August 17, 2023 | Christine Tran

People Share Their “I’m Surrounded By Idiots” Moments


Not everyone can be Einstein, as evidenced by these stories about folks who learned they were not in the smartest of company. It’s hard enough to navigate the world with our own intelligence. What happens when our friends, co-workers, or even family reveal their dim colors? Take it slow with these wacky stories of people coming to the shocking realization that they are surrounded by idiots.


1. A Class of Her Own

There is a girl in my class who is beyond help at this point. Her best moments: "I don’t want to donate my eyes because I don’t want people to see what I’ve seen". "Gingers can’t be American". "Yay! I got a D in French". I just want to clarify the French grade, though. I don’t want to seem like I think I’m better than anyone because of grades.

I wrote this one down because she interrupted other people’s learning and shouted this out in the middle of the lesson. Honestly, as long as anyone tries in their test it’s fine, but she was on her phone most of the time.

stupid idiots

2. Disney Magic Goes Too Far

When I was in elementary school, I did a presentation on Pocahontas, and everyone in class insisted she wasn't a real person. I don't even think the teacher backed me up. Thanks for nothing, Mrs. Spell.

Surrounded by Idiots FactsFlickr

3. Not a Seedling of Thought to Be Found

Got in a heated debate whether plants would exist without humans because we water them. Everyone thought plants would die without humans, me and one other person were the only ones who thought otherwise.

Surrounded by Idiots FactsPexels

4. All the Colors of the Pain-bow

When I was in high school, someone asked me how you get green paint. I said you mix blue + yellow and it makes green. Literally everyone argued with me, yelling, and called me stupid. I immediately lost all faith in humanity.

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5. Great Wall of Ignorance

In a grade 8 social studies class, when I told my teacher the Great Wall of China could not be seen from space, she said, "When were you in space?" And everyone laughed at me.

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6. This Excuse—Like Your Child—Doesn’t Hold Water

Every day I go to work in my local leisure center...The heat and humidity are draining enough, but it really gets you when parents come in with two children who can't swim and leave one of them alone..".Sir/Ma'am, you need to stay with both of your children, they can't swim!" "Oh ok. I'm sure they'll be fine".

*Child starts getting into difficulty without the parent seeing*

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7. Working 9 to 5 Has Never Been So "Fun"

One co-worker told her boss's boss to come down to her office if he wanted something from her. One co-worker got a slice of bread jammed in the toaster and poked it with a fork. Our security guard accidentally shredded his paycheck. One co-worker terminated her apartment lease and had a removal company standing in the hallway without having a new apartment lined up.

My sister-in-law had no clue why her 50 kgs of surplus weight would contribute to her breaking her ankle while walking down some stairs. All in one day. I took the next day off.

Stupid Rules Backfired factsGetty Images

8. Common Sense Is Calling

Working in retail. I sell phones while I'm on commissions, and sales are what pay my bills. 90% of my job is helping people do things with their phones that they could have figured out on their own with a Google search that would have taken 3 minutes, or next to no time at all if they would have just read their darn screen and did what it freaking said.

No, I can't just change your Apple password. Yes, you have to call Samsung about your warranty, they really don't have a reason to speak to me. You aren't hearing your ringtone because you turned the volume all the way down. I wish I was exaggerating, but anyone else who works in a cellphone store can relate, I'm sure.

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9. 9-1-1, What’s My Emergency?

I got hired on as an ambulance dispatcher for a company. Now, I'm not an expert in medicine or anything, but I had some prior experience in related fields, so I felt pretty confident going into the job. It was a newer "department" that was created specifically to handle the expansion of an already well-established company.

What I found out this meant was that the entire department was hired either just before, or at the same time as me, which I was cool with, because I figured that everybody would have come from similar backgrounds. Nope. I found out that, for the most part, the people they hired were hired for their customer service experience.

The management decided it would be easier to teach medical knowledge to those with good customer service skills than it would be to hire people with medical knowledge and teach them good customer service. Unfortunately, while that sounds good on paper, what it meant was that 90% of the department knew NOTHING.

