Never underestimate the power of dumb people. These folks share their encounters with the most moronic people they’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting.
Bailey Ain’t That Bright
“When I was in high school auto-shop, the group of guys I had for classmates was just great. We were all friends, and each of us knew a fair bit about cars. couple that with the amazing teacher we had and it was just a great experience all around.
Except. There was one kid in there named Bailey. And Bailey was a real lemon. I could tell you about a hundred stories about Bailey’s sheer stupidity, but if I had to sum it up best, it’d be this.
Out in the parking lot is a car with a flat tire. My teacher says ‘Bailey, take this portable air tank. Fill it to 100psi and then put 30psi in the tire’
So Bailey goes outside. And about 10 minutes later, I realize he’s still out there. So, I let my teacher know. He gets kind of nervous, saying ‘Holy cow, I hope he didn’t misunderstand me and he’s trying to put 100psi in the tire….‘
So I run out there hoping to stop him before he blows himself up. And I see him there with the air nozzle on the tire valve. But it’s still flat. So I ask, ‘Bailey, what’s wrong!’
‘The thing won’t go!’
So the first thing I do is check the big, obvious air gauge on the tank. Which is bottomed out at zero.
‘Bailey… did you fill this thing with air at all?’
‘Oh, I have to do that?’
‘Uh, yea. You do actually have to fill the thing with air, it doesn’t just come from nowhere.’
So he waddles back inside, where I have to show him how to connect the tank to the air hose (Which is pretty easy for anyone who has never used compressed air), and then it’s time for round two.
So he goes back out to the tire, and I triumphantly go to my teacher and say ‘Well, he failed to actually fill the tank first, but we’re good now!’
‘Did you mention the air pressure?’
Oh. NO.
So I run back out again.
‘Bailey! How much do you have in there?’
‘Uh, I dunno, maybe 90, uh…. p…s…i?’
‘Holy COW! Back away from that thing right now!’ I shout. So he does, and after I cautiously look to see if the tire has begun changing colors, I slowly approach with my pencil gauge, expecting the gauge to blow apart when I connect it. Instead, it registers 20psi.
‘Bailey. Get the heck back inside. I’ll do this..’
‘Dur, okay.’”
An Academic With No Street Smarts
“I was at university with a guy who was academically brilliant, but was serious ‘life stupid’. He would ace every exam he ever took, but had zero common sense and just seemed to lurch through life from one dumb situation to the next. We’ll call him Rob because that was his actual name.
My absolute favorite example of this was the time he lost his little notebook. It was a pocket-sized notebook that he used to draft thoughts, ideas, poems in. He was an English Literature major and was also in the process of drafting a screenplay, so this journal of pretentious scribblings was apparently pretty valuable to him. Anyway, he was running for a bus one day and it fell out of his pocket but he didn’t realize it until he got home.
He was pretty bummed out because there was no way of him replacing it, but he appeared to have been handed a lifeline when he got a text message from a guy who had found the book on his way home which had Rob’s number written inside. Great!
The problem was that the information page in the front of the notebook also had a section which said ‘Reward If Found…’ and then a space for you to write an amount. As a joke, Rob had written £100 because he obviously couldn’t have foreseen a situation where he would ever have to pay it.
Well, the guy who found it (who was a seriously grumpy old man) basically demanded the reward money, or he wouldn’t give the book back. Rob tried to explain to him that it was just a joke and that he was a student and couldn’t afford $100, so please just give it back. But the old guy wasn’t budging at all.
Rob was actually just going to cough up the money to get it back, but we all convinced him that it was crazy to pay a stranger $100 for literally no reason. Rob was going to the guy’s house to collect it, so it wasn’t like this old guy was haven’t to put any effort in or go anywhere. He wasn’t being inconvenienced in any way. We told Rob just to take him a bottle of merlot as a thank you gesture, but to stand firm that you don’t owe him any money.
Anyway, Rob goes to this guy’s house…tries to give him the bottle of merlot, but the dude told him that he didn’t drink so didn’t want to take it. But…he still wanted the money. Rob was apparently just standing in this guy’s living room, basically being mugged because of his OWN STUPID JOKE.
In the end, Rob ended up compromising and giving the guy $50 just to get the heck out of this situation.
The best part of the story? On the way home, the bottle that the old guy wouldn’t take broke in Rob’s backpack, destroying not only the notebook but also his cell phone.”
The Army’s Best And Brightest
“In everyone’s military career there is ‘that guy’ you kind of want to help then realize it’s a waste. My ‘that guy’ didn’t just take the cake, he took the cherry on top too.
