I live in a shared house currently, just so happens with two ‘engineers’, one mechanical, one hydraulic, so seemingly intelligent people with good jobs and generally seeming like they know what they’re doing.

An engineer yesterday

One of them burns incense in the bathroom now and again and the way he does it is to light it with one of those massive boxes of matches, and then upturn the box on end and poke the incense stuck into the ‘drawer’part to hold it.
Now, to me, that goes against all the general impression of intelligence that this gentleman otherwise displays, on quite a fundamental level…

The second example, again successful in his job and well paid, has trouble with the most basic of technological advances, such as working out how to turn notifications off on his phone and actively avoids self-checkouts at the supermarket seemingly believing that there is some sort of global conspiracy with them to trick him. I could list more examples.

I’m sure I must be guilty of something silly on a basic level too, probably health and safety related…

So, do you know intelligent people who struggle with basic stuff, or is one person’s basic stuff another’s rocket-surgery?

Well, I read this for a start…

Well, I read this for a start…

My boss.
Talks like a right **** at times.

I get really confused by 24 hour clock times.

I’ve looked at a meeting start time of, say, 15-30 and thought “who the hell has a meeting at half past 5?” 😯

I’m 46

I’m going to stick up for your second mate. Self checkout takes twice as long. They trick you with a short queue but it’s just not worth it. Plus you can’t use your own bag without triggering some kind of alarm. Also notifications is a mine field. Yes it’s easy to turn them off but sometimes you still want an indication that something has happened just without it playing a tune and different apps do thus differently.

Where I “work”‘ we have the soldering iron test for graduate engineers. We take them out onsite, get setup and plug in soldering iron and then get them to pass you the now hot soldering get iron. If they scream and drop it after picking up the hot end the’re destined for project management, if the pick it up by the handle (a pass) then they will end up in maintenance/operations.

If they pass, next thing we do to them is see how long they take to realise the reason the solder isn’t melting is because some barstards wrapped binding wire onto the solder reel 😀

Notifications on the phone I can kind of understand. So many apps talk to each other or link in via Facebook and I’d bet that most people barely use any more than about 10% of their phone capability anyway.

I saw similar things with some of my chemical engineer work colleagues – these are people who could write out complex chemical equations, work out the process of electron transfer etc but then go and use a calculator to work out their Excel spreadsheet then type the number in manually.

a friend at cambridge was reading physics.

He was caught trying to fry an egg by hovering the pan above the stove top.
It was an electric ring, and he was determined not to electrocute himself. He also refused to turn his fridge on for a term as he was worried it might blow up.

I think he now designs CPU chips.

Plenty of folk who seem distinctly odd in normal day-to-day life are the most gifted when it comes to dealing with fantastically abstract or complex problems at work.

He was caught trying to fry and egg by hovering the pan above the stove top. It was an electric ring, and he was determined not to electrocute himself

😀

Where I “work”‘ we have the soldering iron test for graduate engineers. We take them out onsite, get setup and plug in soldering iron and then get them to pass you the now hot soldering get iron. If they scream and drop it after picking up the hot end the’re destined for project management, if the pick it up by the handle (a pass) then they will end up in maintenance/operations.

Duck. 🙁

Plus you can’t use your own bag without triggering

Ermmmm!

I used to work with a chap who I’d say was comfortably in the genius IQ range. Worked for Disney as an animator. Programmer. Physicist.

He maintained a fifteen year online relationship with a 25 stone single mother of five, who lived in a trailer in New Mexico.

such as working out how to turn notifications off on his phone

I consider myself fairly tech savvy, but after spending nearly 2hrs trying to work out ‘Do Not Disturb’ on my wife’s android phone I gave up and just told her to switch it off when she needed it to be silent! No combination of days/times/notifications seemed to work.

I was seeing someone years ago who was studying at Oxford for her doctorate. I used to visit her and meet up with her friends. they were amongst the brightest and best in their chosen fields.
yet they were all completely mental when it came to everyday things. I would not trust a single one of them to help me across the road!
I think the years of single minded focus in one area meant that they’d forgotten all the simple things most people take for granted…such as not trying to make cheese on toast…in a microwave

Ermmmm!