They would mess up diagnoses, leave out important equipment required for transport, and consistently dispatch units that couldn't actually handle patients’ needs. It was a circus ring for a couple months before people from outside the department were brought in to train. (They worked in the same building, so they just came to our floor.)

Eventually, our entire department just got absorbed. I guess if I had to find an upside, it would be that, as one of only a few people who knew their stuff, it was easy to get a promotion.

Worst Thing Found in Hotel FactsShutterstock

10. Working at the Car Wash

I run a car wash, and it’s absolutely amazing to me how many people want to drive through it. It's a big conveyor belt, none of that chain and dolly stuff, where you have to be lined up just perfectly. But anyway, all you have to do is pay attention to the people working in the wash who tell you to stop via voice and hand signals, along with the 40" television and automated voice that tells you what to do and you'll be fine.

But no. I have multiple people daily who I have to scream at to stop their cars and put them in neutral. I mean, I suppose that if they want to, they can drive on down this track and smash through like 50,000 dollars’ worth of equipment. But when we do finally get them stopped, they usually open up their window like, "What the heck do you want?"

Oh yeah, sorry, it's obviously our fault that as soon as you pulled into the wash behind the wheel of your 2,000-pound death machine, you completely stopped paying attention. I'm sure the insurance company would see it your way.

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11. Too Funny to Be Fiction

True story: When I was going through college the first time during the '08 election, one of my classes allowed us to bring in news articles for discussion; one jerk brought in an Onion article, and seriously tried to pass it off as completely legitimate. I tried to call him out, but he insisted it was real. I want to believe he was joking, but... he was earnest.

And, because life is awful, I'm pretty sure a looooot of people believed it.

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12. Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts

Our family's car got hit by an intoxicated driver while it was parked in front of our house. I was the only one who heard the crash and saw the car drive away. My family called me abusive for trying to prevent them from banging on the next-door-neighbor's house to blame them for the accident. They also denounced anything I said about what I saw after talking to the authorities.

You know, the only darn witness to what happened. The reason they kept denouncing me was because, "I was protecting the illegals like I was one".

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13. The Part Doesn’t Match the Whole

I joined a college group to help build a race car. During one of the first meetings when they were taking apart some components, I used the word "acrid" to describe the smell of some liquid I had smelled in the shop. Now, I wasn't an engineering student, but everyone else in the shop was. They all discounted me because they thought I made up a word.

It wasn't just that they didn't know the word, they also refused to look it up and kept berating me for it. Their attitude toward the whole thing was toxic, and I left the group shortly after that.

Narrowly Avoided Disaster factsShutterstock

14. Someone Call the UN

During our presentations in a public speaking class I took in college, we each had to do a presentation on a country and the customs/norms of that country. One student explained to everyone that Africa wasn't actually a country, but a continent. Everyone seemed struck by that. Another student used the word "providence" instead of "province" multiple times.

And the presentation on Scotland involved the student saying, "Oh and they celebrate Boxing Day. It's the day after Christmas and I don't know, I guess they have a big boxing match?" It was awful.

Dumbest Patient FactsShutterstock

15. In With the Wrong Crowd

I realized I was with the wrong crowd (including my girlfriend at the time) when I registered for college at the age of 30 and all they could do was tell me I was wasting my time and laugh at me. I spent most of my 20s hooked on substances after my mom passed on because I was so depressed, so they didn't think I could accomplish anything.

Today, I'm 32 with a 3.8 GPA transferring to a top 5 university across the country to go to med school. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't accomplish things despite having a colorful past.

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16. Do the Carpets Match the Drapes?

I dye my hair silly colors, and lately have been different shades of purple. I was checking out at the tills when I overheard one woman ask another if my color was natural. I turned and looked at them straight in the eye, and the second woman was squinting at me. I raised my eyebrows in a sort of "Yeah, your friend seriously thinks THIS is natural" thing.

But the squinting woman turned back to her friend and said, "Yeah even her roots are purple, so it must be". I did a thousand-yard stare as I collected my things and left.

