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I was eating at a BBQ joint with my ~30 year old friend, when I had to break the news that the pigs don’t survive if you “only take their spare ribs.”

My wife had to explain to me that pickles were pickled cucumbers and there wasn’t a pickle tree.

I was 30 something years old.

Something explained to me...

I was 41 when I realised that people actually see things in their minds eye. It is not just a metaphor.

Blew my mind, like it is some kind of superpower, you can just imagine stuff, and you see an image of it....

My partner is such a good cook, partly because she can combine flavours in her mind, to check if they will taste good together, that is just fucken cheating.

When people "get a song stuck in their head" they can literally hear it.... How the fuck do you get anything done, you crazy bastards.

My mom was proud that the neighborhood worked together to block an "ugly new cell tower" from being constructed in the area. Then she was upset that her cell service was spotty, in literally the same fucking breath.

I worked in a retail pharmacy so here is a list:

• Women do not have prostates
• During Fukishima nuclear incident, there would be no physical issues for people >5,000 miles away
• Antibiotics don't work on viruses
• Vaccines
• "Natural" medicines can significantly interact with other medicines
• What jock itch is and the astounding amount of men who thought it was normal
• Don't recklessly shove things into your eye, ear, nose, butt, penis/vagina (exceptions apply)

I've had to explain tariffs a lot lately...

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned tax brackets.

I laughed my ass off when my racist uncle smugly explained that he turned down a raise, because that would put him in an upper tax rate and cost him more money than the raise was worth.

Tried to explain how income tax works. Didn't go through that thick skull of his.

I had to walk a classmate through how to install a program in Windows. You know, go to the website, hit download, wait for it to finish, next next next, etc. We're two weeks away from getting our diplomas. In IT.

That narwhals are real. Partner thought they were mythological like unicorns.

Honestly, it was funny but somewhat understandable.

Having to explain that a certain infamous "Chinese alphabet" font¹ (favoured by tattoo joints everywhere) is not how you write in Chinese. There is a shocking number of people who have somehow managed to grow up not just to adulthood but to senior citizen levels who think that foreign languages are just English with a funky spelling; that grammar rules are otherwise the same, and that words translate one for one (and sometimes, in extreme cases, like the gibberish font, letter for letter).

¹ https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-font-mystery-solved.html

I got a job building touch screen information kiosks for a fundraising thing a university was doing for one of its STEM programs. I had my hands full building this thing, so they got one of the students at the college who "does video" to put the content together. I got one chance to talk to this girl, I start in "So the monitors I'm using are standard 1920x1080, so aim for that resolution" and she stopped me to ask what that meant. So I'm now convinced she wasn't a member of the AV club or in some video production major...she was someone's niece who's on Tiktok.

I eventually get an email with the files she was supposed to send to me. Each kiosk was going to be programmed differently to display information about the thing it was standing next to. I get a bunch of video files in no folder structure with names that don't mean anything. "charlton.mp4" "untitled.mp4." "melissa.mp4"

I replied with an email asking "How am I supposed to know which of these videos goes with which kiosk?" How do you end up with most of a bachelor's degree like this?

I was in my late twenties when I learned that the numbers on a toaster are simply time and not degrees of toastiness.

That South Africa is a country. And Northern Ireland is not. To be fair, she was always up front about her knowledge of geography being abysmal.

How fractions work to a 30 year old woman.

I literally had to draw a circle, and use the pie analogy from grade school.

I didn't have to explain it, but I found myself in a situation where I was informing a grown woman that fish are indeed animals.

I had to explain to an adult woman that prunes are to plums as raisins are to grapes.

Just before the US election, I had to explain to a coworker that JD Vance was not going to be Kamala Harris’ VP and vice versa. I knew this person for 9 years, never thought they were a genius or anything but damn, I was dumbfounded when she asked if I could believe it, I think she has always thought whichever side wins has to take the other sides VP. I immediately lost a lot of hope for us that day.

How to make a call using a land line phone. That made me feel very old.

I think it was last year that I had to break it to my mother that pickles are not, in fact, a naturally occurring relative of cucumbers, but rather the result of placing cucumbers in some sort of brine. She's almost 70, and apparently believed there were pickle plants out there that you could just walk up to and grab a gherkin, or something.

Women have three holes down there, not two. To be fair to him, the only women in his life he lived with for any length of time was his mother who was extremely private about all bathroom stuff and hid all her monthly items.

About 30 years ago I had to explain to my boyfriend's mom that LGBTQI+ people do not just choose to be LGBTQI+.

I didn't know at the time whether I got through to her, but years later she told me she understood why that was true.

The back of a hammer is used for pulling out nails.

"Tax the rich" does not mean anybody wants to tax you for owning your home. Unless it's a fucking palace.

I remember in 7th grade, our social studies class did a module on taxation and tariffs. Seemed pretty easy to understand at the time. Little did I know, later on, that many, many people would not understand this relatively simple concept.

That you CANNOT gain more weight from a sugared drink than it actually weighs.

That wood glue used to be made from horse bones and that, yes, the horse dies. Another I had to explain the correlation between 1 cube meter, 1000 liters and 1 ton.

I once had to explain the concept of having multiple Internet browser tabs to an elderly woman. She was certain nobody else could ever manage accessing a webpage AND their email at the same time, and was angry at our 2fa system for requiring that.

Another time I had to explain to my romantic partner at the time that winter actually lasts from the 21st of December through the 20th of March. He was convinced that winter coincided with the Christmas season, and that spring started on January 1st.