He has a point..

I had one of the hardest hours of my life today. I spent it trying to explain the basics of quantum mechanics to a delivery driver with only one GCSE. Don’t get me wrong, and don’t accuse me of intellectual snobbery - he’s one of the nicest guys I’ve met, he’s brilliant at his job, and if there’s a problem with his van he can pull it to bits and fix it in the time it would take me to open the instruction manual. But he has absolutely no understanding of the way the world works, and very little urge to expand his knowledge. 
However, over a cup of coffee and a chat while filling in some paperwork, we got onto the topic of the Large Hadron Collider (don’t ask me now - you know how these things happen in conversations..) He asked me ’What the Hell is dark matter anyway? Why do we need to find it? And is it really worth the tens of billions of pounds we spent on it while the potholes in my road have stayed unfilled for three years?’ So, as he had expressed an interest, and as I do love to share my passion for all things quirky and quarky, I took the time to go through The Standard Model with him and try to give him a simple explanation. It turned out to be much harder than I had thought, and his eyes glazed over in that disinterested way that I recognise so often from chats I’ve had with people about science. I ended up with a headache and feeling more confused than he was. He just sniffed and said “Sounds like most of it is just made up to me.” Then he said “How d’you know so much about it anyway?” so I replied “Oh, I had to study particle physics as part of my university degree.”
He said “You have a degree? In this stuff? You must be pretty bright then, yeah?”
I said, very humbly, “I’ve got some game…”
He finished his coffee, patted me on the shoulder and said “No offence, mate, but how the Hell have you ended up managing a supermarket filling station?”
I thought about it all day, and I still can’t find a good answer. 

RC 29-8-15