It happens to everyone in housewares.

[ShadowTiger]

Everyone.

It happened to me four and a half years ago, and it happened to me again yesterday.

I was in housewares, cleaning up to help the Housewares girl (She's the only one in her department. D: ) and a customer near the pans area asks me for some help.

She asks me if we have any 13x9 pans. I show her the 9x13 pans, but she is entirely nonplussed at my actions, potentially believing I was misleading her out of jest or condescension. I explain to her that 13x9 and 9x13 are identical. She points to the 9x13 label and tells me that it won't fit in her oven because it's 15x10.

I tell her to rotate it 90° in either direction to turn it into a 9x13 pan, and she scoffed and reiterated her stance that it would just be a rotated 9x13 pan, and that's not going to work.

So I tell her I'll be right back.

I run to go get a tape measure. Three interruptions later, I return with a tape measure and find her looking at vacuum cleaners. I tempt her back to the pans with a tempting lure of metaphorical muffins and measure the pan as 9x13, and then I rotate it and measure it as 13x9.

lol she FLIPS OUT. "THEY WERE LYING TO ME. HOW DARE THEY LABEL THIS LIKE THIS!!! THEY........................" she trailed off something pretty heftily there, then just looked at me, and thanked me deeply, and ran off with her new tray. She almost just ran out the door without paying for it but I threw a muffin at her and it snapped her back to reality in a hardware store where tape measure as as commonplace as muffins.

It was an okay day. Felt kinda Derpy. Nothin' like Muffins for the Derpy.

[AmbrosiaWriter]

Basic level geometry fail.

[MoonCat]

More like basic level intelligence fail.

[Bright_Star]

Are people really that stupid?

[Food Lady]

What??!??!?? Wow.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Are people really that stupid?

Afraid so. One has to be pretty brain-dead to NOT understand that 13X9 and 9X13 are the SAME dimensions.

[Dadeo]

Are people really that stupid?

Yes... Yes, they are.

From my days in the paint department:
SC wanted another can of paint, she brought in her old one. The labels had changed since she bought it.

SC: I said I wanted red rouge... red ROUGE. How hard is that!?
ME: (sigh) Ma'am, rouge is French for red.
SC: No! Red Rouge is the colour!

Her can had both French and English on the same side ("Red/Rouge"), the new ones had one side in French and the other side in English.

I show her the English side marked "Red", then spin it around to show the French "Rouge"

SC:...

I was just waiting for her to demand Peinture Paint.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Not gonna lie. Saw the OP title and assumed you were going to mention Deadite attacks, and how you fended them off with a chainsaw attached to your arm.

[Juggler]

I can't make too much fun here.

I was in the book business for several months, maybe up to a year, wondering who this "Verlag" guy was to have a piece of every German publisher.

[JoeGould1111]

This reminds me of my mother-in-law. She was looking for a 6x4 frame, and all she could find were... *GASP* 4x6!

My wife turned the frame sideways and said, "There you go."

*FACEPALM"

[sms001]

Had essentially the same argument with a fellow employee once. Customer asked for directions, which I gave him. Busybody co-irker stepped in and gave him different (slightly less convenient) directions, claiming "It's shorter." Since I know that receiving multiple directions is confusing, I bowed out. I called Busybody out on it later though.
In Chicago, the streets are laid out to a pretty rigid grid. Customer's destination was 5 blocks west and 2 north. Because of how they'd leave the parking lot, I gave the directions that way. Co-irker insisted they go 2 north then 5 west. When I asked her if she thought that was quicker, she said "Not really, but it's shorter." WTF? I explained to her two different ways, but she couldn't get it though her head that it was 7/8ths of a mile either way.

[Merriweather]

This reminds me of my mother-in-law. She was looking for a 6x4 frame, and all she could find were... *GASP* 4x6!

My wife turned the frame sideways and said, "There you go."

*FACEPALM"

Well, it actually could be different on some frames - ones with writing or decorations that have to go one way only (every time I need a cute little frame, I swear all I can find are ones that will only go the opposite way of what I want, sigh).

[wolfie]

Does this thread remind anyone else of the old joke where 2 members of $stereotyped_group were trying to measure how high a flagpole was, and a passerby suggested taking out one bolt from the mount, laying it on the ground, and measuring it there - with the response "Are you stupid? We want to know how tall it is, not how long it is."?