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17. He Shoots, No One Scores

I convinced some people at work to go out for lunch with me because I wanted to tell them that all of our contracts were ending at the same time, so we should all negotiate our new contracts together because there was a lot more work ahead. When I brought my food back to the table, one of them was sliding a bottle of water across the table and the other one was trying to stop it with his head like a railway boom gate.

Needless to say, I didn't get to give my "workers of the world unite" speech. Needless to say, no one got the raise that they wanted.

Fyre Festival factsShutterstock

18. A Most Taxing Calculation

I used to work at Walmart as a cashier. During tax-free weekend, the place was a mad house. The lines were long, and the customers are non-stop. That being said, I can say that at least 80 percent of customers would point out to me, quite angrily, that their total was still including the tax. For example, if their purchase was 148.67, they would wonder why the tax of .67 was on there and why it wasn't an even total, like 148.00 even.

I had to repeatedly explain that's not what tax is.

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19. Who’s Your Accountant?

I once had 3 coworkers agree that I was a sucker for taking overtime (that amounted to, before taxes, almost doubling my income on a given day because of time-and-a-half for 3-5 hours) because "they take it all back in taxes". I tried to clarify and no, they believed it ALL got taken back in taxes. Like, three grown men believed that. WHAT.

Caught Lying FactsShutterstock

20. There’s Dumb and Then There’s Heartless

I used to work on the Brooklyn Bridge as an ironworker. One day, some poor soul was standing toward the edge and was contemplating jumping. I told my foreman and he called the authorities. At about this time, all the trades on the bridge started to gather and watch this man. Maybe 5 minutes go by, and someone starts a "Jump!" chant.

This dude was going to kill himself and now he has about 40 people egging him on...he jumped. Quit my job and moved across the country, screw those freaking jerks.

Bizarre Medical Practices factsGetty Images

21. Friday the 31st

I had to explain that Halloween, in fact, can never be on Friday the 13th.

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22. Evaporating Like My Patience

I once had an argument that rain was "new water" bestowed to us by the Earth. My friend truly believed that water did not recycle, and that consuming it meant that it never saw the Earth again. Also believed that anything flushed down a toilet or drained was burned and evaporated into nothingness.

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23. I’m Thinking of Another Four-Letter Word

I was at work and explaining to a co-worker how to put wrap on a cooking-wrapping machine, and I say, "You have to pull it taut". And she just stopped and said, "That isn't how you use that word. You can't teach a wrap". And my bosses come in and I had to convince them that "taut" was a word, and they told me that I shouldn't use big words like that all the time. Taut.

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24. Knowledge Is Power

I was a TA in high school for a regular high school, I think it was World History course. So not Honors, not "Academically Enriched," but not quite eating your own poop either. Anyways, I get to class and the power is out, so of course everyone is going nuts cause...its dark, I guess? So, the teacher still wants to lecture and the kids all groan.

That is, until one yells out, "Let's watch TV!" YAAAAAY!! The flood gates were opened. Everyone starts chanting, "TV! TV! TV!" I'll never forget the teacher's face as he looked at me. His eyes filled with disappointment about the future of our country. No one in class was able to realize that no electricity also meant no television. Sad.

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25. Cry Fowl

Yearly, a local restaurant offers a meal for the price of $1 for their anniversary. They offer a fried chicken with sides or meatloaf with sides. I decided to go, only to find a line stretching around the block. Hop in line, waited an hour and a half before I was pretty close. Employee walks out to say, "Sorry, we ran out of chicken. We only have meatloaf".

The circus that erupted after that was astounding. One lady in particular I remember for the amazing quote, "That's freaking ridiculous! Me and my dog have been here for 2 hours and we both wanted chicken!" Further up, I hear a bigger commotion. Apparently, one guy got upset about there being no chicken, his friend tried to calm him down, someone else in line made a comment, and all-out brawl ensued.

Line scatters. Two officers nearby subdue the situation to the best of their ability. Restaurant shuts down for the day. No longer does $1 anniversary special. That was a nice thing for a while. I miss $1 Fried Chicken day.

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26. Miss "Congenital"-ality

Freshman year of college, I'm in a math class and we had some random group project to do. A girl in my group informed us that she wouldn't be at the next meeting as she was going to have eye surgery. I asked her why and she said, "I have genital cataracts" and I said, "You mean congenital?" and she gave me a confused look.

