People Share The Best Real-Life Examples Of 'You Can Have A Ph.D. And Still Be An Idiot'

Too Much Ketchup

"My ex-boyfriends mother was a linguistics professor and knew over 10 languages. She was also one of the dumbest people I've ever met. Some examples: she believed that in case of emergency stewardesses catapult out of the plane; she was also convinced donating blood causes some blood disease and you can die because of it. But my favourite one was when she said her son's orthopaedic problems are not a result of a serious injury he had. His knee hurts because he eats too much ketchup."

- ImnotUK

"Man that ketchup is going straight to my knees. Ima need to sit for a minute."

- myrevenge_IS_urkarma

You'd Think An Engineer Would Understand Physics

"I had a boss who was an engineer who put a couple hundred dollars in change in a bank’s pneumatic drive through tube where it got stuck and they had to use a jack hammer to get it out. He was upset that the bank was charging him for this because he didn’t know this would happen. They had large signs saying not to put change in the tubes, including on the tubes themselves."

- RumBunBun

Self-Powering Power Strip

"My first call at my first IT job was in a medical laboratory. There was a doctor who had been in the job for years and she called saying her computer would not power on. I walked her through some troubleshooting and nothing worked. "Is the computer plugged in? Ok, is the monitor on? Ok, when did the problem start?" type of questions were asked and she answered them all. I go up to her office and indeed the computer is plugged in to a power strip which is plugged in to itself. Cleaning crew had deep cleaned her office and never plugged anything back in. Dr. plugged the power strip into itself thinking that as long as it was plugged in, that's all she needed."

- acheron53

Liquid Displacement Isn't That Complicated, Is It?

"I was at a keg party at college and the (gravity keg) was set up. Someone complained that the beer was not flowing, so I check that the keg was still almost full. Turns out someone closed the air intake on top. I opened the intake and poured myself a beer. Problem solved. A few minutes later someone else complains the beer is out. I told them the keg was full a few minutes ago and it was a tap problem that I fixed. They told me they just came from the keg. I go back to the keg and find the intake was closed again. Opened it and poured the young lady who said it was empty a beer. As she is leaving my suitemate comes in and goes to the intake can closes it. Now my suitemate is a straight A student who gets all As mostly due to his photographic memory."

"Back to the keg. So I tell him that he needs to leave the intake open to let air in to displace the beer coming out of the lower tap. He then proceeds to tell me that since the beer is carbonated air is not needed to replace the liquid volumn lost when the beer is dispensed. So I asked him two questions; If it is not needed, why is there the upper tap, and does he really think the amount of gas the carbonation gives off in a glass of beer is equal to the volumn of the liquid beer? He thought for a few seconds and his only response was, "I have a 4.0, what is your GPA?" Then he walked away."

- vpniceguys

Med Students Aren't Immune To The Bystander Effect

"Not quite PhD. But I was at a party (in the uk) full of med students and stereotypically everyone was off their face drunk. Well some guy fell over and broke his collar bone and immediately got rushed by a dozen of them all fussing and asking him the same questions over and 'going through the checklist'. Half an hour later and he's still on the couch in pain and I go in to ask if anybody knows why the ambulance is taking so long. Nobody had an answer because nobody had called one. A party full of medical students hadn't called an ambulance or made any transport arrangements for a guy in severe pain with a broken clavicle. Idiots."

- Reiseoftheginger

"That's actually super common in emergencies when there's a group of any kind. One of the first things you learn in a lifeguard certification course is to identify a single person to instruct to call 911. Never just yell out 'someone call 911' or assume that it's been done because everyone in the group is assuming someone else did it already."

"It's not necessarily that everyone forgot about it, just that everyone assumed it was the logical first step that someone else would have taken already."

- Bangarang_1

He Just Hadn't Had His Coffee Yet

"I had a professor for higher mathematics who had real difficulties figuring out how to extract a cup of coffee from the vending machine. Bless him."

- onesmilematters

Laser Focused Intelligence

"My wife has two Masters and a PhD, is internationally recognized in her field, and is an absent minded doofus. My role in her life is to ensure that her car works, that she takes her meds, and that she eats things other than yogurt and eggs. She can be brilliant one minute, then walk into the side of a moving bus the next."

"I love her dearly but she's a numpty."

- Lost_One_1963

Dump Dinners Were Designed For This Person

"As someone who did two trades and then decided life is better with education - my experience currently going to Uni is how clueless so many people are in Uni. I wouldn’t say they’re an idiot, but tons of ignorance develops living in a student bubble your whole life."

"I rented a room to a guy who did his masters, and it would take him hourssss to cook dinner. I watched him one day, and he just couldn’t wrap his mind around cooking things that take different amounts of time to cook."

"Like, he’d start cooking potatoes and wait til they were done before moving on to the next thing he was going to eat them with."