Forum moderators who can’t use the quote feature or cut’n’paste 😛

My brother with a degree from a very fine establishment, PHd in something with lasers and an MBA declared last Christmas that he avoided tesco as they just were out to trick you with their pricing – that they may be but he should be able to work out if the 2 for 1 is good value or not…

Oh and thinks it’s incredibly rude to be on your phone on a train so turns it off, really useful when your trying to work out when to pick him up

Education is not necessarily a sign of intelligence.

A maths machine I know has no common sense. famous lines include “Do they kick in kickboxing?”

Forum moderators who can’t use the quote feature or cut’n’paste

😳

too much education definitely steals from the commonsense area of the brain.
my flatmate managed to put a steaming hot cast iron Le Creuset pan on the carpet. not sure if it was to save taking it back to the kitchen until later, or if he found out halfway between kitchen and dining table that it was hot.
same flatmate couldn’t suss out how to use my vacuum cleaner, so as his nan was coming to visit, panicked and went and bought a new one. tbf it did have both an on-off switch, and a thumb operated speed control.
2 Masters degrees in engineering, and makes sure you know that.

Pal of mine who was doing a maths PhD at Cambridge asked me what that big yellow thing was in my kitchen. It was a melon. Found the same bloke in a supermarket with an arm full of boxes of dates, weighing them on the vegetable scales. When I asked what he was up to, he was just checking they were all indeed 500g. The test paper he wrote to get in was so good they gave him the best rooms in the college above the Pepys library, therefore no water allowed in the rooms. Probably no bad thing.

I’m with engineer No. 2 with self-checkouts – if the price remains the same why not take the option that allows for a person to have a job ?

And self-service checkouts always seem hateful things to deal with.

Oh and thinks it’s incredibly rude to be on your phone on a train so turns it off

He’s right! He could text though.

A scientist/engineer friend (designed and built engines for German car company) was also a theist. One day we were having a chat and it went a bit philosophical. Knowing me to be agnostic/atheist he tried a kind of (in his mind) ‘gotcha’ question on me. (Paraphrased) –

‘He: So let me ask you this – if you left a pile of metals on the moon for billions of years, and somehow you could return to view it – would that metal become a watch?’

Me: ‘No, unless…’ (I’m thinking ‘unless some evolving lifeform, such as we, actually take that inert/lifeless metal and then someway down the line actually build a watch from it, and leave it in that same spot on the moon’ – but I feel a bit embarrassed for my good friend so keep quiet)

He: ‘No. It can’t. So how come you believe in evolution?’

I’m with engineer No. 2 with self-checkouts – if the price remains the same why not take the option that allows for a person to have a job ?

And self-service checkouts always seem hateful things to deal with.

Agree with this. They’re wrapping the customer doing their job under the pretense of convenience.

Self scanning is a good compromise.

I shared a flat with a guy at uni who apparently was a bit of a maths genius by all accounts and generally came across as a highly intelligent guy. However he lacked any form of practical common sense which would manifest itself in any number ways on a pretty regular basis. A prime example being when I found him in the kitchen trying to fill up the salt cellar through the tiny little hole at the top. I pointed out to him that there was a big whole at the bottom with a rubber bung in it which could be removed to easily fill it up. He rather testily explained to me, like I was a small child, that he’d already tried the approach of filling it via the bottom but the salt just came out of the small hole at the top when filling! At no point did it occur to him to simply put his finger over the hole

‘No. It can’t. So how come you believe in evolution?’

I hope you answered, that it was a poor example as he could not prove that the metal bar was already the optimal lifeform to survive and the watches died out as they didn’t have anyone around to pick them up and see what the time was.

We all do odd stuff, I would hazard a guess that there are those that try new things with success, those that try new things and fail and those that just sit there doing the same things day in day out.

Not necessarily a sign of intelligence but those that try push the boundaries for everyone….. or they get nominated for a Darwin award.

could not prove that the metal bar was already the optimal lifeform to survive and the watches died out as they didn’t have anyone around to pick them up and see what the time was.

