I know I've related this story before but it bears repeating.
I worked in international telecomms for 37 years so I had a lot of dealings with Americans in the same business. So my expectations were that those people would know a little bit about the world. Doing the job certainly brushed up my knowledge of world cities, etc.
A few years back our company was host to an international meeting in Sydney (actually we did many of the damn things) but I was involved in this one. One of the delegates and his wife were talking to my wife and I over lunch one day when he mentioned they were hiring a car to go to Cairns. We asked how much time he was taking for the trip.
One day.
We explained the distances to him. He was a bit stunned, I think. He said something along the lines that Australia is an island and had less than 20 million people so he'd assumed it was a small place.
I was amazed as this bloke was involved in cableship operations in the Pacific Ocean region and should have known how big the place was. He must have seen charts of the Pacific and an atlas.
Ron


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