- XavierOpinionz

Doctors Are Brilliant...and Not So Brilliant

"I work with medical doctors all the time for work. Doctors are some of the dumbest smart people I have ever met."

- Secksualinnuendo

"Yup. I know a plastic surgeon who thought it was a great idea to sue Yelp for bad reviews his business was getting. This ensured that tons of news stories were written about him that repeated those bad reviews to a bigger audience."

- heimdahl81

"My friend's dad is a surgeon, I never forget when we were 13-14 and her mom called her to ask if she could go home and make something to eat for her dad because he was starving."

"That's when she told me that he had never ever made a meal himself for his entire life, he cannot even work the toaster, literally! So the guy was just starving at home because he cannot make a simple meal. And the next day he's fixing someone's heart."

- _reykjavik

"As someone who works security in a hospital, I can say a good 90% of the doctors there are smart but lack any type of common sense, and sometimes I wonder how they function on a day-to-day basis"

- Ray_Ray_86

Doors Are Hard

"I used to work at a university, and tons of academics are incredibly educated in their chosen field, but have the common sense of your average dachshund."

"My favourite was probably an entire group of geology professors and PhD candidates who got 'stuck' for a good few minutes in an entryway because they didn't think to check if the door required a pull rather than a push. Bearing in mind that they'd just entered with that same door not an hour before."

- Koras

Children Require Supervision At All Times

"My ex had a real lack of knowledge and common sense when it came to children."

"She's currently completing her PHD in biochemistry and molecular biology. She was confused though when I said I couldn't go out after putting my toddler to bed as I had no one to babysit. In her mind, once my daughter was asleep she no longer needed anyone here to take care of her."

"I chalked it up to cultural differences and never being around children. Eventually though our opinions on raising kids differed too much and I had to end things for my daughter's sake."

- RetroDad-IO

Just Read The Documentation

"Worked at a tech company, was made team lead. One of our team members was a PhD in astrophysics. He would ping me constantly for how to do things that we had well documented. How to install certain programs, how to gain access to servers or code repositories. Literally we would sit in zoom calls together and I would just read the instructions out loud and watch him do them. I was utterly confused as to how he could breathe by himself."

- Woodhouse_20

It's Not Supposed To Be A Soup

"A long time good friend, absolutely brilliant. Can literally beat you at chess blindfolded. Engineering in college and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. But he’s a big picture guy, sees how things develop and great long term vision. Incredibly successful. But little things? Guy couldn’t pack a suitcase, wouldn’t know how to book a flight. Was making boxed Mac-n-cheese and couldn’t figure out why it was so watery. Ya, he didn’t drain the water after the pasta was cooked."

- PapaChoff

India Is Definitely Not A Continent

"Mother in law has a PhD in some thing related to botany. She thought India was a continental island like Australia. To this day I still have no idea how that happened when this came up she was in her mid 60's."

- SavingsCheck7978

Computers Aren't That Hard To Understand

"If you work IT you feel this. Every lawyer, doctor, celebrity and CEO I've ever worked with is computer illiterate. They can email, they can Twitter and that's it. They confuse the mouse, they openly call themselves Luddites, they kick the power plug out and claim the 'box broke'. Mega-millionaires, too. Smart in other regards, but computers are kryptonite."

- zeift

"not IT, but, I worked in tech support for Verizon fiber optic services a long time ago. they provided internet, TV, and phone services."

"my favorite call was a dude who couldn't receive calls, and this was a Big Deal™ because He Was A Doctor - that might've been something he repeated a few times. anywho, I walk him through basic troubleshooting as he's dramatically exhaling after every sentence because I should obviously just be sending a tech. I wasn't allowed to do that without going through the steps, though."

"everything in the house checked out, but, after an attempt to remotely reset the system to no avail, my last required step for the guy was reporting the state of some status lights in the terminal on the wall outside the house. I get the guy to pop the front panel, and I'm explaining that he needs to tell me which of these lights is on and off, and what one of the digital panels says. guy cuts me off to say, 'oh, hey, there's a bunch of phone and internet cables in here,' to which I reply, 'yes, there are, but, we don't need to pay attention to them at this time, we just need to know what the status of the system is.'"

"dude says, 'well, these don't seem to be plugged into the right ports. let me see if I can correct-' this was when I interjected with, 'sir, please don't mess with any of the wired connections, those are setup on installation and everything is already mapped to your home layout-'"

"that's when he cut me off with, 'I think I know what I'm doing - after all, I'm A Doctor.'"

"the line immediately went dead. obviously, I tried to call him back... but, his issue was that he couldn't receive phone calls, and we didn't have a cell phone number for him. shucks."

"I've often pictured the guy standing outside his home, realization of his mistake settling in, all while his brain starts to focus on the fact that he had to wait on hold for over fifty minutes to even speak with me. f**king glorious."

- extralyfe

We can't all be smart in every area of life, but it's good to be able to acknowledge your weaker areas as well as your strengths.