reply)

That Snow White
Thought 7 UP was a fizzy pop until she unknowingly drank Rohypnol.
(nimrodihnio making gravy for one., Fri 19 Mar 2010, 14:18, 2 replies)

Slight pea
Cue wavy lines~~~~~~~~ : 1998 Stood at the desk of a pretty but deeply irritating trust admin in a large accountantcy firm office.

"The reason your disk won't work has nothing to do with the platform upgrade we carried out over the weekend. No your PC is not broken. No we haven't messed anything up. No I am not picking on you because of previous issues we may have had. Floppy disks don't generally work when users wrap the label over the shutter!"

It doesn't make them work any better if you then insist that other members of your office coven have used them successfully.

That ladies and gentlemen is why I no longer work in IT support.
( number5 has been fighting tramps and losing., Fri 19 Mar 2010, 14:18, Reply)

The future Mrs Draconacticus
Always makes me laugh... albeit usually not with her but somewhere near her. She isn't stupid, she has far too many qualifications for that, I'd say that instead she out-sources her thinking.

Some fine examples are the time she asked me, "When's November 5th this year?" and on recently hearing our mate's band was going to be playing at the Deaf Institute in Manchester she actually thought he was going to be doing a charity gig for deaf kids. Bless.

A lot of her finest moments are related to cars. In the recent snow she sat for 3 hours on the motorway waiting for the AA man to turn up because an engine warning light had come on. Turns out that the little flashing light was actually trying to tell her she'd just driven 20 miles with the boot open.

I wasn't that suprised. Years ago we'd had a heated debated when she was telling me about an ex-housemates car that was borked...

Her: "Yeah, Barry's car was screwed, the carburetor had gone"
Me: "How do you mean?"
Her: "Well, it was like there was no engine in it"
Me: "What? It wouldn't start?"
Her: "No, it went, but it was like there was no engine in it?"
Me: "Cars don't go without an engine"
Her: "No, I mean like a radio controlled car..."

*fast forward 15 minutes*

Me: "I don't understand, do you mean it didn't accelerate properly?"
Her (getting angry) "NO! I told you! It was like it had no engine in it! Why don't you listen? My dad worked for Rover so I know about cars!"

*fast forward another 15 minutes*

Me: "Look, if it had no engine it wouldn't go at all. What EXACTLY do you mean?"
Her: "I mean it used to bounce around a lot!"
Me: "You mean the suspension was fucked?"
Her: "Yeah! That's it! The suspension had gone! What did I say? Oh yeah, well, carburetor's close innit?"

I've gotten used to it over the years. I always keep two glove puppets ready to explain hard stuff to her now. Wouldn't change her for the world though :)
( Draconacticus Reject shampoo. Demand real poo!, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 14:12, Reply)

A future doctor no less
When I was at college I was into the rights of the animals. I was chatting to a second year medical student and asked him if they performed vivisection in the college labs. "What's that?" he asked.
( stopmeandslapme Cometh the hour, cometh your mum, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 13:59, 1 reply)

bunker somewhere?
My friend katherine thought Hitler was still alive... this came to light in 2004...in a history lesson...about how he died
(fych, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 13:58, 1 reply)

I had a friend Chris
who was a bit confused about sealife. He thought that dolphins were fish, which was fair enough - but he also thought that mermaids were real, but seahorses made up.
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 13:54, 5 replies)

More students...

I heard a postgraduate student ask their mate 'is a decade 2 years or 5?'
(groovytommy, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 13:46, Reply)

Students...
I could write for hours about the students that attend the University i work for.

My favourite would include a third year - about to graduate - student asking me how to do running tally during an open day.

'Yes you put 4 lines in a row and the one across makes 5...'

If they're the future than I’m worried.
(groovytommy, Fri 19 Mar 2010, 13:43, Reply)