65 People Shared Their Stories Of Getting Wrongfully Assumed To Be Dumb

"I'm not one much for "dressing" up with a big bushy beard and bald head tattoos Any way I was in church one Sunday and I sat in some lady's "seat" lol I moved up a row and apologized trying to be nice and she turns to the lady behind her and says I really hope this junkie doesn't steal the offering and chuckles turns and looks and me and says I'm just goshing and tries to fire up a conversation asking if I'm a truck driver just visiting About then the assistant pastor announces the new Sr pastor and asks them to stand and greet him The look on her face when I walked up to the podium and greeted them was priceless."

"Interrupted a group of Chinese girls on the subway in Beijing when they were saying some rude things about foreigners. A 6’ ginger-haired white girl speaking Mandarin was clearly unexpected."

"At work one day writing a menu board for lunch specials. A couple comes in and starts chuckling behind me. The lady gives me this snide look and says “What’s a SAND-wich? It’s spelled SAMWITCH, honey. Hahaha, she wrote SAND, like in the desert!” I just smiled and didn’t even correct her. That cocky stupidity was truly a sight to behold."

"A group of college students from an obscure Christian cult stopped me during my run to “evangelize” to me. Unfortunately for them, I am a Ph.D. student in theology. They started asking me if I was familiar with certain things in the Bible, and I responded by quoting chapter and verse, poking holes in their logic, and asking to follow-up questions. The poor girl obviously had a script to stick to because she did not engage any of my questions but just kept repeating that scripture clearly shows that their church is the only one in the world that actually knows the truth, even though I demonstrated why that makes no sense."

"I’m profoundly deaf, so couldn’t use the telephone to ring the bank (this was pre-internet banking), so all my banking had to be done in person at the counter. One day I went to the bank to change my address and asked the assistant to please look at me while she was speaking as I was deaf and a lip-reader, then explained I needed to change my address with the bank. She looked at me, tutted me, and said “You could have done this by phone.” We stared at each other for a few seconds before I said “That would be a very one-sided conversation.” She went bright red and changed my address."

"A guy tried to tell me that the Civil War was not about slavery and I needed to get educated on the subject. I teach US history in college and actually wrote my dissertation on the subject - so I let the moron have it."

"When I was in the Army, I and a group of specialists were standing in a circle, taking a break in the motor pool. A lieutenant came out and said he needed a forklift driver, went around the circle, pointed at each male, and asked them if they had their license. None of them did; he huffed and walked away. He had clearly, obviously skipped over the other female and me in the circle. That was fine; we were the only 88M (heavy vehicle operators) and forklift-licensed people there; the dudes were all paralegals and HR specialists. Everyone laughed. What an embarrassing moment for him."

"I made vegetarian nachos with fake mince in front of a bunch of friends for a party. Another friend showed up late and, unprompted, started trash-talking vegetarian food because the nachos were so good he could never give up meat. One of the other guests eventually corrected him."

"Not me, but my favorite example of this is when US congress invited Dee Snider, lead singer of Twisted Sister, to testify at the PMRC hearings. They expected a dunderhead, and he calmly and intelligently ripped them a new one."

"I was a service desk technician at a hospital helping a doctor reset his password. He kept misspelling the temporary password (it was welcome12345). Turns out he thought welcome has 2 L's and freaked out at me citing his education and my (at the time) lack thereof as evidence that he was right. After going back and forth he got frustrated and handed me off to his nurse and left, she got it on the first try and then apologized to me for her boss's behavior. The funniest part was as she was hanging up I heard her talking to another nurse saying "yeah Dr. Dumba*s couldn't spell welcome again"."

"I had a boss who thought everyone was an idiot. One morning, the computer in the office wasn't working. She asks me if I know anything about computers. I tell her that I've used one before. She tells me to check the computer in the office and see if I can figure out why it stopped working. I press the power button and she calls me a moron, telling me that she had already tried that herself. I get under the desk for a moment then come back up. I tell her to press the power button again. It comes right on. She asks me what was wrong with it. I tell her it was unplugged."

