" She thought the Statue of Liberty was made of dark-green plastic and did n’t know what oxidation meant . "
Though it’s true that it’s everyone’s first time living life, common sense and critical thinking go…a long way. Recently, Redditoru/TheBanishedBardasked the Reddit community to share the things theycouldn’t believethey had to explain to an adult, and some of these are wild, you can’t help but chuckle:
1.“When my sister and I were watching the live-actionThe Lion King, she made a comment wondering how many trainers it took to get all the different animals to stay in their places and perform on cue. I stared at her in shock as I explained to her that all the animals were CGI, and that there would never be a way to get all those different animals in one place without it being an absolute disaster. She had to Google it before believing me. Mind you, my sister is 47.”
2.“I had to explain to a friend of a friend that wind is not created by tree leaves vigorously rustling together. Explaining that without showing the outright judgement I felt on my face was near impossible.”
— KenzQB
3.“I had to explain to a 20-year-old that she could be pregnant even without having an orgasm. She kept going on and on about how her period was late and how she felt weird, but she was sure she couldn’t possibly be pregnant because only her boyfriend finished and not her. Well, she was pregnant — and very shocked about it. I haven’t spoken to her in about 12 years, but I see her and her kid around sometimes, and it always makes me think how sex ed should teach kids things they actually need to know.”
4.“There’s been an ungodly amount of times where I’ve had to tell people that, no, those are not ticks on your cat or dog’s stomach. They are nipples. Also, the number of men who reply, ‘But he’s a BOY?!’ Like, dude, YOU have nipples.”
— According - Lobster-72
5.“I once worked at a hostel in Canada. One day, a guest paid for their room with American cash. I calculated the exchange rate and gave them their change in Canadian dollars. They looked puzzled and finally asked, ‘Wait…there’s different money here?’ I had to explain that, yes, even though both countries use dollars and cents, Canada has its own currency. She was a young adult and completely shocked.”
6.“I had to explain how a greeting card worked. Like, how a piece of paper could be folded in half to create an ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ It was one of those moments where my brain broke because I couldn’t figure out how to explain such a simple concept to a grown upper manager at my job.”
— impeccadillo
7.“When I worked at a video store, a customer came in to return a copy ofThe Wizard of Ozthey’d rented. They said, ‘I wanted the color version; this one is in black and white.’ I asked how much of the movie they’d watched, and they replied, ‘Just a few minutes.'”
8.“I was working for a publishing firm. A fax was coming in, and I was standing behind the office manager, waiting for the fax to complete, when my eyes idly went to her computer screen. She had the accounting and mailing program up and was manually typing addresses from the accounting program to the mailing one. I asked why she didn’t just copy and paste the addresses, and she just blankly stared at me. She had been the office manager of the publishing firm for over 10 years, and she didn’t know about copy and paste. Hundreds of boxes of books were going out every day, and she had typed every single address by hand until that moment.”
— triviaqueen
9.“I had to tell someone, ‘You have to boil the potatoes before you mash them.'”
10.“I had to explain to my cousin that Hitler was a real person and not just a character in movies. She went to good schools, but sadly, the education system fails so many.”
— RoundOctopus9944100
11.“My mom set up her phone to unlock using her fingerprint, except she scanned her index finger. She tried unlocking her phone using her thumb and couldn’t understand why it didn’t work. A few years later, I told my boyfriend this story, and he also didn’t understand why the phone wouldn’t unlock. So, I’ve met two adults who didn’t know each finger had unique fingerprints.”
12.“I’ve had to explain to so many people that cheeses like Parmesan and Feta are, in fact, dairy cheeses and not vegan. One person kept giving me lip about the Feta cheese, so I went and got the bucket it came in and started rattling off the ingredients. The first one was milk.”
— Lunavixen15
13.“So many people don’t understand the origins of their food. One time, someone asked, ‘Why do we need farmers if we can just go to the grocery store to get food?’ I asked her where she thought the food comes from, and she looked at me and said, ‘Are you slow? I just said the food comes from the grocery store.’ Another time, I had to explain to someone that beef is cow meat. He kept saying that a cow is an animal, and that beef is just beef. When I asked him what animal he thought beef came from, he said, ‘I don’t know, but it’s not cow.'”
14.“When I worked at Walmart years ago, my coworker tried to clean a customer’s forehead by licking her thumb and rubbing the mark off. She was unsuccessful. After the customer walked away, I explained Ash Wednesday to her.”
— Suspicious - Soup-3806
15.“I bartended at a brewery, and one time, I served two customers two pints of beer in different glass shapes. The one paying for the drinks smirked at me and said, ‘We both ordered a pint.’ I told him they were both points, and he laughed and said, ‘You expect me to believe they’re the same? They don’t look the same.’ I had to grab two different empty pint glasses, fill one with water, then pour the water into the other glass for him to understand the basic concept of volume.”
16.“I worked at a computer store around 2014. A rich-looking lady showed up and complained about having issues with her tablet, saying that there are never issues with it when she’s at home, but whenever she leaves the house, it doesn’t have internet anymore. At first, I assumed she had the tablet version with a SIM card and that it wasn’t set properly, but she had the standard version. It turns out, she expected her home Wi-Fi to work everywhere. I tried explaining how Wi-Fi worked to her for 15 minutes, but she was having none of it. She thought I was treating her like an idiot and asked to speak to my manager. Twenty minutes later, I saw her still arguing with my manager about the same issue.”
— NeededMonster
17.“I had to talk to an adult family member about their child not washing their hands after using the bathroom. My family member said that they don’t enforce it at home because the adults don’t wash their hands, either. I asked them, ‘Do you wonder if maybe that’s why you’re sick all the time?’ It was like a bomb went off inside their skull.”
18.“I had to explain to a grown man that, despite looking to be the same size as the moon at certain times, the sun is, in fact, larger than both the moon and the Earth. He couldn’t wrap his head around the sun being larger than Earth because it looked so small in the sky. When I explained that you could fit about a million Earths inside a sun, and that it only looked small because it was so many million miles away, the disbelief on his face was amazing.”
— TheNJGM
19.“She thought the Statue of Liberty was made of green plastic and didn’t know what oxidation meant.”
20.“I used to work at a cupcake store. We had rotating flavors, one of which was called ‘Black Tie Affair’ due to the black and white color palette. A woman came in one day, read the names of the flavors, and made a face. She asked why it was called ‘Black Tie Affair,’ asking why we had to bring race into it.’ I had to explain to her that a ‘Black Tie Affair’ is a fancy event, not an affair between a Black and Thai person.”
— Resilient_Ghost
21.“Once, a lady brought a DVD back because the player wasn’t reading it. She called me an idiot for suggesting that she had to place the shiny part of the disc facedown instead of the picture side.”
22.“I had to explain to my mom what a group chat was. She argued, ‘But what if I need to say something to someone and it’s personal?’ I explained every which way I could that she could still text them singularly, yet she kept insisting that she couldn’t because they were in a group chat. She never understood the concept.”
— tweetysvoice
23.Lastly: “I was taking a new hire through onboarding forms on my computer when she started tapping my monitor. I said it wasn’t a touchscreen and told her to use the mouse and keyboard. She looked at the desk, then at me, and asked, ‘What’s a mouse?’ This was in 2018, and she was 19. I asked how she didn’t know what a mouse was, and she explained that every device she’s ever used was a touchscreen, and that she’s never had to use a mouse before.”
Note : Some stories have been edited for length and/or clarity .
