Why ask?
Living in one of Britain's more picturesque cities you quite often get people asking you take photos of them in front of famous landmarks. This can be quite a nice stress reliever, at least if you take care to cut their heads off (not literally) so what they end up with is a picture of the bottom of a famous landmark and them from the neck down. Quite often also hear tourists saying "Ow!" as they step backwards off a pavement to get a better photo and get run down by an oncoming bike. Most annoying are the French/Italian/Spanish schoolkids who hang around outside MacDonalds looking gormless and abusing passers by. Not too clever in a town with a large bilingual population, I'm surprised there aren't more fights.

However the stupidest thing I've heard is from a British family wandering around looking lost.

The Dad: "Can you tell me the way to the market place?"
Me: "Sure, go back the way you came for about 100 yards, turn right, right at the end and then bear left."
The Dad: "I don't think so."
Me: ???? erm ????

Honestly one of the few times I've been truly lost for words. I've lived here for 6 years and you've obviously been in town for about 20 minutes. More to the point why the hell would you ask me if you were going to ignore what I said? Incidentally I should mention that in contrast to my occasional photo-taking nastiness, the directions were spot on.

Additional thought, how many British people pronounce "Arkansas" correctly at first glance?
(flimflam_machine, Mon 11 Jul 2005, 18:07, Reply)