Its later than you think

Yeah, my mother-in-law keeps stumbling across the native Clueless Idiot. She works from home, which helps with the 'not being in' thing, but then they assume she's entirely incompetent in, say, building-related matters (even though she's spent many, many years renovating the houses she's lived in - my good lady wife informed me once that paint-speckled hands were a large feature of her childhood ;) )