My late mother in law sometimes suffered from a 'gastric stomach'.
She may also have been a martyr to a hepatic liver, renal kidneys and a cardiac heart, I didn't dare ask.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:59, 2 replies)

It's probably more innocence than ignorance
But when I was still at the age when I needed to be accompanied to public lavatories by my dad rather than going about my business on my own, I went to wash my hands then asked my dad if I could have a sweetie from the vending machine on the wall.

Dad: Err, those aren't sweets, son.
Me: So why are they strawberry flavoured?

A voice from a cubicle piped up with "Good luck explaining that one, mate!"
( Ungersven would support SpankyHanky's patreon, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:56, 5 replies)

Dimwits! Pork! Genetics! Moons!
She believes that pigs are man-made creatures as they are so similar to us.

She also believes the moon landings never happened as she doesn't understand how the astronauts could be sure it wasn't going to be a partial moon.
( disasterprone "Pyjamas caused the Holocaust", Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:48, Reply)

drove around wales
for a good hour looking for the hotel we had booked..me to the girlfriend"no our hotel isn`t called hotel gwesty its called the marriott..both of us thick as pork..fail..
(norfolkngood, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:45, 2 replies)

I'll tap that.
More stupidity than ignorance. First post in years so please be nice!

During my teens i worked in a large, orange apron wearing DIY store. I generally spent the majority of my time mulling around the fire section or showing people where compression fittings were. I also sometimes dabbled with the tools.

One Saturday I got a call to go to the returns desk because if items were above a certain value they had to be checked by someone on the department, anyway off i trundled. There was a lovely polite woman returning two tap hammers, which i thought was a bit strange. Anyway i said they were fine, she asked for store credit and asked me to wait to give her a bit of advice on the tools. As we were walking back I asked her why she brought back two seemingly unused hammers, she told me her husband had sent her in to pick a 20oz hammer but she couldn't find one so she him bought two 10oz hammers instead.
(BigRich, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:43, 2 replies)

I heard a chap on the radio once talking about how dim his girlfriend could be
"Why is she so dumb?" asked the DJ.

"Well" the man explained through repressed laughter, "she doesn't believe in giraffes, but she is quite scared of werewolves!"
( Naked Ape call me Caitlyn, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:31, 9 replies)

An early date with the now Mrs Flatfrog
At Pizza Express: the sweet lady I was with ordered a pizza with anchovies on it - 'I really like anchovies'. Shortly afterwards the repast arrives and she leans over to me: 'I think they've made a mistake, it's got little fish on it'.
'Yes, those are the anchovies'.
And at quite some volume, she exclaims 'Anchovies are fish??!'

Apparently she'd spent her life to that point eating anchovies under the impression they were little veg, like capers.

Admittedly, I showed myself up similarly some years earlier by not knowing the difference between capers and chives.
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:28, Reply)

My BiL deliberately used the term "Well it's not exactly rocket surgery" at work the other day
And was corrected.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:28, 4 replies)

While at college someone I know was taking the ubiquitous general studies
In the previous class the discussion had been around terminal illness and as such they had been given an essay to write. Unfortunately this girl was a little dim and possibly hadn't been listening very closely as she wrote and essay on "Youth in Asia" rather than the Euthanasia that was the actual topic
( Naked Ape call me Caitlyn, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:20, 1 reply)

When I first met Mrs SLVA
we were talking to one of her ex-schoolmates who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact, she was more like the tea-strainer. She tried to tell me that a cut hair can take root elsewhere on the body.
"Don't be soft, it's a dead hair, it can't grow a new root no more than a nail-clipping can produce a new nail-bed."
She wouldn't be told though. She knew best because she was doing a hair-dressing course at college.

Another one of her gems was that earwigs do indeed go into people's ears, and then burrow into the brain and lay eggs. It happened to the old guy that lived next to her granddad.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:19, 2 replies)

Another post from that corrupt cop:
"Maybe moving to Africa would not be so bad. After all, they all moved here."
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:18, Reply)

Sneaky Pea.
Linked so you don't have to even scroll past it.

www.b3ta.com/questions/stupidtourists/post35649

Except for this bit.
( DukeEuphoria Comes highly reccomended, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:14, 3 replies)

A student approached me in the lab the other day
in a state of some concern. She had managed to produce a wonderfully well-resolved emission spectrum for Lithium and yet the principal lines disagreed quite substantially with the wavelengths at which she was expecting them based on her calculations. Was this a problem with the instrument, she wondered, or had she miscalculated the positions of the lines?