My first encounter with this guy was I found his weapon in a porta crapper. I walked out with my weapon and his, saw a higher-ranking sergeant, and turned the weapon over to him. Turns out this was that guy’s squad leader. Ten minutes later I see that guy doing PT in full battle rattle with a sign around his neck stating, ‘I forgot my weapon in the latrine, don’t be like me. I’m an idiot.’ This would not be the last time he lost his weapon or important field gear. I found out later on the unit tried to dump this dude off onto another battalion. He got sent back to us for refusing to cut his hair and follow various other orders.
When we were overseas, he had a random outburst in the chow hall, shouting, ‘You don’t see a shlong in my butt.’ We found out it was because his ex-wife was dating other dudes. Later on, he had his weapon taken away from him because he threatened to shoot people in his squad. Not long after that, he was found rubbing one out to Family Guy. There was a slew of other things as well.
After deployment, that guy got put onto my crew as my driver. He wasn’t allowed to drink because he would get white girls wasted and overdramatic. He once threatened me that he was going to turn himself into the sheriff’s office instead of reporting for duty because he got rejected by some girl. When I told him to do it because I’m not a babysitter, he started sobbing saying it was my job as his sergeant to fix his problems. Unfortunately, he showed up the next day for duty. For some reason he decided to tell the section he was a webcam model. We asked how he knew they were girls and not guys, he said, ‘You can tell’. Turns out he was showing his dong to girls and dudes for $2.99 a minute.
The night before going out to the field we do inspections to make sure everyone packed what they needed. He took it upon himself to wake up early to remove all his clean uniforms and clothing from his bags. So he left for two weeks in the field (no showering in the field) with field gear and the clothes on his back. We figured this out on day three when his stench was billowing out of his driver’s hatch. Not to mention he was constantly rubbing them out in the hatch while we were still on the track. Just add that to the stench and critter fest that was going on up there. More often than not my number one man would have to punch the heck out him to wake him up when we got fire missions.
He would give us life’s advice on how to scam the VA, other forms of government such as food stamps. And told us an easy way to get free cash is to put your name on class action lawsuits. At one point he told me, the army owed him his sergeant stripes because he had been in for nine years; and, it’s the least they could do for him. I told him, I would never allow that to happen as long as I was in the Army.
He had no filter for saying stupid things. It was like his burnout brain was directly linked to his mouth. Unfortunately for the rest of us in the crew, we wore CVC helmets. Which meant you had constant communication with three other people. He was the bane of my existence for three years. In the end, I got him to get out of the Army.
We all end up reflecting on that guy. People get annoyed that he is basically scamming $2600 a month off of various assistance programs. I ask them, ‘Do you really want that guy in the workforce? This is the safest situation for all of us.’ Sleep easy at night knowing he isn’t in the Army anymore. Well unless you’re in Iowa. Then he might be trying to bang your daughter or son.”
Dumb Landlord And His Dumb Cousin
“I was leasing an apartment and the landlord one day called me up and told me I had to move out immediately because they had a cousin who was going to move in from another state due to blah blah blah story I don’t care about and is not my problem. I reminded them that I had a lease with both our names on it which stated I had 6 months left there, so he needed to find some other arrangement for his cousin, end of the conversation. A couple of days later said cousin showed up with a key to the apartment and let themselves in, was very aggressive and in my face about wanting me to leave ASAP, I told them more or less to bug off or I was gonna call the cops. They left but not without a big hissy fit. Next day I had the locks changed.
A couple of days after that the cousin broke into the apartment, literally by kicking in a window (this being the place they were planning on living in), It so happened I was there at the time, as soon as I heard the banging on the door and window I called the cops and when the guy came in, they swiped the phone from my hand (with the 911 call in progress) and started yelling at the operator on the phone. I told him it’s gonna go really well for you when the cops show up and you have my phone in your hand and a busted window in the apartment, you should probably go while you can.
He did put the phone down and I snatched it back, and we had a general TV drama shouting match for a minute, but I firmly refused to simply leave, especially since all my stuff was still there. Then he called the cops on me from his phone. I thanked him for doing that since two 911 calls from the same place are probably gonna get a faster response. Also, my girlfriend was with me and his girlfriend (or sister, I don’t really know, they looked related but maybe that’s just the law of attraction) was with him.
So they got into their own side catfight and also both called the cops. 6 or 8 cops very quickly showed up after all these calls, rammed in the door, and arrested the guy and girl immediately with weapons drawn on them, with him protesting in a very rude manner to the cops that I should be arrested because his uncle said he could move in. Yeah, that’s obviously gonna go well for you.