Everyone backed her up that she really did mean "genital" and not "congenital". Even after I Google it and show everyone the difference between the two words, they proceeded to tell me how you can't believe everything you read on the Internet. I was dumbfounded. I just imagine this girl still going around and saying "genital".

Caught Lying FactsShutterstock

27. The Suggestion Box Is Never Open

At a monthly meeting for all the department heads and supervisors, the general manager went around the room and asked if anyone had any ideas about how we can make a good impression on the new Regional boss who would be visiting. Nobody said a word. I knew this person from working together at the previous property, so I suggested something that he always harped on.

Two hours later, I was called into my boss's office and told I could no longer attend these meetings. Later on that night, a few of the upper management took me out for drinks and told me that it is expected to not offer any suggestions when the general manager asks for suggestions...it was absolutely ridiculous and I've never forgotten it.

Put in my two weeks shortly after. It still pisses me off to this day.

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28. Literal Pants on Fire

I was hanging around with my friends. One of my friends had just gotten his very own moped. It needed a fill up, so they went to get the jerry can with petrol in it. We were in the middle of an apartment building complex on the patio. My other friend wanted to see how much petrol there was, so he used his lighter to help him see.

I immediately said, "Stop that! It will catch fire". He did not believe me, so they decided to test it by pouring the petrol on the ground and to try lighting it up. The person who was pouring the petrol scared and jumped once the petrol caught on fire, and they dropped the jerry can. The rest of it splashed to the ground and formed a 10 meter (32 ft) tall fire spiral.

Scared man biting his nails looking left in gray t-shirtkurhan, Shutterstock

29. All’s Well That Ends Well

I was on a job site, and we had to pump water out a dam to do some maintenance on some pipework. Supervisor gets a pump organized, it gets dropped off, we are good to go. So, the guys get all the poly line in place, start up the pump aaaaandd...no water is moving. Supervisor declares the pump to be a piece of trash. I ask if anybody primed it. I get a blank look.

After explaining to him that it would need to be primed, he decides to humor me. I tip a bucket of water in the wet end. And another. And another. This thing is not filling up. I enquired as to whether there was a gate valve fitted to the intake pipe. More blank looks. And this time they refused to believe anything more I said.

They ran that pump for a good 3 hours, expecting it to build pressure somehow. I hung out in the truck while they proceeded to destroy the wet end of a very expensive pump. Biggest bunch of freaking idiots I've ever had to work with.

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30. What’s up Pussycat?

I used to volunteer at an animal shelter as a teenager. I volunteered regularly and was basically there whenever I didn’t have school, but most of the younger volunteers were only there for a few weeks in the summer because their parents made them go. There was one summer I was training some of the younger volunteers on how to care for the cats and how to properly clean their areas and whatnot.

They usually work up front with the healthy cats that are up for adoption, but that day I was told to take them to the back and show them how to take care of the cats there. The back is where they hold the sick cats, strays, and kittens and moms in the nursery. Obviously, they weren’t ready for most of the cats there, so their job was to learn how to care for the healthy kittens.

Now, every kennel in the back is CLEARLY labeled right on front about whether they’re sick or a stray, if the cat is aggressive, whether or not it's been vaccinated, what medications it needs, all of that stuff. So of course, that’s the very first thing I teach them, to be aware of the labels and to come to me if there are ANY cats they’re afraid to work with or any labels they don’t understand.

So, like 20 minutes pass, and I’m busy mixing one of the stray’s food with its meds when from the nursery I hear: "What does feral mean?" "Who cares? I wanna pet it. Open it up". I rush in just as this juvenile cat screams and lashes out, trying to scratch them. Of course, NONE of them had gotten rabies vaccines but luckily, they’d all jumped back in time to avoid getting scratched or bitten.

I had to close the kennel and drape a towel over the door to help it calm down. I couldn’t believe I had to explain what the word "feral" meant to a bunch of high schoolers AND scold them for not following the rules and trying to play with aggressive, unvaccinated strays. None of them came back to volunteer. I was very unsurprised.