😆

When I worked in a bike shop folk like these were called “clever thick c**ts”

We once had an engineering graduate fiddling with a large nut (fastener) in the workshop whilst talking to one of the fitters. A short while later he proclaimed the nut was stuck on his finger. Cue much hilarity whilst about 60 engineers and workshop staff gathered round to watch it being hacksawed off 😀

My brother with a degree from a very fine establishment, PHd in something with lasers and an MBA declared last Christmas that he avoided tesco as they just were out to trick you with their pricing – that they may be but he should be able to work out if the 2 for 1 is good value or not…

He’s right. Supermarket pricing is all psychology and nothing to do with the cost of the thing.
All the different deals are designed to confuse, so it becomes more effort than most people are willing to expend to work out what’s best value , so they just use shortcuts like ‘the brand I like’ to make their decision. which rarely means the cheapest. But low-price items still exist so the ad campaign can boast about ‘everyday low prices compared to our competitors’

2 for 1 isn’t value – it’s designed to get you to buy 2 of something when you only needed 1. You then habituate using twice as much, they remove the deal 2 weeks later and you continue with your new-found habit…. hello to higher sales!

Trust me, I work in marketing 🙂

I think Dunning Kruger may apply here 😉

such as not trying to make cheese on toast…in a microwave

This is fine, actually. toast in the toaster, ham on a plate with cheese on top in the microvave. Both done 1 minuteish later. Butter toast, herby tomato/ pesto/whatever, Fish slice or quick fingers gets the ham and cheese on top.

In your face 90 seconds after starting. Loads quicker than waiting for the grill, and 97.5% as tasty.

Back on topic: friend of mine is a currency trader. Very, very clever, as well as the actual trading, he’s designing the algorithms for the autotrading stuff.

Turned up to a surf trip in Indonesia with his standard UK surfing clobber: 4/3 fullsuit, jeans and jumpers. Said he hadn’t really thought about the weather!

I grew up with one of these.

My dad was an engineer/draughtsman before he retired. If you’ve ever flown in a British jet designed in the 50s/60s, or worked on a British oil rig in the North Sea then the chances are that my dad designed a bit of it.

I once found him screaming blue murder at a piece of furniture he’d built. Turns out that he’s tried taking a plane to chipboard.

An old girlfriend of mine was a bit clever – all A’s at A-level ( back in the day when that was hard ) and she did extra special papers. She was off on her way to Cambridge to study maths and physics, sponsored by a car manufacturer.

I gave her an old bike and she “helped” me get it back into a usable state. We were working on the bike one day and she was annoying me, so I told her that if she oiled the rims of the wheels then it would go down hill much faster ( remember rim brakes ? ).

she was annoying me, so I told her that if she oiled the rims of the wheels then it would go down hill much faster

Do you often show psychopathic traits?

You really need help.

I saw similar things with some of my chemical engineer work colleagues – these are people who could write out complex chemical equations, work out the process of electron transfer etc but then go and use a calculator to work out their Excel spreadsheet then type the number in manually.

I feel I should stand up for chemical engineers here.

Unless you’ve got the patience of a saint, anything beyond +-/* is far quicker by hand than it is in excel unless you happen to be doing the same thing repeatedly (and by and large everything is more complicated).

Like people who write up the notes of meeting for a phone conversation in MS Word and leave them on your desk “Dave called about the Project Execution Plans”, when a post-it on the monitor would have done.

Tools for the job.

For example:
This calculates the wet bulb temperature based on relative humidity, quicker by calculator and pen and paper than trying to type that, unless you have a data-set consisting of hourly readings for 15 years.
=(F4*ATAN(0.151977*(SQRT(G4+8.313659))))+(ATAN(F4+G4))-(ATAN(G4-1.676331))+((0.00391838*POWER(G4,3/2))*ATAN(0.023101*G4))-4.686035

Or this (absolute humidity from the same source data) is probably borderline.
=((0.000002*$F4^4)+(0.0002*$F4^3)+(0.0095*$F4^2)+( 0.337*$F4)+4.9034)*G$4/100

I feel I should stand up for chemical engineers here.

Be fair though, we are a bunch of geeks.

I still use a pencil and paper to write up calculations. Many of my younger colleagues are horrified at the thought.

Back on topic: friend of mine is a currency trader. Very, very clever, as well as the actual trading, he’s designing the algorithms for the autotrading stuff.

Turned up to a surf trip in Indonesia with his standard UK surfing clobber: 4/3 fullsuit, jeans and jumpers. Said he hadn’t really thought about the weather!

Ah, that reminds me, went to the Nurburgring a few years back, a bloke came along who was a post grad researcher at Oxford, I think a Microbiologist. 5 day trip only one pair of jeans and a t-shirt. it was very warm and he would sleep in a different t-shirt and shorts!