People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
For real. Everytime I get in the shower I end up having to point the showerhead away and cower from the cold water and I could have just turned it on first?
I'm in awe of the guys who pull their trousers entirely down at urinals when they must have seen everyone around them not doing that.
I'm a first gen immigrant but despite having native American English, sometimes once in a blue moon I'll encounter a semi-rare word I've yet to be exposed to.
So my closest analog is that I was confused for the longest time why people kept referring to statues of figures from shoulder level upwards as busts when they never had chests or breasts or boobs or blossoms or busts!
So for the longest time not only was I confused, I would be on the lookout for statuses that depicted from breast height upwards, but I never found one, lol.
I can't think of an incident like this off-hamd for myself, but I once dated a woman who didn't know that women have a urethra. She thought the urine just came out of her vagina. She was ~23.
"I'm working on my masters and I feel like such a dumbass..."
Never assume someone with an advanced degree knows anything outside of that degree because "they must be smart".
I worked with someone who was working on his second PhD in computer science and the guy did not know how to print.
Literally couldn't figure out how to click the print button.
In computer science.
PhD.
Computers.
'Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes'
I've worked in tech for almost 20 years. A big misconception is confusing Computer Science and IT. Computer Science is generally more about logic, data structures, and programming paradigms across languages. IT is generally more about the configuration, deployment and usage of technology and operating systems for end users.
There's a ton of nuance in there, like Infrastructure or devops, where it's about the deployment of technology software and hardware to power large technology services, which sits in the middle.
That being said, I've generally found that the more specialized someone is in computer science, the less they know about the operating system they use and how it works. Especially if they spent the time to go for a PhD or something.
The smartest programmer I've ever met is my boss, our CTO. PhD from an Ivy League school. Can write haskell on a napkin, even though our stack doesn't touch haskell. Also doesn't know shit about how MacOS works even though he uses a Mac, and consistently asks me relatively simple questions regarding unix/linux differences, filesystem stuff, package managers, etc. It's very interesting to see the difference in knowledge.
Wouldn't it make sense though for computer scientists to make some effort to actually learn how to do practical things on computers? This seem weird to me, like a car designer who never drives. Sure you could probably design a decent vehicle never having driven one, but you might make a fantastic vehicle if you have.
You can tell he is smart because he asks you about stuff outside of his domain.
There is a difference between "intelligent" and "smart" is the way I like to describe myself.
I'm college educated. But I'm also the guy that took twelve years to realize that his stove had a cook-timer on it...
Love that for once we're mostly not mocking them and are actually sharing similar experiences, we've all had one of those moments.
I genuinely can't tell you what my thing is. Other than that deep down, I know the feeling and know that I have one. This has happened to me before. I have felt this feeling. I just don't remember what about. I'll keep you guys posted if I remember.
For me it was about 5 years ago, I'm over 30, realizing that my parents and extended family lied to me about watermelon seeds growing in your stomach.
It was just so ingrained in me as a child that it took more than 20 years for me to question it.
Watermelon is so much easier to eat now.
I learned recently that your can cut the two vertices that form the base of triangle watermelon slices (so that the slice becomes a top-heavy pentagon) so that they don't collide with people's cheeks when they eat them. You can do it on quater-wedges before you make them into individual slices.
It's seems so obvious but none of the adults around me did it growing up, lol.
Maaaaaaaan. Gonna have to try that lol.
I'm joining you on team traumatic memory repression.
And once again, we learn that common sense is actually not that common.
I'm positive if we took a closer look at your life we'd find many such things. Nobody is perfect.
Yeah I thought nobody being perfect was common sense.
And of course, we have a relevant xkcd.
To be fair this is possibly the most relevant xkcd of all time
Yeah it's probably the most linked xkcd with some margin, would be fun to see the traffic data to that page.
I remember this thread. One of the responses was from someone who thought that the beep his car made when locking the doors got quieter when activated from further away.
We had a guy at work a couple years ago, nice guy but not too bright. He'd fill his bottle from the water cooler, and always got surprised by how fast it filled up at the top. He thought the water cooler's dispenser somehow got faster as the bottle filled up, not realizing that it's because the top of the bottle is narrower than the bottom.
Well...by the power of the inverse square law, they kinda do, I guess.
I'm so thrown off by our current shower which legit heats up in 2 seconds. I was so used to waiting like a minute for it to warm up, I built my rituals around that. But this one... it's just hot, like right away. Bizarre
In fancy installs, the hot water supply is a loop, not a tree, and a circulating pump keeps the entire run hot.
That sounds like a great way to waste energy.
Someone else already pointed out that these are usually pretty well insulated systems that don't radiate much energy, but also consider how many dozens of gallons of water aren't being wasted by waiting for it to be warm.
You're not supposed to just stand there and waste that warming-up water, you're supposed to collect it in a watering can and put it on your plants! It's got stuff from having sat in the water heater so it's not the best for drinking but plants don't mind.
This legitimately is something I've been looking for as I hate just running a gallon of water out for no reason.
I mean, having lived more than half my life with water catchment NOT county water, letting the water run is wasteful and can mean you go without during drought. That means turning the water off while scrubbing, too. I've learned to embrace the cold on purpose at the end, with the closing pores n all.
Cold water is actually good for the skin, keeps it firm
Parenting. You think you’re doing great and you realise at times that some of the thing a you take for granted, you haven’t taught your kids.
Just because they’ve seen you do something a thousand times doesn’t mean they understand why
I remember a story of a child watching their mother cook a roast, and asked why she cut the ends off before putting it in the oven.
The mother learned it from her mother, so they both went and asked the grandmother.
Turned out the grandmother used to have a small oven and did that to make it fit.
As a parent, I was surprised at the amount of stuff kids need to be taught. Stuff that I assumed was obvious isn't - it's learned behaviour. And you don't realize that it's learned until you see your kid struggling with some trivial task.
when I was little I would wait for the water to warm up, then pull the thing to turn on the shower head. But there's like 2 seconds of freezing water in the tube to the shower head so I would have to really quickly pull it, run back to the edge of the shower, and block it with the shower curtain. It had a 50% chance of failure and I did it for years
As someone living in the tropics, where home heating doesn't exist, warm/hot showers only takes 2 seconds after turning it on.
As for one of my own fuckups, I once put a piece of pizza with styrofoam as a plate in the microwave. I was 15 at the time. I did not eat pizza that day. Not the last time I fucked up with the microwave.
I can understand the shower one, but who tf is insane enough to not use oven mitts or a rag? I'd imagine you'd take a moment to think about the possible solutions before doing something that painful
It's an analogy, not real life.
I lived the same "realization moment" last year talking to a friend.
I was saying that I need to go home to wash my white undershirts as I only got blacks left (small t-shirt to wear under a shirt and not freeze to death during winter).
He asked me why so I have several colors of undershirts.
Well, black and grey for black or dark colored shirts, white for white or clear colored shirts otherwise you’ll see it behind the fabric, duuuh, are you dumb?
The answer:
Or you can wear white ones under dark shirts as well and it won’t be visible…
🤔🤔🤔😧 FFS dude, why did I never thought of that?
I wish the same were true for bras. Women's shirts are often much thinner than men's, so a white bra might show through a dark shirt. It took me until this year to figure out that in order to make your bras less visible under light or white shirts, you should use a skin-tone bra instead of a white bra. Blew my mind when I figured that one out.