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31. A Most Royal Mix-up

One time when I was about 15, I was out with a group of my mates, and somehow the conversation got onto the Royal Family (I'm from England). I said something (can't remember what) about the Queen, and then my best friend says to me: "Didn't the Queen die?" and then someone else says, "Yeah, she did". Uh...No, she's still alive.

I explain this to them, and then my best friend’s sister says: "No, she's dead, I know she is". So, we're all stood there for like 10 minutes arguing over whether the Queen is dead or not, when I eventually say: "Ok, if she's dead, when did she die?" To which my best friend replies: "In 1997, in a car crash I think". I just stare at her and say: "That wasn't the Queen, that was Princess Diana".

And then another girl says: "Oh, so it was the Queen's daughter that died?" And after that I just gave up.

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32. Not a Doctorate in AV Equipment

Bear with me here. I do classroom tech support at a state university. I'm near the top of a fairly tall ladder of operators, who each do their own troubleshooting to try to fix an issue before passing it on to the next level. Got a call the other day for a "projector not turning on" (most common service call by far). It was for a private department at the law school on campus, meaning that their own IT/tech support had given up before setting up a service ticket (costs money) to have us check it out.

All levels of support beneath me passed it on up, until it was my problem. I showed up in the room—professor and around 20 young, intelligent-looking law students. The projector was powered on. I pointed that out to the professor. She replied, "But it won't show my desktop". I walked over to her computer and saw that IT WAS POWERED OFF.

I turned on her computer for her, watched the projector screen light up with her desktop, looked her in the eye and said, "Should work now". Then I turned and looked at all the students and left. Freaking room full of academic millennials and who I assume is a very intelligent professor, and nobody thought maybe she should turn on her laptop? To say nothing of the half-dozen technicians who all gave up on the issue before I got involved.

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33. My Sun and Stars

I tried to explain that the moon and sun were not the same size, then all of a sudden found myself having to explain that the sun and the moon were in fact different and not just one side fire, one side rock. They all laughed at my crazy theories, then asked if the sun was so far away, why is it in the same sky during the day (on Earth) as the moon was at night?

They peed themselves laughing, and I just laughed with them.

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34. An RA Is Not an RN

I'm an RA, and I had a student with the flu show up to a buffet-style program and take food. They then came and asked me if I would call them an ambulance in half an hour. I explained that's not really how emergency services work, but I could call them the student taxi to take them to any medical attention they needed for free if they wanted.

They said no and went up to their room. Sure enough, half an hour later, their roommate runs down in a panic saying that they can't breathe. We go up to their room and they are breathing fine, they just don't feel good, probably because of the flu. At this point, I call campus police and they arrive and ask the student what they want.

We explain that we have no issue calling for an ambulance. However, the hospital is one block away, and it's an expensive trip for something that really isn't an emergency. Besides, the school is willing to pay for a trip by a taxi that is only a 5 min wait, anyway. So they finally decide to take the taxi to the ER. They go and are discharged in hours with a diagnosis of the flu and told to rest.

The next day, the student's mother calls and emails any person in the school she can get the email for, including people like building maintenance and random residence life staff from other buildings. She is upset that I would not "take care of her daughter" while she was clearly suffering from such an illness. Apparently, the mother thought I'd be nursing her child back to health. Her fully adult child.

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35. Go With "I’m With Stupid" Next Time

I was middle school age and I had just finished watching the Lion King Broadway show that traveled to my city. I bought a t-shirt that had Scar’s mask on the front with the quote "I'm surrounded by idiots". In the back, it said Lion King Musical, or something like that. It was summertime, and I went to tennis day camp at the time.

I decided to wear the shirt. Well, towards the middle of the day, this one kid gets annoyed and starts getting angry with me, saying he's not an idiot. I try to calmly explain to him that it's just a shirt and not to take it literally. Suddenly, all of the other kids start joining him and getting angry at me, telling me that they're not idiots either and that I'm a jerk.

For a few minutes, I'm trying to calm everyone down but to no avail. Eventually, one of the counselors comes up to me and tells me I need to change shirts if I want to stay there the rest of the day. Honestly starting the day, I didn't think any of the kids were idiots, but after all that I felt that the shirt suddenly became accurate.

Cropped Hand Showing Thumbs Down Sign.Getty Image

36. Not a Lightbulb Moment

We were doing some construction work in a hospital, and I was working in the ceiling near the nurses’ station. One nurse got my attention and said, "The guys that were here six months ago put some of these switches in wrong. They're upside down". Curious, I went over to the light and flicked it off and back on. It was in the down position. "Probably a three-way," I said".

No," she shot back, "it's upside down. The light is on, but the switch is down". "Yeah, I see that," I said. "There must be another switch somewhere around here that also controls it". "Ain't no other switch. They put it in upside down". Narrowing my eyes and furrowing my brow, I walked over to the other side of the nurses’ station, about fifteen feet away, and flipped another switch down, then back up.

Sure enough, the light went off and back on. "See?" I said, "it's a three-way switch". "All's I know is that one is upside down. You need to fix it". I looked at her wide-eyed, in disbelief. "You want me to fix it?" She nodded. I flipped the second switch down, and the light went off. I then walked over to the other side of the station and flipped the first switch up.

The light came back on. "There," I said, "Fixed". "Thank you, now that wasn't so hard, was it?" she said smugly, oblivious to the mechanics of the entire situation, and went back to her paperwork. "No problem," I said, and turned to walk away, hoping in my heart of hearts that whoever turned off the lights that night would use the second switch.

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37. Harry Potter and the Unfeasible Origin Story

I'm Half-Korean/Half-White and have a story back in high school. I was sitting at my lunch table and a guy asked me, "So what are you?" I responded "I'm North Korean...My Mother escaped the North Korean Dementors by running across the border to the South. As she was running across the border, I popped out right on the concrete slab in the middle. I became an international issue, claimed by the North/South/God. I then moved to a small High School in Pennsylvania".

"Wow!!! Really!?!?"

"..........yeah"

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38. The Littlest Scapegoat

My wife, her mom, her stepdad. I was watching football when the yelling started. It started out as accusations of my 6-year-old son breaking a piece of the "hardwood" floor. He got accused so much that he finally admitted he broke it. For the next hour, the poor little guy kept saying, "I think I put the missing piece here".

In reality, he was trying his hardest to find it because all three of the grownups complaining about the broken "hardwood" floor were upset about it. Then they made him cry. I don't like my kids crying. So, I told the other grownups to leave off and show me where the hole was, and I would fix it. This is not always an easy job, but my son just honestly didn't seem to know where it was, and I got sick of them calling him a liar.

So, they showed me the hole. The "hardwood" floor was just a floating laminate floor, and one of the pieces slid away from the other piece it was butted up against, sliding about 2" underneath the carpet in one of the bedrooms. I called the adults in and made them slide it back in place. One by one. My wife was first.

Then I slid it back to make the hole and made each of the other two slide it back in place. Then I made each of them apologize separately to the poor little guy they berated and called a liar. I understand my wife not knowing about it, even though she has helped me do flooring in the past. But her mom brags about her "renovating knowledge," and her stepdad has built entire houses before.

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39. Nothing Going on Upstairs

I was at a small social at my parents’ house and mentioned something about the National Space Center in Leicester. A girl pipes up and says, "Oh, I love taking my son there, he loves it. I just find it amusing because I don't believe in space". I looked at her, dumbfounded, and asked if she meant she didn't believe in investing money in space exploration.

No, she did not believe in space. She simply did not believe that anything existed above the sky, that pictures and videos were all fake and that all space agencies and anyone who claimed to have been to space were lying. The other girls in the group started nodding in agreement, saying things like, "Now that you mention it, I've never really seen space".

I just went home.

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40. Never Too Late to Learn?

So, I work at a doctor’s office. Our office is always getting in trouble because we have the lowest rates of physicals booked, despite being the biggest office within the system. We also have had a huge problem with followups not being booked, etc. etc. So, one day, at a meeting with all of the front-end workers, the boss made a comment about how we need to be checking patients out properly.

