Stupid Questions

On Stupid Questions

One of your elementary school teachers probably once told you that there's no such thing as a stupid question. Like so many lessons imparted by elementary school teachers, this is a fatuity and a hoax. There are indisputably such things as stupid questions. In fact, there are so many stupid questions out there that the mere descriptor "stupid question" is not nearly specific enough. After years of careful study and documentation (often at substantial risk to my mental health) I am here to present what is, to my knowledge, the first complete taxonomy of stupid questions of the North American Retail bioregion:

1. The Inapplicable

This question importunes the questionee for information that it is not within said individual's job description to provide. For instance, in the course of my research, questions of this type that I encountered included phone numbers for palm readers, directions to the nearest ski slope, and requests for advice and services of a sexual nature. If I was a hooker, a tour guide, or the lady who answers at Information if you succeed in not getting a machine, these would not have been stupid questions, but as I was working in a used book store, they were.
Askers of this type of stupid question are roughly evenly divided between the arrogant and ignorant (often tourists or people who are too good to touch their own phone book) and the emotionally needy and ignorant (usually abused-looking women or the mentally challenged, they generally give the impression of asking the question as much to hear a human voice as to get the answer. No, this is not flattering.)

2. The Bleeding Obvious

This question is distinguished by an even greater dependence on context than the above type. Properly speaking, the question itself is not stupid, but the fact it was asked of you when the questioner could easily have found the answer for his or her self betrays an intellectual laziness and lack of observational skills that mark the questioner as stupid.
Particularly fine specimens in my collection include:

"Where are the Mysteries shelved?" (Under the bleeding red sign in the middle of the room that says "Mysteries.")
"What time do you close?" (At eight, according to the neatly printed sign pasted at eye level on the door you just came through.)
"Do you take credit cards?" (Yes. I don't think that Visa, Mastercard, and co. would take kindly to us applying these decals to our register for merely decorative purposes.)

This genus also includes the mysterious and rather wonderful "Is this where I check out?" asked while standing in the spot where the clerk has just checked out a previous customer. At first glance, this seems like a prime example of the Stupid Question, but to call a question Stupid implies that it should not have been asked. Unfortunately, the alternative in this case is that the questioner will wander about in a haze, ultimately set his or her purchases down some distance from the register, and become agitated when asked to move (or worse, overlooked in favor of a customer who has come to the correct counter.) Hence, "Is this where I check out?" has been placed on the Protected Questions list.

3. The Unanswerable

This group of questions have answers which the questionee cannot possibly know the answer to. The questioner will inevitably take an answer of "I don't know" as evidence of laziness or malice on the questionee's part.
Specimens:

"Would my mom enjoy this book?"
"Who sold this book to you?"
"Who wrote [some awful novel that had one printing in the 1970's and was promptly forgotten by all]?"

The Unanswerable will sometimes crossbreed with the Inapplicable, as when an arrogant tourist asks you for directions to a restaurant you can't afford to go to and takes as malice or laziness your disinclination to spend upwards of ten minutes looking it up in the phone book and then puzzling it out on a map while a line of people who actually want to buy something extends towards the horizon.

4. The Wrong Question

This is the camouflaged snow weasel of the Stupid Question world. It sneaks up on you in the form of a perfectly valid question, and only after it has attacked - sometimes after a quite long and troubling circular conversation - do you determine that the answer to the question was not, in fact, the information that the questioner wanted to elicit. A common form is to subtlely mangle the vital stats of a book (or other product) being requested, leading to requests for "That book by Harry Potter" or "The Lord of Ocean City." More advanced questioners may consider asking for a book by its subtitle, misstating whether it is fiction or non-, and, when shelves are being examined, describing it as "a green book" when the cover features a square inch of green on an otherwise yellow field. And these are just beginner's tropes. The full range of possibilities is virtually endless and totally unpredictable. Alas.

5. The Zen Master

Speaking of totally unpredictable, these guys are it.

"Where are your nonfiction novels?"
"Do you sell record players?"
"What makes the CIA radio transmissions so loud in here?"

These questions, indicative as they are of a profound level of stupidity most probably mingled with traces of either ignorance or craziness, should make you extremely wary of the questioner.

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