Did you ever get embarrassed by something that should've been obvious but still struggle with? How do you deal with that?

For a long time, I've struggled to remember whether counting starts from the number you're currently on, or if it should begin immediately after that number. It wasn't until a year ago that AI told me that's called inclusive versus exclusive counting, and that when in doubt, you can use both methods to ensure all the bases were covered.

Well, in high school I was doing some kind of biology experiment... I can't remember what, but it required us to keep track of how many we had of something. My teacher, who came over to help, was explaining the process, and I kept asking him how it could have that number, because I was counting in my head, but evidently everyone else was using exclusive counting while I was using inclusive counting, so my count was one number off. He finally looked at me as if I were dumb and said, 'Use your fingers!'

I was of course mortified for something that I should've been able to do, but without knowing the language I had no way of pointing out why I came short in the first place.

Has anyone dealt with something like this or similar? How was it handled? Did you eventually find closure later?