Stupid things you thought as a kid - we were all dumbasses when we were kids

[zoidey]

People who worked in toll booths had to risk their lives running back and forth on crowded highways

sure but they weren't controlling every tollbooth in the world

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

sure but they weren't controlling every tollbooth in the world

Similar

 

[PT 940]

When my aunt told me at age 5 that my teeth would start falling out I thought she meant all of them and all at the same time and that really upset me. I was so relieved when I found out it was a more gradual process.

Also not really when I was a kid but when I started high school I was extremely naive from being sheltered my whole life and there were a few guys I thought were my friends who would make up dumb stuff and I believed it. And they would go back and forth between themselves and reinforce the stuff and agree that it was all real. They would write down fake video game codes that I would go home and try for long periods of time that never worked and I always just thought I was doing it wrong because I didn't believe that friends would lie to each other, especially about dumb stuff.

Another story about naivety - in middle school a girl I was close friends with told me she had a magazine with an actor I really liked on the cover and that she would bring it to me. After a few days of reminding her to bring it she eventually said she dropped it in a mud puddle on her way to the bus one morning. Over the summer I went to the library and spent a very long time on one of the intra-library computers looking for the magazine, knowing I could still look at it if I could find it in their system. And it turned out they never made an issue of the magazine with said actor on the cover and when I eventually figured out that she lied about it I was really upset because again, what a stupid thing to lie about!

 

[Pepito The Cat]

This is kind of an embarrassing one because it lasted for so long.

I thought that Freddy Mercury and some dude called Pink Floyd were members of the band "Queen". Then, after Freddy's death, Floyd went out of his own to make The Wall album.

Why? I have no idea but my teenager brain merged the two and I firmly believed it until my early 20s.

 

[Count groudon]

I used to think that Chinese men could only grow fu Manchu mustaches and no other style of facial hair due to some weird racial patchiness, and only had a bit of hair on the back of their heads that they’d grow out and braid to make up for their weird baldness.

That was my way of rationalizing the stereotypes I saw on tv.

 

[An Sionnach Seang]

At one point, I thought that Worf on Star Trek TNG and Worf on Star Trek Deep Space 9 were two different characters. (Who just coincidentally looked similar and had the same name.)

just to make things confusing there was also a Worf in one of the Star Trek films, also played by Michael Dorn, who was supposedly TNG-era Worf's grandfather

 

[PT 940]

I used to think that fire, not matches specifically, got rid of bad smells in the bathroom so I would take a lighter and just sort of slowly go around the room with it to cleanse the smell. Was in my late 20's when someone told me that no, it's has to be matches. I always wondered why the lighter didn't work so well...

 

[UnKillFill]

just to make things confusing there was also a Worf in one of the Star Trek films, also played by Michael Dorn, who was supposedly TNG-era Worf's grandfather

I cant use that as an excuse. I didnt see the TOS movies (except for the one with the whales) until way later lol.

 

[Recoil]

You know how road signs use an up arrow to indicate that the destination lies ahead?
I remember taking it literally, thinking that every region was stacked on top of others with huge highways spiraling up into the sky.

 

[PL 001]

That commercials for video games told the truth about how awesome they were and weren't meant to deceive and distort the truth.

I ended up convincing my mom to get me Quest 64 as my Christmas gift because the commercials made it look so awesome. My mom had already gotten me Ocarina of Time and traded it back for Quest 64 I later found out.

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

all traffic lights were controlled by a single overworked man in a basement somewhere... would anyone here take that fucking job?

I always thought that there were small people/beings inside the light that handed the light up and down or back and forth for it to light the various colors.

Another story about naivety - in middle school a girl I was close friends with told me she had a magazine with an actor I really liked on the cover and that she would bring it to me.

Freshman year of high school might be pushing the "kid" angle, but I had a classmate unsuccessfully test my naivety then. First we have to backtrack two years to 7th grade.

My classmate "Helen" had a bit of a reputation. Despite our school being a private K-8 school with a dress code, she tended to push the envelope with tight blouses with at least two buttons open. Needless to say, the two class pervs each tried to grope her on numerous occasions and my best friend at the time called her a "bare-chested prostitute." I have a feeling that's why she didn't stay for 8th grade and went to the public junior high instead.

Fast forward to 9th grade at the local public high school and Helen is in my homeroom by virtue of our last names being a letter apart. There was another girl, "Mindy" in our homeroom that apparently became friends with Helen. One day during homeroom, the two are talking behind me and Helen calls to me, "Hey, Kiwi Lime Pie, would you like my number?" Wanting to be polite, and convinced saying no meant I'd be teased mercilessly for turning down a girl's number, I agreed. She gave me a folded paper and told me to call her after school.

It turned out the paper was an ad for a 900-number (i.e. pay-per-minute) phone sex line. I ended up throwing the paper in the garbage wondering why she'd do that without realizing I wasn't so naive to believe her number was a phone sex line, especially since 14 year olds can't legally work as US-based phone sex operators.

The next day, Helen asked me about calling her. Wanting to toy with her some as a form of comeuppance, I think I said that I tried but was told she wasn't home. She probably didn't believe me, but I didn't care.

 

[PT 940]

I used to think people who said "overseas" were dumb if they were referring to someone living across an ocean, not realizing the expression could mean a lot of things. I didn't understand that it was more of a colloquialism than literal.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I thought that episodes of kids shows and comic books worked like chocolate bars or sodas, issue #47 was exactly as good as issue #63, or that one episode was just as good as another episode, that's just how it worked. It was their business model, they had a recipe and they manufactured a product that kids consumed so it had to be the same every time. Like a soda.
Between 5 and 6 years old I started questioning this.
We have these in Scandinavia, I don't know how common the format is elsewhere but here it is a classic.

I guess they're like the softcover manga pockets. As you can see by the numbering there's a lot of them going way back and like most families we had a crate of those. Very varied content, a lot of it came out of Italy I believe and it had things Mickey Mouse chasing people with a revolver and shooting into a crowd because he was a detective sometimes, it was mixed in with the Carl Barks stories. Fun stuff and they're absolute classics over here, IKEA and Kalle Anka Pocket. (Kalle Anka is Donald Duck's name)

So at around 5-6 I started thinking that a particular Scrooge McDuck album/pocket might be objectively better than another album, that other album felt weak, why didn't I enjoy it as much? Maybe it wasn't that good. The good one might actually be my favorite, it might actually be the best one there is, but how? The tiny cogs were turning in my tiny head as I reasoned my way towards something that seems obvious to anyone with half a brain: not all men are created equal, remove kebab.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

Ginger ale was a medical drink that you were required to give children on airplanes.

King Kong came from Hong Kong.

 

[DrJonesHat]

When I was very young, I was quite clingy and asked why my dad had to go to work each morning. I was told "he has to make money." I thought his job was literally to make money. I learned later he was a therapist.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

Night Court was about vampires

 

[Rigor Meowtis]

I had no concept of death when i was very young, so I thought people would regress back to being a baby with their memories wiped and under the care of a new family. Then my mom told me about Jesus dying and I had an existential crisis during bath time.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

I had no concept of death when i was very young, so I thought people would regress back to being a baby with their memories wiped and under the care of a new family. Then my mom told me about Jesus dying and I had an existential crisis during bath time.

I thought you instantly turned into a skeleton.

 

[Rigor Meowtis]

I thought you instantly turned into a skeleton.

That’s actually pretty neat

 

[kadoink]

That congressmen did their jobs.