One person, who has been there NINE YEARS, N I N E years, sitting at checkout goes, "How do you check out a patient?" Now, this wasn’t a clarification question such as "What would you like us to do differently?" oh no no no. This woman meant exactly what she asked. She didn’t know there was a check out button, OR how to schedule a follow up.

She’s been there nine years. She sits at check out! I don’t get it. Anyway, so the other checkout woman during this conversation told her that there is a checkout button, but didn't know how to tell if the patient needed a follow up. She’s worked here two years. When you click the button to check out it says, ON A FULL SEPARATE PAGE (that you have to acknowledge in order to complete the checkout process), come back in 1 year for physical, needs followup 6 weeks, etc etc.

I looked at my manager in complete agreement, and I banged my head on the table.

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41. Dude, Where’s My Car?

My ex-husband went to Winco one day, did his shopping, and then went to the parking lot to find his car. It wasn’t there. He searched up and down the aisles. He had other shoppers looking. He had some guy drive him up and down, still no luck. It was stolen! In broad daylight! He said thanks to everyone for helping and was seconds away from calling 9-1-1 and then me to come pick him up.

Phone in hand, he realizes—we had switched cars that day.

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42. Between a Rock and a Dumb Place

The students in my high school biology class were...something special. At the beginning of the school year, when we were learning about the 6 characteristics of life, many of them were surprised to learn that plants are, in fact, alive. In the second semester, months later, this came back up when discussing symbiotic relationships.

Our teacher was telling us that lichen is a mutualistic relationship between algae and fungus (if I'm remembering right, it's been like 8 years), and a student asked, "Wait, wouldn't it be a parasitic relationship between the lichen and the rock it's growing on?" "No," she explained, "because rocks aren't alive".

Across the room, another student exclaimed, "Wait, you're telling me that trees are alive, and rocks aren't??" And at that point, two more students near me started murmuring to each other about whether rocks fit the 6 characteristics of life (they thought volcanic activity counted as reproduction...and that rocks grow?).

That class was full of moments like this.

Surrounded by Idiots FactsShutterstock

43. To Be Fair, TV Is Pretty Complicated

A girl my dad dated for a while. Even while dating her, my dad would say she was dumber than a bag of rocks. One day, she sat down to watch a movie with my dad. The movie was all about this guy and his twin brother. She sits and watches the whole thing, no interruptions. At the end, she turns and asks, "So there were two of him?"

That would explain why she always had the TV turned to a music channel. Apparently, she couldn't follow normal TV or movies.

Barack Obama factsPixabay

44. The Milk Is for the Baby

I'm a doctor, and I saw a patient who was concerned because she was still lactating, despite the fact that she stopped breastfeeding her twins two years ago. She said: "sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find my husband sucking on them. He says he's trying to drain the milk for me". I had to explain to her that breastfeeding her husband will lead to continued lactation.

Daenerys Targaryen factsPixabay

45. All Out of Spite

I worked very briefly with a woman who showed herself to be both an idiot and a jerk. Her grandmother passed on and she and her relatives discovered that the man she'd known as her step-grandfather had never even been married to her grandmother. She bragged about the family throwing him out of the only home he'd known for three decades because, "If he wasn't good enough for my grandma to marry, he's not good enough for us".

He was an elderly man who lived as this woman's husband and had everything taken from him out of pettiness and spite. It showed me how stupid she was, and I was right. She was fired a week later.

Significant Other Was Shutterstock

46. Bad Idea

There was a troubled kid I went to high school with. He struggled with school but had friends. Nevertheless, he was starting to do substances and go down a bad way. He decided to photocopy the front and back side of a $20 bill, cut it out of normal paper, and glue the two halves with Elmer’s glue.

What is even sadder is that to test his new money he went to the gas station and bought some gum and it ACTUALLY WORKED?!? So in his mind it must have meant that it was fool proof. So he then tried to go and deposit the glued up money at an actual bank. He was obviously found out and apprehended. I don’t know where he is now but I’m assuming he is making similar life choices.

Dramatic Class Reunion Stories factsShutterstock

Sources:  Reddit, , , , , 6, , , ,


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