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How to put phone in silent mode.

I work at a ski mountain, it was spring and the snow was melting. Had to explain that it needs to be below freezing out for the mountain to make more snow. "Fake" snow is still frozen water.

I was eating at a BBQ joint with my ~30 year old friend, when I had to break the news that the pigs don’t survive if you “only take their spare ribs.”

My wife had to explain to me that pickles were pickled cucumbers and there wasn’t a pickle tree.

I was 30 something years old.

Something explained to me...

I was 41 when I realised that people actually see things in their minds eye. It is not just a metaphor.

Blew my mind, like it is some kind of superpower, you can just imagine stuff, and you see an image of it....

My partner is such a good cook, partly because she can combine flavours in her mind, to check if they will taste good together, that is just fucken cheating.

When people "get a song stuck in their head" they can literally hear it.... How the fuck do you get anything done, you crazy bastards.

My mom was proud that the neighborhood worked together to block an "ugly new cell tower" from being constructed in the area. Then she was upset that her cell service was spotty, in literally the same fucking breath.

I worked in a retail pharmacy so here is a list:

• Women do not have prostates
• During Fukishima nuclear incident, there would be no physical issues for people >5,000 miles away
• Antibiotics don't work on viruses
• Vaccines
• "Natural" medicines can significantly interact with other medicines
• What jock itch is and the astounding amount of men who thought it was normal
• Don't recklessly shove things into your eye, ear, nose, butt, penis/vagina (exceptions apply)

I've had to explain tariffs a lot lately...

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned tax brackets.

I laughed my ass off when my racist uncle smugly explained that he turned down a raise, because that would put him in an upper tax rate and cost him more money than the raise was worth.

Tried to explain how income tax works. Didn't go through that thick skull of his.

I had to walk a classmate through how to install a program in Windows. You know, go to the website, hit download, wait for it to finish, next next next, etc. We're two weeks away from getting our diplomas. In IT.

That narwhals are real. Partner thought they were mythological like unicorns.

Honestly, it was funny but somewhat understandable.

Having to explain that a certain infamous "Chinese alphabet" font¹ (favoured by tattoo joints everywhere) is not how you write in Chinese. There is a shocking number of people who have somehow managed to grow up not just to adulthood but to senior citizen levels who think that foreign languages are just English with a funky spelling; that grammar rules are otherwise the same, and that words translate one for one (and sometimes, in extreme cases, like the gibberish font, letter for letter).

¹ https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-font-mystery-solved.html

I got a job building touch screen information kiosks for a fundraising thing a university was doing for one of its STEM programs. I had my hands full building this thing, so they got one of the students at the college who "does video" to put the content together. I got one chance to talk to this girl, I start in "So the monitors I'm using are standard 1920x1080, so aim for that resolution" and she stopped me to ask what that meant. So I'm now convinced she wasn't a member of the AV club or in some video production major...she was someone's niece who's on Tiktok.

I eventually get an email with the files she was supposed to send to me. Each kiosk was going to be programmed differently to display information about the thing it was standing next to. I get a bunch of video files in no folder structure with names that don't mean anything. "charlton.mp4" "untitled.mp4." "melissa.mp4"

I replied with an email asking "How am I supposed to know which of these videos goes with which kiosk?" How do you end up with most of a bachelor's degree like this?