Turns out she'd only gone and treated Lithium as being entirely Hydrogenic, and had completely forgotten to apply any quantum defect to the principal line series! Oh, how we laughed.
(LongJohnBaldry, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:11, 13 replies)

Last Fri, Mrs SLVA and I was in Tesco
and we bumped into one of her work-colleagues. We shall call her Sonia. She asked us if we were doing anything on the Sat as there was a band playing at such and such a pub and wanted to know if we fancied going along.
"What's the band?" asked my other-half.
"They're called TBC. They've played there a few times and I've yet to go see them." replied Sonia

I had to go away and get the bread as I knew I'd end up biting my tongue clean off if I stayed.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:05, 6 replies)

Comp'ters
every month or so my mum gets a bit annoyed with the rest of the family being able to operate laptops, so much so that she asks for a go. what happens next is a bit like that scene out of the simpsons where they play monopoly and it ends up as a massive fight. still funny when she asks how to power it up.
(The Blue Brony Flogging a Dead Horse Since, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 14:03, Reply)

Compasses
apparently "know" where you need to go and point to it according to the other half. No amount of reason + logic + facts + theory could persuade her that the earth has a magnetic field and that the compass needle points to magnetic north.
(TWith2Sugars, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 13:41, Reply)

After university, I took a temporary job at Abbey National.
On the first day, I met Angela, who wanted me to do some filing. She showed me the files and the filing cabinet, and said, 'I need you to put these in alphabetical order. Do you understand what I mean by alphabetical order?'
'Of course she does,' chimed in Kirstie. 'She has got a degree in English.'

On another day, Teresa and Lauren were having an argument about whether they they needed to put "its" or "it's" in a document. They asked me, so I said it depended on what they were trying to say.
'It's really helpful having you here with your English degree,' said Lauren.

Yes, because that's where I learned the alphabet and basic punctuation - university.
( thealternativefact, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 13:38, Reply)

"Right,
why doesn't the government just say, let's switch off *alll* the electricity?"

Ex's solution to climate change. I didn't even know how to reply to that.
( Peapod Has returned to the fold on, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 13:37, 1 reply)

These people teach your children!
Its revision season for me now - prime time for procrastination - so what better time to make my first post.
I'm working on a particularly nasty PDE at the minute, and it makes me nostalgic for times of old, good old highschool mathematics and the ever hilarious blithering idiots that teach it.

My favorite was Miss C (and God knows why this one was still single), an all round lovely lady, but obviously missing a few things up top.
She was desperate to be one of the "cool" teachers and this really was her downfall, many a time.

The other teachers in the department had found that maths bingo went down well with the kids, so she wanted in. She found herself a bingo card online and photocopied it thirty times. Poor lass was utterly stunned when every kid in the class yelled bingo at the same time.

God, I loved her
(Malomadame God gave rock and roll to me, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 13:28, Reply)

a young reporter was discussing a new band called the 'pog-ewes' that was playing in Cardiff. It took a couple of minutes to realise she was talking about the pogues......
( pottybeaver is neither a potty nor a beaver, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:59, Reply)

history lesson
I had to explain who hitler was to our 18 year office assistant who wanted to know if he was a nasty man. The explanation took half hour after she realised that second world war came after a first world war. This led to a discussion on the titanic (around the same time) and then a geography and maths lesson to show where the wreck was and that an A4 scale map of the world is just that - a scale map, so it would take longer than an hour to swim out to the coast of greenland.
( pottybeaver is neither a potty nor a beaver, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:55, 3 replies)

Vacuum Brain
My vacuum cleaner was in need of a a new beater brush and after a quick trawl on the net I rang a supplier and got through to a very dopey sounding girl who sounded like she should still be at school.

After giving her the make and model number three times, the conversation went something like this:

Spares supplier "What's your first name?
Me "Stephen - with a ph"
Spares supplier (spelling it out) "Is that S T E P H V E N?"
Me "No, there is No V in Stephen"
Spares supplier "What is the part you require?"
Me "It's the Beater Brush"
Spares Supplier "Duh wossit look like?"
Me "Think of a rolling pin with brushes attached to it!"
Spares Supplier "Oh yeah, I know what yer mean"

My address and card details were slowly taken down with much repetition, biting of the lip and resisting the temptation to ask to speak to a grown-up.

Finally I was asked my email address: "stephen(dot)vambo(at)some(hyphen)"
I was asked "Wossa hyphen?" "It's a dash!" I said.
"Duh is that like a takeaway?" "Yes I replied and gave the rest of the email address.

