No lie in this story I'm about to tell ...
I have a friend who attended a well-known engineering school to study electrical engineering. He specialized in circuit design, PCBs, etc, and is quite adept at that. He's no idiot in that regard. Several years later we were on a houseboat trip; it was a very nice modern craft with full power gen-set, etc. He wanted to charge his fishing boat marine battery which was mounted low in the belly of his craft which was tied off portside. I was on the bow with some others having a conversation. He came up to ask me how to hook up the battery charger. Seriously; he didn't know how to hook up the battery charger. I said "Black to black; red to red." He went astern and then came back a few minutes later; said the leads were too short. He asked if we could somehow get power off the houseboat gen-set?