40 Pieces Of “Common Knowledge” People Outside These Professions Don’t Know

That my semi-truck can't stop as fast as their car.

I need a couple football fields to slow down from highway speed, and that's in absolutely clear weather... Stop merging 13 feet in front of me & slamming on the brakes for an exit, just stay behind me and wait an extra 2 seconds so I don't kill you and endanger everyone around us.

Side note. Don't hang around too close to us either, even something as simple as one of our tires blowing up can kill/seriously injure you by itself or cause us to completely lose control of our rigs if it's a steer tire.

Sorry for being dark, but people don't realize quite how dangerous semi trucks can be.

Mental health worker. Everything you learned on TikTok was a lie. Not wrong. A lie. Take your goddamn meds.

The fashion industry is the second biggest polluter in the world behind the oil industry.

Carbohydrates are not “bad”. Carbs are vital to our body and our brain loves them. Ultra-processed food is bad.

Most people will try anything but reading the instructions. I write the instructions.

I work in IT

Computers are magic boxes that sometimes do what I want them to do.

I can fix them but a lot of the times I don't know why what I did worked.

Turn it off and back on again isn't just a funny saying.

The lighter the coffee roast, the more caffeine it has. The darker the roast, the less it has.

 

To elaborate a bit more, the reason dark roasts taste bitter is not because it has more caffeine, but because it’s burnt to shit and that’s just how ash-water tastes. Heat destroys caffeine, so darker roasts have the least caffeine of all.

Shocking someone (like an AED or "paddles") doesn't restart your heart, it stops it.

 

People often assume the heart stops and an AED fires it back up. The heart is contracting, but ineffectively (an arrhythmia, it's basically lethally uncoordinated) and therefore not pumping any oxygenated blood to the body. Which equals death before too long. So the idea is to stop the heart so it'll reset itself to a normal rhythm.

Many films will also show CPR, and the person comes back from unconsciousness. This DOES NOT happen. The only thing CPR does is keeps pressure on the heart to pump oxygenated blood to the rest of the body. CPR is not a treatment, it's a temporary measure to keep the bodily organs oxygenated long enough to get the heart restarted via shock.

 

That language isn't stationary!
I'm translator and for the last few years my native language (Ukrainian) changing a lot.
We are bringing some old words and rules back and, at the same time, creating new ones, which is awesome.
But, unfortunately, I'm hearing all the time about "truth is only in vocabulary" and "new words aren't real" and sometimes it is really pissing me off.
Languages are changing all the time! It's their nature.
Yes, there's a set of main rules and words but even they are changing from time to time.
People creating new words all the time, some of them are dissapearing with time, some staying for much longer and that's okay.

Everybody sells as much information on you as legally possible. Your bank, credit card company, mortgage company, any website that required a sign on... all of them sell your data. So I can target you with ads based on if you have a hotel booked for a major destination, how many kids you have, if you're due for a new car, where you get your oil change, how much sports you watch, where you spend your time and on and on and on. It's creepy

Computer clouds are just someone else’s computers. Younger folks generally get this.

Drowning is typically quick and silent. I'm a lifeguard.

Not in hotels anymore, but spent 15ish years there. People die in hotels all the time. Every hotel I've worked at has their stories, and the ones with indoor open atriums are the worst. Sometimes it's just natural causes (I've had twice where someone had a heart attack in the middle of an event) but sometimes it's drug overdoes or suicides.

There are no guaranteed results with therapy. It’s all subjective and based on what you put into it/the connectedness with the counselor. I say this as many clients have told me they compare it to going to the gym..

Used to be a railroad conductor. Derailments happen all the time. Like multiple per day. You only hear about the major crashes.

When you brush your teeth, don't rinse with anything afterwards, just spit out the toothpaste. You get more benefit from the fluoride sitting on your teeth than just rinsing it off.

Cell phones dropped in water. Step Zero: salt water? Forget about it. Step one Do NOT put your phone in rice to dry it out. There are two problems with this. The moisture of your newly damaged phone will strip minerals off the rice, and those minerals will now be free to contribute to the corrosion of the circuits. The other problem is the amount of time rice would remove moisture from your phone is insane. FYI anecdotal evidence perpetuates this myth because sometimes phones work for no reason. Just lucky

Step two, remove the battery. Can't do that at least power the device off asap. Like if your stuff isn't backed up ASAFP. Do not use the device.

Step three, take your phone to a repair shop. They will disassemble it, they will scrub all components with isopropyl alcohol, and heat everything. They will reassemble everything and pray. They will test everything and let you know if more repairs are necessary but more importantly they will attempt to backup any data that isn't in the cloud.

Source: I personally repaired about 5,000 water damaged phones over four years.

Bonus fact. Water resistance is damaged by chlorine and exposure to water in general.

Bookstores do not mark-up the price of the books. The publisher sets the price and we get a discount, usually around 30- 40%, when we order them wholesale. The reason some places can sell them cheaper is either that they buy them in huge quantities for their own warehouses and pay their workers poorly (B&N) or they make ZERO profit off selling books at all and pay their workers even worse (Amazon.)

Also, if an indie bookstore can't get the book you want around the holidays, there's a good chance that Amazon ordering WAY more than they will ever sell and holding them in warehouses in case the book gets popular is the reason. Then Amazon returns everything they didn't use to the publisher in January, f*****g over the publishers who may have put out the money to print more copies they didn't need, the authors who could thought those books had been sold, the wholesale warehouses who now have no space for new releases, and booksellers who dealt with a*****e customers during the busiest time of the year.

Lots of very talented and successful criminal defense attorneys can’t make enough money from retained clients, so they also take on court appointments (not all court appointments go to public defenders, at least in Texas). I’ve seen defendants fire really good court appointed lawyers to hire mediocre attorneys simply because of the misconception that court appointed lawyers are bad. So called “free world lawyers” aren’t always great and some of the best criminal defense attorneys are public defenders.

PLEASE clean off your shoes after you hike, it is SO easy for invasive weeds to hitch a ride on your shoes and nest in the next place you take them (like your backyard)