A classic example of American Dumbth

[MindPilot]

I just returned from an Alaskan cruise (Believe me, stepping out of a chopper onto a 3200 foot deep river of ice is truly a life-changing experience!) and I had heard this may happen but I didn't really grok it until I heard it with my own ears.

I'm standing at the counter in a hardware store in Skagway, Alaska. I overhear another customer ask the cashier, "Do you give Canadian change?" I was hoping the cashier would respond with something like "no, out here we conduct our financial transactions with twigs and pebbles." But she was very polite, albeit appropriately condescending, responding with "no ma'am, you are in Alaska which is part of the United States of America. Your change will be US currency."

I pretended to be British as I thanked the cashier for my purchase.

[Reverend_Smitty]

1. It's that map shortage that Miss South Carolina warned us all about

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww

:rofl:

[valerief]

2. Alska is part of the grate Untied States of Amrica? Sins when?

I did not even now it was under the equidor.

A cuncernt Amrican.

:dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce: :dunce:

[tsuki]

3. Yeppers. We let all them illeegulls in. Durn librals. n/t

[american_typeculture]

4. I don't get it.

Businesses close to the border often conduct business in both currencies. Was the customer from Canada or U.S.? This piece of info is important, if they were Canadian then they might have expected the business to take both Canadian and American currency.

[MindPilot]

6. She (the customer) was most definitely not Canadian.

The drawl gave that away, and she was already handing the cashier US money.

[Beausoleil]

5. That's typical

I lived in Seward, Alaska for several years, a town on Resurrection Bay on the Gulf of Alaska. Many cruise ship tourists (Americans) couldn't figure out what to pay with: "Do you take American money?", or how far they had just "climbed": "What's your elevation here?"

[MindPilot]

8. A bumper sticker on the back of a truck in Ketchikan...

"If they call it Tourist Season,
why can't we shoot them?"

[hootinholler]

7. Wow, in addition to the headline, a twofer!

I mean *dumbth*?

-Hoot

[MindPilot]

9. "Dumbth" is the title of a book by Steve Allen...

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=38MUSELAQE&isbn=1-57392-237-4&itm=1

"Now updated and expanded with twenty new ways to think better, this is Steve Allen's humorous and provocative examination of the increasing American tendency toward muddle-headedness and ineptitude, which Allen uniquely defines as "dumbth." After cataloguing a host of hilarious and sometimes alarming personal encounters with shoddy workmanship, bad service, failures to communicate, and the general breakdown in the capacity to reason, Allen offers 101 solutions to this widespread problem. He recommends that we add a fourth "R" - reasoning - to the traditional reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetics."