My buddy thinks boiler shells are giant metal Easter eggs

Had a friend swing by the job site last week and he saw a half-finished boiler. He straight up asked if we paint them for holiday decorations. I tried to explain the pressure vessel specs but he just nodded and smiled. Now he texts me pics of actual eggs saying 'thought of you'. Makes me laugh every time.

3 comments

3 Comments

kimg571d ago

I read about a guy who saw a giant satellite dish and thought it was a wok for a giant. It's like our brains have a catalog of normal objects and just scale them up when we see something huge and strange. Your friend with the Easter eggs is the same deal. He can't picture the industrial use, so his mind picks a familiar round object and runs with it. I bet if he saw a refinery flare stack, he'd call it a giant birthday candle.

joseph6147d ago

My cousin once saw a big water tank we were installing and was dead sure it was for holding corn. He grew up on a farm, so in his mind every giant round thing is a grain silo. Took ten minutes to convince him it was for a town's drinking water. People just see industrial stuff and their brain matches it to the closest normal thing they know.

cora3657d ago

Wait, aren't a lot of grain silos square too? The big round metal ones are for grain, but lots of old farm silos are those tall concrete stave towers. I guess if you're from the city, any big round tank might look like farm stuff. But his brain probably just went "big round thing on the land" and filled in the rest!