going shopping

my mother used to play jokes on me all the time. This is a good example:

We were living in germany, my pops stationed at an Army base over there. Me and Mom go out to the Post Exchange (for you civilians out there, think the military version of a Wal-Mart)

A bunch of men were doing excercises. They were stretching out their quads by placing their hands against a wall of a small building. To anyone, especially a gullble child, it looks like they are, with all their might, trying to hold up the wall

My mom says, "During World War II, American bombers destroyed most of this area. Ever since, they have had to have people hold up the walls so the building doesnt collapse"

For at least 6 months, every time i saw soldiers doing stretching exercises, i totally believed that they were actually holding up the wall

as a sidenote: my mother did this so often, by the time i turned 10, i didnt believe ANYTHING she said. To this day.

josh

so i'm 7 and looking through this mail order catalogue full of high-tech gizmos and wanting most of it but thinking i'd never save enough money for any of it. after all, it was all over $100. then i saw it. some items said "rush" and then a much smaller amount. so i asked my aunt what that meant and when she explained i was perpelexed.
why would anyone spend 100 on something and have it take a month to be delivered when you could just spend 7 and get it in less than a week?

scott f

When I was a kid and you used to see posters in empty shop windows saying "Bill Posters will be Prosecuted" I thought Bill Poster was a person and must of been really naughty to warrant so many notices put up about him!!

Fairy Snuff!

I was about five and my mother was taking something to some re-sale shop to be sold and she said she was doing it for Christmas money. In my mind she was going to end up with all this gloriously shiny and all different colored coins. I could hardly wait to see that Christmas money.

Linda from Texas

When I was about 5, I managed to misinterpret the concept behind "cents-off" coupons. If a coupon said "save 15 cents", I was certain that it meant you had to pay ALL your money except for 15 cents that you were allowed to SAVE, when paying for that product. And i really could not undertand why anyone though that was a good thing...

chrisboy

I used to believe that price tags in stores were what the store paid to get them from the manufacturer; they paid their employees from the sales tax

blake

When my mother and sisters would leave the house on errands without me, I would always ask, "Where you goin?" and my mother would always reply, "Crazy."

I used to believe Crazy was an interesting store on the eastern border of my hometown that I was never allowed to go to.

David.

As a child, I was terrified of tailors dummies lit up in shop windows after dark....

I was also scared of men with beards - and no moustaches. Weird?

Merv

Sometimes as a child in Ireland if I did a silly thing my parents would tell me that I needed to get some "cop on".

To "cop on" is Irish slang for "to understand" or "to get with the program." It is also used as a noun meaning "common sense."

They began to enrich this admonishment by telling me I needed to "go over to Mrs Conaty the Chemist [pharmacist] and ask her for half-a-pound of cop-on."

Sometimes they would even put a few pennies in my fist and send me on my way, only to call me back as I was going out the door.

I really came to believe that this magical cop-on stuff could be bought in the Chemist shop and that it would make me more intelligent, less clumsy, less forgetful, etc.

As time went on I did notice my parents trying to supress smirks as they told me this. And I finally realized that they were just sharing a joke at my expense.

Fergus

When I was very small, my brother and sister (both older) used to tell me that I was ordered out of a "Montgomery Ward" department store catalog. If I misbehaved or pissed off Mom too much, she would simply return me for a better model.

Knox

I used to believe that writing a check simply showed the store that yes, you did have that amount of money in the bank and that was sufficient to buy something.

Dan M.

When I was little and went to department stores, I always would jump off the escalators at the end because I thought they'd suck my toes under when it got to the end. To this day I still get nervous about escalators because of that childhood fear!

Micah Glenn

my nana told us that if we didn't jump off of the escalator at the top or bottom, we would get sucked right into it along with the stairs.

davey

I once asked my Mum what 'prosecuted' meant after reading 'Theives will be prosecuted' on a sign in Sainsburys. She told me it meant that they would be killed! I attribute this to my happy crime free life.

billy.b

When I was young I used to think that WHSmith was all one word, and was thus pronounced "Wwwhhhhuuusmith"

Nathan