Ask Lemmy

I used to think "change" you got from a store was just the business being nice and making sure you didn't walk away without any money.

I used to think that the whole world was in black and white, just like all the old pictures and movies I had seen, then at some point we discovered color and turned it on! After that there were no more black and white pictures and movies anymore.

That Pluto is a planet.

For a long time, i thought that people thinking that the pyramids were made by aliens was a joke and that the number of people who truly believed it was 0

Traffic lights were hand operated.
The small town where I grew up had one pedestrian traffic light for crossing the main road. There was a small brick shed next to that traffic light with no windows and a little door. When I was little I was convinced that was an operation's center where someone worked to turn the lights red or green.
In reality it was a power substation for the neighborhood, but I was seriously convinced that behind that door was a man looking at a TV screen and operating the traffic light at the right moment.
When we went to a larger town nearby, where there were traffic lights without a convenient mysterious building nearby, I told myself that the traffic light people were most likely working under ground, peeping through the drains.

I.. was good at making up answers for myself instead of just asking my parents.

My mom told me that Dad went to work to make money, and I actually expected to see money making machines when I visited him at the office.

That Africa was largely unexplored by humans and mostly unpopulated

I used to think the poles holding up traffic lights were hollow, and there was a person sitting inside throwing switches to change the lights while looking at a watch to keep the timing fair.

That the Gulf War was in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the only one I knew!

That our blood was blue, but turned red when exposed to air and light. All because a teacher told us so.

Oh yeah I had a few.

• That the moon you see during daytime is actually Mars (I then repeated that to my big sister and she believed it for an embarrassingly long amount of time)
• That the "up" arrows on traffic lights were for planes

That all large salty bodies of water were called "the mediterranean sea."

That my grandma's name was "grandma".

That Europe is a separate country where all the politicians live

That Everyone the Police arrest is a bad person.

The big stereo speakers in my living room contained tiny orchestras

That my parents never had parents. Sure, I had grandparents and saw them daily, but I somehow never realized that they were my dad's parents.

That people with a beard where poor people. I always felt sorry for them not able to afford a shaving kit.

I thought chocolate was a color

That the ice crystals on popsicles were bad for you and only girls could eat them cuz they were immune to the koodies

As a very young kid, I thought there was a very hungry monster that lived inside vacuum cleaners. The switch was just a lever to open a flap and expose the monster's sucking hunger.

That America was the greatest country in the world. And truly, not trying to be political, but honestly the propaganda in Midwest America was real. I didn't know anything about other countries - except for we were better. We figured it out, we built the best system ever and everyone else wanted to be like us.

Now those are the people I see overseas who are about to get punched in a pub.