I was seriously amazed at how many cops piled into this apartment, at least a half dozen, completely overwhelming odds even to people that stupid having an absolute wall of Glocks drawn got through to them because the one smart thing they did was allow themselves to be handcuffed without resisting even though he was muttering about ‘this is B.S.’ the whole time and the girl just had this resigned and frankly pathetic look that made it clear this wasn’t the first time this guy had messed up and dragged her into a bad situation.
I never saw them again or heard any more from the landlord. Gave a basic report to the cops on the scene and showed them the lease and my ID, never heard from them again either so I don’t know how it worked out for the family. Shortly after this happened the landlord shut off the power and water. Talked to a lawyer about my rights but decided it just wasn’t worth having a confrontation that might drag on for some time while I’m living in a place with no heat or running water in the dead of winter with a busted window and door kicked in, so I moved out as fast as I could.
I did leave them with a nice fridge full of rotting food and a seriously nasty toilet and didn’t pay rent the last month I was there, cause I didn’t expect to get the deposit back at that point. The smell of rotting turkey from that fridge surely permeated the carpet. So, ha!”
What’s Laundry?
“My cousin. All through public school, she was a snob who looked down on everyone. She was super stylish and struggled academically.
We graduated in 2014. We both went to colleges (not the same one.) She got a job at a bar, stayed out late drinking. Her boyfriend told her she didn’t need to complete college, so she just stopped showing up. Didn’t drop; just stopped showing up. Completely flunked out.
Here comes the mega stupidity: Our families live hours away from her college at the time. Her family went to move her back home. My cousin’s mom noticed a pile of clothes in the corner. The mom said ‘what’s that, your laundry? Pack it and we’ll wash it when we get home later.’
My cousin (I kid you not): ‘You can wash those?!’
Turns out, she’d been throwing away clothes instead of washing them. She claimed she didn’t know she could, yet she washed her undergarments and bras without a hitch.
She’s now at home with her family and has started doing more chores to show an increase in responsibility. She still tries to throw clothes away, citing that she didn’t know they could be washed and reused. Makes me wonder what she thought all those years before college, before she left home. She wore some of the same outfits repeatedly — she had to have known they could be washed.”
Too Dumb To Be A Receptionist
“I am sure if I thought real hard I could come up with someone more stupid, but this story is pretty good.
There was this receptionist at the veterinary office we have taken our dogs to over the years who argued with my dad about how to pronounce his own name. He went in to pick up some prescription something for our dog Daisy and this girl asked the typical ‘name of a dog, name of owner’ type questions.
‘We have it listed as Michelle and you don’t look like a Michelle,’ she says. Dad asked how it was spelled on the monitor and sure enough, it was still spelled ‘Michael,’ dad’s name.
He said ‘That says, Michael. That’s my name.’ And she argued with him about it! He had to get his driver’s license out to show her, and even though she finally relented to let him pick up whatever it was he was down there to pick up, she was adamant my dad has been mispronouncing his own name for 50+ years.
The best part is Dad tells us this whole story and we think nothing of it till like 3 months later when Mom took the dog in for a check-up. The girl still thought the owner of the dog was ‘Michelle’ and that my mom must be in a lesbian relationship. Mom gently corrected the lady that it was Michael and again this girl was adamant it was pronounced Michelle. Mom, bemused, said something along the lines of ‘It’s literally a name from the Bible. It’s pronounced Michael and has been for thousands of years.’ The receptionist sat in silence outside of the minimal amount of talking needed for the rest of that visit.”
The One Thing You Shouldn’t Do With Dangerous Chemicals
“In a 3rd-year chemistry course, we were working with titanium chloride. Nasty stuff.
A bit of background information. TiCl4 is extremely dangerous. Not only is it an incredibly strong acid, but it is also highly volatile, and reacts violently with water (including water vapor in the air) to generate hydrochloric acid (colorless) and titanium hydroxide (a dense white cloud). When the container is opened, the TiCl4 vaporizes rapidly and plumes of white smoke begin spilling out of the bottle.
Due to these properties, special precautions must be taken when handling it: It is kept in special containers, you must wear gloves when handling anything that has been in contact with it, and most importantly, the bottle can only be opened in the fume hood (basically a box with a powerful vacuum attached to prevent harmful vapors from escaping into the room).
One guy opened it at his workstation, instead of in a fume hood like he was supposed to. Billows of white smoke immediately rose from his bottle and he began choking. Now, instead of putting the lid back on, he decided to toss the bottle away. Luckily the bottle did not break, but TiCl4 spilled everywhere. The higher surface area of a puddle allowed it to vaporize unimaginably fast, ripping the hydrogen out of what little moisture was in the air that cold winter day, and spewing strong acid and poisonous smoke into the room. The entire building was evacuated. I’m not too sure what happened after that, since the lab was canceled and I was dismissed.
