Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

So, so many. How do I chose?

- Wanting to 'speed up' a web site that we did not own, in Sweden (they used a service I wrote). His 'benchmark' was counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" while the home page rendered on his home PC and < 1MB DSL connection (he lives in a rural area).
- Wanted to change the sort order of a column of report so it 'sometimes' sorted on 'ABC' (alpha) or '123' (numeric) and sometimes, a mix of both. His justification was if he could put the data in the order he wanted in Excel, the computer should be smart enough to do the same thing.
- Wanted a Windows desktop application to run on an android.
- Wanted to write the interface to a new phone system that wasn't going to be installed for months. Even though we had access to the SDK, he didn't understand the SDK required access to the hardware. For several weeks he would send emails containing tutorials on interfacing with COM libraries (as if that was my problem).
- Wanted to write a new customer support application in XML. I told him I would have the application written tomorrow if he could tell me what XML stands for.

Worked with a European consulting company to integrate some shared business data (aka. calling a service).
VP of IT called an emergency meeting (IT managers, network admins) deeply concerned about the performance of the international web site since adding our services.
VP: “The partner’s site is much slower than ours. Only common piece that could cause that is your service.”
Me: “Um, their site is vastly different than ours. I don’t think we can compare their performance to ours.”
VP: “Performance is #1! I need your service fixed ASAP!”
Me: “OK, but what exactly is slow? How did you measure their site? The servers are in Germany”
VP: “I measured performance from my house last night.”
Me: “Did you use an application?”
VP: “<laughs> oh no, I was at home. When I opened the page, I counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, then the page displayed.”
Me: “Wow…um…OK…uh…how long does our page take to load?”
VP: “Two Mississippi’s”
Me: “Um…wow…OK…wow…uh, no, we don’t measure performance like that, but I’ll work with our partners and develop a performance benchmark to determine if the shared service is behaving differently.”
VP: “Whatever it is, the service is slow. Bill, what do you think is slowing down the service?”
NetworkAdmin-Bill: “The Atlantic Ocean?”
VP got up and left the meeting.

A classmate's earphones once stopped working, I went to go look at it. After a bit of tinkering, I said, "The speakers on these are toast, you'll need a new pair." Then, some random kid grabbed the tablet mind you, and not the earphones, played in the settings, and said "Fixed." I then told them, "This is a hardware issue, not a software issue." What's worse? Some people said "So, software and hardware are the same thing."
Mississippi is just full of computer Illiterates.

1st. Put my Razor Blackshark Aviator headset on. Noise cancellation the low-tech way with full earcups.

2nd. I go on music genre binges for weeks at a time. Lately I've been listening to Viking inspired Dark Folk music like Wardruna, Fejd, Corvus Corax, and Forndom. That came after I did a month of proto rock n roll blues from the southern United States like Leadbelly, Blind Willie Johnson, and Mississippi John Hurt. I also drop some liquid DnB on a bender here and there.

3rd. I set up Hyper.is terminal to use the power plugin that makes sparks fly off of each keystroke.

4th. I set up Atom to work similarly with a continuous code counter that keeps a score of how long and fast you type continuously when coding. It also throws sparks off of the cursor as you type.

5th. Pop my neck and fingers and geterdun.