"The corporate trainer came to our offices to provide training. I popped into the room to say hello and see if she needed help. She was having trouble setting up the projector before the session. I started trying to help but I’m not really savvy with projectors. She was getting frustrated with me as she assumed I was the IT dude, and obviously not a very good one. We eventually got it fixed, and I offered her a coffee. She was a bit rude to me at that stage. I got her one anyway. Fast forward to the session itself, and I introduced her to the room of 40 people and thanked her for coming. She realized I was the head of the division and was the one paying for her to be there. I felt very smug at that point."

"Had a friend in college who was VERY full of himself. One morning while eating breakfast in the cafeteria someone said, "I wonder how bagels are made." I said, "I'm pretty sure bagels are boiled." The pompous friend then said, "What are you stupid?! Bagels aren't boiled. That's f***ing ridiculous." Someone did a quick Google search to find that bagels are, in fact, boiled. People seemed genuinely intrigued by this information."

"I was working as a teller at the bank years ago, and Karen was complaining about how slow and sh*tty my computer was... If I had been using an IBM she'd have been out of there already. She works at IBM, they only make the best, fastest bank equipment. Blah, blah blah. I slowly, deliberately turned my slow, sh*tty IBM computer for her to look at. Not another word."

"While building a wall with a new Forman helping him out for extra hours I noticed that my doors were bigger than his so I say what's going on why are your doors so small than he starts a little rant about reading the blue print right the proper spacing so I grab the blueprint and red 2 foot 6 inches than he measures his door and says 26 inches made me realize I don't want my name near anything he worked on."

"I was checking out at a store once and paying with my debit card. I proceed to use my finger to press the touchscreen buttons instead of using the stylus. The cashier says “You shouldn’t do that, so many people touch it and it’s gross. I use the pen.” So I say “People use their fingers to touch the pen too...” And then his face fell and he looked like died inside as he realized how stupid his comment was."

"My wife and I were traveling with a couple we worked with in South Korea. We weren't best friends with them but they were nice enough so we rented a car and traveled around the island of Jeju. Now, this is a small island and you could drive around it in 4 or 5 hours but we were taking our time seeing the sights. The guy was a bit of a know-it-all but they had been in Korea 6 months longer than us so I always tool his advice. Anyways, I'm driving the car and we are trying to find the place that we want to eat, I say something like 'we are going the right way' and this guy responds with 'no we are going south, trust me I majored in geography.' I look straight ahead into the setting sun and respond with 'weird we found the one place on earth where the sun sets in the south.'"

"I film and edit promotional videos, then post them on my company’s YouTube channel. The day after I uploaded a particular run-of-the-mill video, my manager calls me into his office because one of our douchebag directors (who hates our department and loves undermining me in particular) sent an email to my manager and a few higher-ups. In the email, he stated that I had messed up the promo video because there were “all of these other disgusting videos attached to it.” As proof, he included a screenshot of the end of the video, where all of the recommended videos appeared to star scantily-clad Asian women in suggestive poses. Neither he nor my manager knew how YouTube algorithms worked, and that the videos were suggested because he (or someone on his account) viewed that kind of content before. I have no idea how my manager explained this to him."

"Once at a game night, someone made a comment about an aspect of languages. The comment isn't really important. The point is, they were vaguely wondering about a thing, and I answered the question. They had just met me, and so tried to rib me by laughing and saying I was wrong. I said, no, pretty sure that's right, and this is why. He scoffed and said, "It's not like you have a degree in languages or something." Everyone else immediately dissolved into giggles as I informed him that actually, I had just moved back from grad school after getting my second linguistics degree. The bright pink look on his face was wonderful."

imk said:
"I am an application developer in the public sector. I have made many of the computer programs where I work such as Human Resources, incident reporting, and some case management systems. Several times I have had people try to tell me, wrongly, how to use an application that I made. I especially like it when they tell me I should “ask the people at the company” uh, what company would that be? I tell them that it is very flattering that they think that the software was made by an entire company instead of by me alone in my office."

vtpilot replied:
"Haha. Reminds me of the time we had a PM and his crew come in and brief our group on a migration they were about to do. What he laid out made no sense to anyone and I figured Id ask a few questions to maybe help him see the error in his ways. He got all pissed off that anyone would question his wisdom and asked who the hell I thought I was. The look on his face when I said the author of the procedure and code they were using was priceless."