"Right" she said, "I'll just read that back to you: stephen(dot)vambo(at)some(takeaway)company(dot)co(dot)uk"
( Vambo, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:50, 3 replies)

Is it a bird?
Walking home from work one night, my collegue M recounted the following story which should serve as a warning to any government who thinks that a University education is any indicator of the quality of the workforce it creates.

M had been out with a friend and heard an odd noise above her, in the sky. On glancing up, she noticed what seemed to be, rather unusually, a very old airplane, possibly a bi-plane. She couldn't quite tell and wasn;t really sure if that's what it was, so turned to her friend to ask,

"Is that what you call a bi-plane?"

Only before she got the end of the sentence out, the angle of the aircraft shifted and she realised that actually it was just a bog standard two seater plane.

Not wanting to admit that she'd made a mistake and desperate to complete the sentence with some kind of dignity she uttered the words,

"Is that what you call a plane?"

There's something so delightfully innocent about that that it still makes me giggle every time I think about it.
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:39, 1 reply)

The obligatory thick kid in class
When studying averages in GCSE Human Geography - average wage, number of kids, house ownership, job type etc - asked "How many people are average, then?"

Loads of the class absolutely jumped on him "DUUURRRR! God you're so FIK you tosser! Duuurrr!", and the teacher likewise laughed it off.

To this day I remember thinking what a good question that was, and wonder about the answer.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:34, 6 replies)

On a canal holiday
We took time out to enjoy the delights of a curry in Wolverhampton, our walk took us past a dealership of an iconic ex-british (aren't they all) luxury and sports car manufacturer.

One our party commented "What's that on the bonnet of that car? is it a panther?"
( Radebe, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:31, 9 replies)

Nein! es ist ein Kuchen!
A few years back, I had a fantastic new year's holiday in Berlin with some mates from my undergrad days. Most of them had done language degrees and as so often happens when we go away and meet up with their various well travelled friends, I'm the only one who speaks solely English (*). As most of them speak brilliant English and at least 2 or 3 other languages, it's never much of a problem, and they're happy to translate for me, the hapless monolinguist.

I was at a friend's apartment just after new year with a group of mainly German speakers. The conversation was flowing in a mixture of English and German and as a treat, one of the girls, Naddy, had made a delicious cake for us all to share. She'd put in on the armchair while taking her jacket off, had forgotten where she'd left it and went to sit down; seconds before her arse impacted on the cakey goodness, one of the girls screamed out in warning. Everyone cracked up laughing and my friend turned to me and said "They're laughing because Naddy nearly sat on the cake!"

"Yes," I responded patiently, "you don't have to translate the visual gags for me..."

Bless though, eh?

(*) I can get by in French and Spanish. This lot were discussing Middle Eastern Politics in a mixture of Russian, Portuguese and Hungarian.
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:30, 1 reply)

ok I'll give it a go
My ex wife once bought a Beatles calender
I asked her *why* she'd bought a Beatle's calender-seeing as she'd never ever expressed any interest in the 60's Liverpudlian beat combo..she replied that she'd always liked the Beatles and THATS why she'd bought the calender..interested in this seemingly new found admiration for Lennon, McCartney & co I asked her to name her favourite Beatles song

"Hey Hey we're the monkees" was her reply
( bigmeuprudeboy is using powerpoint or paint...have MERCY, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:24, 3 replies)

Blonde
My delightfully Blonde ex-girlfriend frequently came out with such brain-farts as

"Who is Whitehall? why is he in the news so much? he must be very important"

"when Mary and Joseph got pregnant everyone was very relieved - they'd been trying for ages!"

the same dear little thing who, on having christmas at my mums flat, phoned my mum to ask her if there was anything she could bring on the day

"yes, could you bring the crackers, i didnt get a chance to pick any up"

"of course! really looking forward to it!"

the next day she proudly handed over a box of cheese biscuits.


the worst thing is, she's a teacher.....
(Fake Spaniard, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:15, 2 replies)

For some reason that I forget
the topic of the Voyager space-probes came up in conversation at work some years ago, one snippet being that the signals would now take about 10 hours to reach Earth.

"Can't they speed them up somehow?" asked my collegue Pete.
"You can't increase the speed of light" I replied.
"Do they broadcast it as light? Wouldn't it have to be really bright?"
"No, they use radio signals, which travel as fast as light"
"What if they put booster stations inbetween, that'd speed up the signal."

I began to conjure an analogy based on driving somewhere at a constant speed but realised it was futile trying to explain the principles of the speed of light to someone who needed to be shown how to attach files to an email. On several occasions.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 12:05, Reply)