> I work at a casino in the midwest. The two dumbest questions I have
> been asked more than once is "What kind of mixed drinks do you
> serve"? or "Do you serve mixed drinks here"? I should add that our
> bar(s) is surrounded by every kind of liquor you can imagine, but
> people still ask these questions.
I actually don't have better answers to the most stupid guests questions. But,
I do not believe that these examples together with 'is this the bar' are very
stupid. They are more like rhetorical questions to start conversation. A bit
much like the standard greeting 'how are you doing'.
Anther possibility for their "silly" question:
Recently I was at a discussion group about sustainability where an owner of a
shop for organic products mentioned that people often ask silly questions like
'where is the milk' while searching in a display of soap and she has to answer
something simple as 'in the refrigerator'.
One must know that most the organic food shops in the Netherlands have a
different ambience and looks compared to the standard groceries which people
are used to. My idea was that this sort of customer behaviour is due to them
being overwhelmed, say a sort of less comfortable, by the newness of the
place.
It may be that for these guests asking 'is this the bar' the same thing
happens as for those customers in an organic shop asking 'where is the milk'.
They are overwhelmed. Probably they have never seen a bar like this before
(maybe having a very limited concept of the term bar) and while re-evaluating
the concept of bar they utter silly questions 'do you have mixed drinks'.
Guests don't recognize the liquor display similar to the urban tale that the
native Americans didn't recognize Christopher Columbus' ships.
--
"Question everything..."