How stupid can people be?

[Provost Harrison]

Yeah, it is amazing the stupidity you can get. You know, if I'd have been that techie in the first post I would have felt compelled to find his address and go and beat the sh*t out of him with a bat, leave him dead, and do my bit for evolution

[Adagio]

Well... he also mentioned, that he really wanted to tell the customer to pack the computer and return it to the store, with the words: "I'm to stupid to use a computer"... but he didn't, since it was his boss's wife (or someone close at least)

[orange]

sounds fake...but funny

[Adagio]

From what I know, that site, tries to keep the stories real (eliminating the fake stories), but of course, there's always a chance for the stories to be fake... but IF that story is real... well, then there's much to learn about stupidity yet

[Inverse Icarus]

response to title:

in a word, mindbogglingly.

[Locutus]

My all time favourite - not necessarily a stupid person (just clueless), but very funny:

I'm working as a tech support person at a Finnish newspaper printing and publication house, and we have several reporters that submit their files via a dial-in modem line directly to our layout system.

Once one of the reporters wanted to call the tech support because the modem wasn't answering his calls, but the call was answered by a computer illiterate.

Reporter: "It seems that...eh, modem's out again."
Computer Illiterate: "Oh, just a minute. I'll go look for him."

He proceeded to page the whole company through the central P.A. system.

Computer Illiterate: "Mr. Modem, Mr. Modem, there's a call for you."

My co-worker intercepts, trying hard to keep a straight face.

Co-Worker: "Mr. Modem is on vacation. He won't be back till August."

The computer illiterate returns to the phone and tells the reporter that our modem is on vacation till August.

This one and a gazillion others on the website every Technical Support employee should read.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

[Ari Rahikkala]

The proper answer to this thread's title is always: "Stupider than the example that you will give implies."

That said, I maintain that there are actually very, very few people in this world who really are truly stupid. I also maintain that there are very, very few people in this world who never act stupidly. The vast majority is quite senseful in most cases but sometimes seem shockingly stupid due to lack of information or human error. There are, however, much more truly stupid people than people who are never stupid.

(as an example of stupidity manifesting itself only in some cases, right now I'm between switching kernels (yes, I do it for fun - and for performance ) and didn't care to start X when I came to Apolyton. Thus I'm writing this reply in Lynx. Now using Lynx is not quite intuitive, and neither is configuring and compiling a kernel, so I can pretty safely believe I'm not really stupid. However, at least this version of Lynx has a bug which prevents posting to Apolyton without using an ugly workaround (attaching a file). So an empty .txt attachment will come with this post. I could have easily decided to use eLinks instead of Lynx, but... well... I was just being stupid.)

[Guynemer]

How stupid can people be?

Have you seen who we Americans elected as President?

[Adagio]

Hmmm... I guess that answers the question


-But I was trying to keep this to only talking about computer-related stupidity... real world stupidity is much worse-