Passive Aggressive: pretending not to know what you're talking about
Have you ever gone to a Seattle area store where a sales clerk comes up and asks if they can help you, then, when you tell them what you're looking for, they pretend they have no idea what you're talking about?
One example: in a store that sells appliances, I asked where the food processors were; the response: "food processor?"(blinks in confusion). Turns out, what I was looking for was a few aisles over from where we were standing.
When I first moved here, I had a lot of traveler's checks because I needed to change banks (my old bank didn't have a branch up here). I went shopping at a chain department store, buying household stuff. The lady at the cash register acted like she had never seen or even heard of a traveler's check. She asked: "What's this? Where did you get this? I don't know what to do with this." She even looked at a stamped signature (if you're not familiar with them, traveler's checks have an embossed signature of the bank's president someone like that, on part of it; this is distinct from your own signature line and is obviously printed as part of the traveler's check) and asked "do you know that person?" pointing at it.
This is tantamount to looking at a dollar bill and asking the person if they know the secretary of treasury because his or her signature is on it.
Eventually, I got the manager, who was able to help me. According to her, her store had no issues with accepting traveler's checks and their policy was to process them just like any other transaction, but she could not explain her employee's ignorance. In no way did she apologize or even attempt to address the issue with her employee -- if anything she acted like she was doing me a favor by accepting my traveler's check.
This could conceivably happen anywhere because stupidity is ubiquitous, but I don't think I've encountered it elsewhere to quite the degree as I have here.