A week later, I walked into the lab and I could still smell hydrochloric acid. I’ve never seen that guy since, I can only assume he’s been kicked out of that course.”
That’s Not How Money Works
“Guy I worked with named Buddy bought a huge Snap-On roll-away toolbox for over $3,000, on credit. Two days later, he sold it to a coworker for $1,500 because he had some overdue bills and had to pay them.
Needless to say, he never paid Snap-On for the toolbox he was off into the winds after he was fired for starting his fourth fist-fight at work. One of the other guys I worked with told the Snap-On salesman where Buddy’s new job was, and last we heard they are now garnishing his wages.
The guy was a nutcase though. He had very thin skin and the slightest thing would set him off. He’s go absolutely nuts when he was set off though. He yelled at the security guard and threatened to have him fired because he didn’t like his tone. He almost got fired three times for fighting, but he was able to win the department manager over until the fourth time. Oh, and one time he was told to put Caution Tape across a malfunctioning gate and he said ‘I don’t know how.’”
“We’re Not Sure If He Even Knows How To Drive?”
“I work for a small retailer and we had ‘that guy’ for a while. He would call every day and ask the same questions. And no, not in different ways or something that could be construed as clever.
This same person also couldn’t figure out the key fob for his own car and had to have his 5-year-old daughter let him into his own car. He has kids, let that sink in for a second.
He’s incapable of basic math besides addition and subtraction. We buy stuff and we when tell him he gets 30% he didn’t understand what that meant. He also asks every time how much he’s getting, despite not understanding the answer.
I’m not sure he actually knows how to drive. We have a dumpster in our parking lot and he manages to bump it every time with his car. Every time he leaves we have to go move it because he hits it on the way in and out.
Back to the fact that he’s a father somehow, he’s also an awful parent. We have witnessed him telling his kids they are worthless and terrible, stupid, dumb, and any number of insults that are more applicable to himself. Unfortunately, that’s not something we can report to CPS.
I have watched him, on more than one occasion, fail to open the door to the bathroom and simply walk into it face first.
He once came in with a hamburger of some kind and while eating it, pulled a packet of mustard out of his pocket. He did not put this mustard on his hamburger, he instead bit into the packet and sucked the mustard out.
I could keep going.
One time, he left his daughter in the car and she locked herself out with the key inside. Instead of walking two buildings down to the car repair place, he took a rock and broke the driver’s side window.
Our store has both a publicly accessible web page for making orders from home as well as in-store kiosks. Despite him owning a modern android smartphone one using it to look up food, he claims he doesn’t have the internet to use our website from home.
His wife (girlfriend, I don’t actually know?) calls him just about every time he’s in and he lies to her every time saying he’s on the way home and that he’s stuck in traffic.
As many of you might have guessed, he’s not particularly well-groomed although he usually has something in his hair. What that something is, I’m not sure.
I think that’s all I’ve got. He recently moved further away so we don’t see him very often anymore.”
My Brother Is The Stupidest Person I Know
“My brother. He is genuinely the stupidest person I know.
He has broken his arms five times, three for the right arm and two for the left. This is how he did it:
Age 7, dancing on a table, fell off. 2.) age 15, smoking pot with a friend, cop shows up and he runs, jumps a fence, shorts get caught, he FALLS OUT OF THEM onto his arm. 3.) Age 17, runs in front of his friend’s truck as it went down the road at ~30 mph. 4.) Age 19, Was trying to hide from someone and jumped over a couch, and somehow broke his arm
(I don’t remember how he broke it the other time, I just know it’s been five times.)
He was arrested for possession of a weapon when he is not legally allowed to own one. It was his friend’s weapon. He pointed it at a cop.
He got expelled from my high school. Twice.
He got expelled from public school on the last day of school for writing ‘shag a pregnant chick; call it a threesome’ on a final. Note: these are rap lyrics, he did not actually do this to a pregnant woman.
He had two lines in a mandatory play. He still messed it up.
While in prison he got a pot leaf tattooed on his face.
Upon seeing him for the first time after prison he said, ‘Mom thinks I’m getting it removed but I’m only gonna make it better. I’m also gonna get Chinese lettering down my face.’ (We are painfully white.)
He dropped out of high school before finishing the tenth grade. Not because he had to, just because he didn’t like school and wanted to do dope instead. He ended with a 3 in History and a 6 in math. I don’t know what his other grades were.
When he was 15, my uncle was 30. It took half an hour to explain to him why he would not always on behalf of my uncle’s age.
He genuinely, genuinely believed that the Ebola scare a couple years ago was the beginning of the zombie apocalypse.”
