What obvious adult discoveries made you feel a bit of a plonker?

[Airconfan]

What’s something you learnt as an adult that made you think that’s completely obvious and yet I have never considered that….i feel like a bit of a plonker?

Mine was when taking tablets, the more you drink with it the better it will dissolve. I think alot of tablets are testing with the assumption people will drink 250ml alongside it.

“I just remember thinking me dry swallowing some ibuprofen might not be the most affective”

Sorry, but this really made me laugh 😆 You just used to choke down dry medication like an ostrich?! Didn’t it stick in a horrible lump in your throat? I’ve never in my life seen anyone do that!

I learnt this recently and it has blown my mind every day since.

I was in my early 20s when I bought my first flat. There was no hot water and I actually rang Thames Water to complain that they weren't sending hot water through the taps. The lady I spoke to was so polite and lovely and helpfully explained that I would need to get someone to come and look at my boiler. Mortified.

Also in my early 20s when I found out/was told that maggots grow from fly eggs. We were watching an old film and a doctor was horrified that a man's leg wound had maggots in it. I said but how did they get in, surely he would have noticed and my faintly horrified husband explained about flies and larvae etc. The awful thing is I then remembered learning that at school but I just hadn't put two and two together.

Believe it or not, I'm actually quite clever but common sense took me a long time to develop.

I was in my early 20s when I bought my first flat. There was no hot water and I actually rang Thames Water to complain that they weren't sending hot water through the taps. The lady I spoke to was so polite and lovely and helpfully explained that I would need to get someone to come and look at my boiler. Mortified.

Also in my early 20s when I found out/was told that maggots grow from fly eggs. We were watching an old film and a doctor was horrified that a man's leg wound had maggots in it. I said but how did they get in, surely he would have noticed and my faintly horrified husband explained about flies and larvae etc. The awful thing is I then remembered learning that at school but I just hadn't put two and two together.

Believe it or not, I'm actually quite clever but common sense took me a long time to develop.

Oh my God, so many things:

1. The lockabie bomber was an Islamacist named Almagrahi. Not, as I had always thought, an Irish republican named Al McGarry.
2. There is no battle in Scottish history called Fulluden. Therea a Culluden and a Fludden which I was conflating into one thing.
3. There was never a police Nessy in the kids TV show Family Ness, named Elliot Ness. I have a very clear memory of this happening, but as far as I can find out, it never did. No idea why my mind made this up for me.
4. Police dogs in the US are not trained to leap in front of bullets to save their handlers. I thought this forever because of a line in Turner and Hooch about Hooch dying because he was "doing his job" which i now understand was meant figuritively.

That the swimming pool in cruise ships is not just a hole cut into the boat so you’re swimming in the sea. In fairness, we were a very working class family with no real life experience of cruise ships and I’d only ever seen them photographed from above. Add to this the fact I gave it no real thought beyond childhood, and I was genuinely surprised to discover the truth (for about 5 seconds until it became blatantly obvious) 🤦🏻

My husband dry swallows all tablets. I do not know how (or why 🤔) he does it, he has no problems, never chokes, they just go straight down 🤷‍♀️ Me on the other hand … whole different ball game, complete opposite! 😁

Not as worrying as you seem to think as I apparently wasn’t alone.

I didn’t know what was plumbed into what. I never thought about it. I did do biology until the age of 14 but didn’t get it

How many women sit there thinking about where the uterus and the urethra are? I didn’t, there was no reason for me to give it any thought.

You don’t sound puzzled, you sound ‘baffled’ in the MN sense of the word. I nearly didn’t comment because I knew there were people who would be faux shocked.

I can guarantee there are plenty of things I know that seem obvious but not to others. But it was literally something I never thought about and I zoned out in biology

Yes, my 11 year old told me this a few years ago!!

Surely a £6 UV light is easier to come by and more cost effective than a single use old fashioned camera flash… which would also require an old fashioned camera to work it!!??

I thought that Rio Ferdinand was a football team. 😳

@unlimiteddilutingjuice yes that is confusing, Culloden is the Jacobite battle that ended the attempt of Bonnie Price Charlie to take power. Flodden is where King James of Scotland was defeated and died and is in England. It's very unhelpful that they sound so similar!

I knew Culross isn't pronounced as said, but it was last weekend when I found out it was said more like Coor-rus, and I've lived in Scotland all my life.

Same here! In fact I think the construction of it never really entered my head until we were due to travel through it a few years ago and my young DC asked whether you can see fish swimming outside it (like a tunnel in an aquarium). I was about to answer that it’s too dark at that depth to see fish, before I mentally checked myself and it dawned on me that of course the tunnel runs through rock under the sea, and not through it 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

Omg I was about 24 and doing a urine sample at the gp, kept spraying everywhere as I put the sample pot in the wrong place, ie not at urethra. Mind was blown and felt like an absolutely uneducated idiot about my own body!

I visited Flodden a couple of weeks ago. It is in North Northumberland near Coldstream.

I'm enchanted by this! I didn't know until five minutes ago - thanks. I don't feel a plonker about it, though, as I doubt it's widely known.

I didn't know this!

Every day is a school day.

I did not know that Austen Powers and Fat Bastard were both Mike Myers.

I vividly remember my mum returning home from a gynae operation at about the age of 40, excitedly explaining female anatomy to me, a teenager. The nurses had explained to her that she had 'three holes - a pee hole, a fun hole and a poo hole'. It's a description that still makes me smile every now and then.

Given a man pees and ejaculates from the same hole, it isn’t a huge leap to think there are two “ways” or “tubes” in the vagina, one connecting the bladder and the other the uterus.

(I do understand how it actually works, and haven’t ever been confused, but it’s not that puzzling. It’s like how we eat and breathe using the same hole but my lungs aren’t full of cornflakes).

I’m autistic, so there’s a lot of stuff I’ve realised as an adult I took literally as a child. For example, if someone said in a book that the dog or horse “went to live on a farm”, I really did think without question it went to live on a farm.

I actually found that (lungs aren’t full of cornflakes) very funny, and very cute for some reason 😁😁

That would be some unsafe pool.

BTW being working class does not mean people are not intelligent.

Similarly, I’m 47 and only found out this week that a marrow is a big courgette. This was while I was eating courgette a in a meal with my friend and saying how nice it was but how much I hated marrow.