Mine was the guy who tried to convince me that it was Lou Abbott and Bud Costello.
But I just had one with someone who argued quite vehemently that you can’t read in bed unless you have really, really strong arms (something I’ve been doing my entire life, no extended arms necessary)
Pretty much any of them.
How is he reading? I’ve read in bed my entire life. The only thing I need to worry about is the light disturbing my husband (and ereaders solved that problem).
What age John Mayer was at the time.
I mean, depending on your position reading in bed can hurt your arms. But that is more user error than anything.
Dumbest arguments … pretty much pick any argument I’ve ever had facilitating with guests at the museum where I work. I’ve heard everything from aliens building the pyramids to lizard people living inside a hollow earth. (and these are believers, not the ones making jokes).
I’ve heard just about every claim from the flat-Earthers and the creationists telling me why science is wrong, or we’re all being lied to. (and let me tell you, they can come up with some real doozies!)
Of the stuff that I’m willing to share, I once had an argument with someone where I tried to convince them that you can’t divide a number by zero. They refused to believe me.
Yes, it was every bit as painful and mentally draining as you would imagine it to be.
That sounds painful!
Honestly, the hardest part is getting them to stop talking and let me move on to someone else. I’ve never had anyone get physical, and the few times a guest started really yelling at me, another guest stepped in and told them off. Of course, then I have to try and politely break up that fight instead.
Ahh. Fun times.
As for the arguments themselves, they just give me great stories to tell later.
Not really a full argument because I got to shut it down pretty fast once it really started, but it’s great…
So I’m in a meeting where a system we have to protect some digital content from being stolen is being presented and explained in detail. The guy running the meeting says something like “all the videos use the RTMP streaming protocol” and I have to interject with “actually it’s regular HTTP with some special chunking” and he’s like “oh, okay.” Then he says something like “it has a local server that provides a token” and I’m like “actually, no, the token authorization is online in a centralized location,” and again he seems cool with it.
This preamble is important because up to this point I thought I had been invited to the meeting specifically to elaborate on details, but apparently he thought I was just some rando who was there for funsies. So then he says something like “all the videos use the same decryption key” and I say “actually, each individual piece of a video has a different key, so on average there are about 100 keys needed to decrypt and play a single video” and that’s when the guy gets in my face.
“Okay genius, why is it YOU seem to know how all this works?”
“Because I invented this technology and built the system. Isn’t that… isn’t that why you invited me here?”
I think he believed it was a standard copy protection system we had licensed from somewhere and was trying to take credit for having implemented it. Well he got fired over this and I went on to much better assignments. JUST KIDDING! He got promoted to Vice President and I was given stupid monkey work for the next several years.
I’ve adopted a Do Not Engage policy with that kind of crazy these days. Of course it’s easier since I rarely have to deal with the general public. Instead I get to talk to archaeologists who think knowing how to make a form in Access makes them a database expert.
Ah, the good old Promote the Stupid policy. That always works so well.
When I was maybe 11 or 12, I had a stupid argument with my friend about the Moon, which he insisted was a star. I got really mad eventually and just said, “the Moon is NOT A STAR!” and his Dad (a professor) in the other room overheard and piped in, “the Moon is a star!” And I had to go in there and start talking about how no, the sun is a star because stars are gaseous bodies that produced nuclear fusion in their cores (I knew about astronomy) and he suddenly went, “THE MOON IS NOT A STAR! THE MOON IS NOT A STAR!”
Very bizarre and stupid.
Maybe they had just watched the English dub version of Gamera vs Guiron.
English was his second language, but he had been living in the U.S. for decades, had written multiple scholarly books in English and was a professor of comparative literature, so that really wasn’t an excuse.
I don’t know if it’s the dumbest, but one of my more “memorable” arguments was when I was on holiday abroad and visiting China. I met up with a friend of mine that had moved there a few years prior.
We went out for dinner and somehow started talking about “Godfather 2”.
It turned into an argument (though I didn’t really engage) because my buddy insisted that what happened to Fredo didn’t HAVE to happen.
He got boiling blood upset when I disagreed. I finally just ended the discussion by saying, “look, I’m Italian, you’re not so you’ll never see it my way and we’re not going to agree.”
Stupid argument to have, especially on holiday in a foreign country.
This thread makes me think of this-
I actually LOVE that bit, haha! One of my favorite “Kids” sketches.
It’s certainly something akin to what I’ve wanted to do during an especially stupid argument.
I just remembered an argument I had on Reddit with someone who insisted all beans were native to North America. And I asked about chickpeas and lentils and they said “those aren’t beans.” 
I don’t know, maybe they’re technically right, but it’s like those people who say an eggplant is a fruit as a gotcha as if anyone puts eggplants in a fruit salad.