Stupid thing you thought when you were a kid

[glitteryboots]

I'm watching the first episode of Schitt's Creek on Netflix and the boy and girl in it are arguing over who gets what bed in the motel because if someone were to break in they would murder the person in the first bed. I thought the exact same thing when I was a kid - made sure my brother slept in the bed nearest the door because then I thought I was safe. Not an AIBU but what weird things did you think as a kid?

Probably a lot of stupid things I've forgotten but I thought handbag was actually 'hambag' until I was about 13/14 and a friend corrected me then I had to pretend she misheard me and I did say 'handbag'.

Oh actually, I've just remembered, about a year or two ago (obviously as an adult) I was in a department store and pressed the 'up' arrow on the lift, the guy working there asked me if I was going to the roof garden restaurant as it was closed and I said no and he said that he assumed so because I'd pressed the 'up' button. I didn't say anything. So yeah, in a nutshell, I only recently learned you press the up arrow to go up and not because the lift is down and you want it to come up to where you currently are.

I'm not completely thick, I promise.

When I was small I used to think that your Mum was your Mum because you came out of her tummy but your Dad was your Dad just because he happened to be married to your Mum!

I remember not believing that anyone could disguise their voice beyond my recognition, and I said so as I was being blindfolded to play squeak piggy squeak. Of course, everyone then disguised their voices as much as they could, and I failed repeatedly to guess who squeaked!

@AwkwardPigeon when my son was in hospital, we were taken for xrays by one of the staff. She took us in the lift and couldn't understand why we went up instead of down for the same reason.

She worked in the hospital, how many times must that have happened to her! I had to explain.

So don't feel bad, it's not just you.

My brother's best friend recently admitted that when he was little he thought people planted bulbs in the garden so the worms could turn the lights on.

I've never been sure which way the arrow buttons work either.

It would make more sense to just have a call button and get rid of the arrows altogether. After all, when you get inside, you press the button for whatever floor you want to go to.

I love the bulb one. Very cute.

It would make more sense to just have a call button and get rid of the arrows altogether. After all, when you get inside, you press the button for whatever floor you want to go to

No, it's not that simple. If you are in a forty storey building, and you get on at floor three, to go to the ground floor, you want to know if the lift is going up or down. You don't want to detour all the way to the penthouse first!

That if you left the plug socket turned on but no plug in it, electricity would leak out.
That if you left the TV turned on with no one watching it would explode.
Sometimes I curse my brothers.
and that if you ran out of paper for the fax machine the person in the next office could just fax you some over.

I didn't understand lift arrows until recently. I thought the same as you. It's not very intuitive, and I think most people don't understand this either, because there's one at our local shopping centre which is poorly designed and stops at every floor regardless, and people always get in and press the opposite direction to where it's currently going.

Along with things I thought only belonged in fairy tales: I doubted that prisons were real, as they appeared in stories a lot. When adults said "be good or you will go to prison", I guessed they were joking; it was a bit of a shock when we went past a prison, and I saw it was very real! (I've never seen inside one, except on TV.)

Ditto use of the cane at school: I thought Roald Dahl had invented the idea for Danny the Champion of the World. Lucky me!

I too was puzzled by the lift arrows, it took me a long time to work that out, and that lifts would stop on the way up or down to pick up more passengers. I also remember not getting the idea of the lift moving up and down: when you're inside, you can't see that happening. But when I went in an old-fashioned lift, complete with an attendant, and a metal gate instead of the sliding doors, it suddenly made more sense. I also loved some of the more unusual labels on lift buttons: "mezzanine", "UG" (upper ground). I used to spend a lot of time playing with my grandparents' sliding door to their kitchen, pretending to be a be a "lift girl".

I received zero sex education from my parents and school's contribution consisted of a grainy film about amoebas if I recall, so was happily ignorant in believing that when a woman was due to give birth, her belly button would magically begin to open until large enough for the baby to be lifted from the womb and the belly button re-closed until the next time.

My brother told me that the only food dinner ladies got was the leftovers on school kids' trays. I used to leave so much food and all the nice bits just so they wouldn't go hungry. I was always so hungry in the afternoons

When I was growing up, we lived in a big old, very cold, house with no central heating. We all had electric blankets so we were warm in bed. My DDad told me that the orange light on the control unit was an ‘eye’ that watched over me and kept me safe through the night... I found it very comforting in the old creaky house!
Still have an electric blanket at night, 45 years on... they still have orange lights on them...😁

When i was really young i thought the real world had at one stage been colourless..thanks to black and white tv

I thought only women liked tea. My dad didn’t but I’ve no idea why I thought no men liked tea. Remember the first time I went to a friend’s house and her dad was drinking a cup. I thought he was very odd.

Like many Scottish children, I used to think that trains crossing the Forth Bridge had to go up and down over the arches, and that they would fall off if they went too fast.

Outrageous are you telling me it ISN'T daft apeth?!

I used to think Australia was 6 months ahead of us, so when it was winter here e.g. January, it would be summer there e.g. July. It was only when I was a teenager and started wondering what would happen if you travelled from the UK to Australia and never came back, would you be 6 months older, and happened to say this to a grown up and then realised I had got it completely wrong!

Daft 'apeth is short for halfpenny, or aypnee, or however you want to spell it.

I read that deer antlers grew to full size in a month and assumed breasts would grow to full size just as fast. So was terrified as a 10/11 yo at boarding school that I'd go from flat-chested to a G cup suddenly and wouldn't be able to get bras when home.

Some other girls explained when I was 12...

That if you were under the duvet you were invisible.

I thought "literally" meant hyperbolically - I remember replying to someone using literally correctly with "No, not literally - it really did happen!"

And then well into my adulthood the Oxford English Dictionary has caved to common (idiot) usage and said "also used to mean not literally". FFS. I'm still gutted.