I was doing a powerpoint for the head of our special secret projects department. obviously, this fella must be a very smart and clever electronics/software engineer to hold such a post in an avionics firm. I presented him with the printout and said "just put your comments in the margin." He looked blank and said "huh?" His secretary looked up and said "Write in the white part at the edges." "Oh." ***** My wife's boss, owner of a firm that imports and distributes calculators and expensive watches, and who is capable of reparing an intricate German timepiece, walked over to her desk holding an open, empty stapler. "Do you have any paper clips?" He asked. "Yes I do," she said, "but I'm going to assume you mean staples and give you some of those." She handed him a strip of staples. He briefly fumbled with the stapler, then said "How do you put them in, points up or points down?"
Some of the most intelligent are lacking in the basics and common sense. Einstein had to be reminded to take an umbrella when it rained so that he wouldn't get wet.
I doubt the veracity of that statement. Many people don't use umbrellas - for no other reason than rain doesn't really hurt a person. Or maybe he was just too lazy - which is my excuse.
I don't see the issue here Forbin, maybe they weren't accustomed to the office culture? I mean, you weren't born with an innate sense of how to use a stapler or what a margin was, those things were taught to you. But beyond that, I wonder why people hate rain so much. It's just water, but people have such a discomfort of being in it.
The guy with the stapler demonstrated an important aspect of being intelligent and excercising common sense: He didn't know, so rather than risk breaking the stapler, he ASKED A QUESTION.
I don't know about that. Once he put the staples in upside down, he would have immediately realized his error.
Yeah but as a "rocket scientist" myself I can't see anyone in our field who wouldn't know what the hell is a margin. Maybe he is one of oldies.
I think I've posted this before, but just in case... last week, daughter had to explain what an invoice is to someone who claimed to be a credit controller...
I find it difficult to believe anyone got through high school, let alone college, without being exposed to staplers or the concept of margins.
A song made in 1982 is considered to be among the oldies now? I knew how to operate and refill a stapler at age six. Eh, I can sort of get that. An e-mail attachment is quite different than an attachment in postal mail. It typically adds another step and another program or two to the mix, so many people just give up.
About 17 or 18 years ago I was working for a station where my news unit had only an AM radio (plus vinyl seats and non-carpeted floors ). The only non-country or non-talk radio station in town was an oldies station. And they played true "oldies". Nothing after 1975 or 1976. Then one day they played "Do You Believe in Love" by Huey Lewis. That song was, at most, ten years old at that point (assuming I remember hearing it in 1992).
I once worked for a senior vice president who couldn't figure out how to change the toner in the copier. The Peter Principle at work...
No, I hated MTV from get-go. I had a satellite dish back then and saw MTV when it first started up. I predicted then that MTV would destroy Rock music because videos would make it all about what you were seeing instead of what you were hearing. I wasn't wrong.
A woman at work has a son who is a math PhD. He writes technical papers with titles like Stratified fibrations and the intersection homology of the regular neighborhoods of bottom strata and Triangulations of 3-dimensional pseudomanifolds with an application to state-sum invariants. He teaches math at a university. But the math PhD can't do his own taxes! His mommy has to do his taxes for him!!
I remember having a similar discussion back in college. I made the comment that there was a song that the only reason I liked it was because the lead singer was pure fantasy material, but that otherwise the song itself was just ... blah, and that if I'd heard it on the radio, I'd have changed the station. One woman piped up and said 'oh, what song was it?' When I couldn't remember, she got very irritated that I'd brought up the subject. Much like today's message boards, she'd completely missed the point and gotten angry at me because of it.
Wow.....I think I'll wait for the movie to come out. Actually, I think I'll hold out for Stratified fibrations and the intersection homology part II - electric boogaloo!
