We all do dumb things but there are some things that happen to me on a regular basis that makes me question my own brain power and whether my own thinking is diminishing over time. I consider myself to be above average intelligence but not super-smart or anything like that and that's why when stuff like this happens to me, I am able to laugh it off but also really wonder what is going on upstairs. My brain just doesn't work sometimes and it always surprises me that things like this happen.
I wonder if any of you do things like this as well.
Walk from one room to another for a specific purpose then immediately forget what I went there for
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This would be more understandable for someone that has a large house and plenty of distractions like kids and a partner but I live alone with my dog and my condo is only 3 rooms and about 50 square meters. It isn't a huge place by any means and I don't really have a lot of stuff anyway. Sometimes my brain just isn't working so well and I get up from the sofa with a clear objective in mind to walk the 15 feet or so to my bedroom and then I'm just standing there looking around with no idea why I am there.
I normally think for a second, give up, and then remember what it was immediately upon returning to the sofa. This happens several times a week.
Hitting the wrong button in the elevator....regularly
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That is not my elevator. My building only has 11 floors and I only go to 3 of them for the most part. The lobby, the floor I live on, and the floor that has the pool and gym on it. This is not a lot of information to remember but many times I enter the elevator knowing damn well which one of these 3 options that I heading towards and end up hitting the wrong button anyway.
Many times I have ended up in the lobby shoeless with my swimsuit on, only to have the door open and then not exit the elevator at all. I just hit another button and go to the floor that I originally intended to. Once, I was shirtless in the lobby and it wasn't until I exited the elevator that I realized that I was in the wrong place.
The worst instance was when I got in the elevator and then hit the button of the floor I was already on out of habit. Then just by luck someone else in the building hit a button and the elevator started moving. When I got to their floor I was embarrassed and unwilling to admit that I had made a mistake and just exited the elevator anyway. Then stood there for a while until I could get "another try" at using the lift.
Putting on my shirt backwards or inside out
I don't put a lot of effort into my clothes. It stopped being important to me around 6 years ago. I am not poor, but I look like I am on a regular basis. Some of my friends get on my case about it but I honestly don't care what I look like. My clothes are clean, I just put zero effort into being fashionable. This is partly because of the fact that I stopped being interested in what I consider to be a waste of money as far as fashion is concerned because I was forced to do so by my job in the states and man oh man, if I could have all that money back that I spent on keeping up with the times!
The other reason is that I do not want to accumulate a bunch of shirts and other clothes that I don't even wear because I never know when I am going to move to another city or another country. It hasn't happened in a while because I have kind of laid down roots here in Vietnam at this point but the last 2 times I moved, one which was from one city in Thailand to another city in Thailand and the next from Thailand to Vietnam, it was kind of alarming to me how much CRAP I had accumulate during those times. Because of this I have boxes in other people's houses in 3 different cities in South East Asia.
Anyway, I put so little effort into what I wear that on a number of occasions I have been informed by friends, after hours of hanging out in public, that my shirt was on backwards or inside out. This was more funny than it was embarrassing but still, get it together dude!
Not understanding very basic technology
There was a time in my life that I was on the cutting edge of technology. Those days are far behind me and nowadays, I know almost nothing John Snow about whatever it is that people are using these days. This doesn't excuse me from not understanding 30 year old tech though.
Not that long ago I was in my apartment on a very hot day and kept run back to the wall-mounted thermostat in order to turn the AC to a lower and lower temperature but my apartment just kept getting hotter and hotter as the day's heat made my rooms eventually unbearable. I contacted the landlord in a bit of a huff about how the "AC is broken" and she sent a guy up to my room almost immediately and apologized profusely.
Can you guess where I am going with this?
Well the tech wasn't in my apartment for very long because the issue wasn't that the AC was broken, it was that while I was changing the temperature on the digital display, I had failed to actually turn the unit ON. He laughed, I laughed, I apologized for wasting the landlord's time. I have not made this mistake again since that day.
I look back on this with a sense of "doh!" because the central temperature control is actually audible and looking back, it occurs to me that I never even thought to listen or to look and see the very noticeable red light that is on the display when you have actually switched it on.
I am sure there are many other examples but those are the ones that stick out in my mind right away. I'm a guy that can finish Sudoku puzzles in less than a minute but other things just elude me.
Do you have anything similar that happens in your own life or have you done the things that I have mentioned already?