in the street

The first time I ever saw a "Garage Sale" sign, I knew how to read the word "garbage" but not "garage". So I misread it as "Garbage Sale" and thought the sellers were expressing a low opinion of their merchandise.

Rachel

Until I was about 12 years old I believed that homeless people were made up by my parents to scare me.

Angela B.

My friend lived on the side of a canyon, and his dad told him there was a kid named Echo who lived on the other side. He said Echo would answer if you called to him. My friend got really mad and kept yelling at Echo over and over for being such a mean kid and repeating everything he said instead of answering.

Jen

When my dad would get mad at me for being bad, he would tell me he was going to throw me in the garbage and let the garbage man take me away. Every Monday morning I would hide when I heard them coming.

Michele

I used to believe that at the beach town where we spent the summer, they took the sidewalks in for the winter.

Missy

when I was young, we lived near a hospital, which had the big "H" on the top of the building. Every time we would drive by I would say "There's the H hospital", assuming that there was an A hospital, B hospital, etc., etc. It was not until I was much older that I realized the H meant Hospital.

M.D.M.

I realized that there were tons of cracks in the cement and asphault right about the same time that the space ship Challenger blew up. For many years I was convinced that the explosion caused the cracks.

Dave Hare

I used to believe that the pictures of the people on a semi-circle in the parking lot of places (aka, the handicapped sign) meant that the place had restrooms.

Anon

More years ago than I care to mention, I lived across the road from from the first tee of a beautiful, well established golf course. Beyond the tee was a Greek temple from which I believed the sun rose every morning - glorious and magical! During a visit as an adult 20 years later, I realized that the Greek temple was an elaborately disguised tractor shed that happened to be due east from my livingroom window!

Alice

I used to believe that the orange balls I saw on the telephone wires were "radar balls"... that is what my dad told me they were. That way the police would always know who was speeding down the road!

Tami

I used to think that I nursing home was a place were mothers would take their new born babies to feed them

Katie

When I was young there were a few pedal cycles in our village. We all knew that the rider had to pedal, with the legs going up and down in turn, to get the bicycle to move. On a rare occasion, the sanitary inspector came on his motorcycle. I was convinced, though, that the wheels of the motorcycle did not turn: they just glided on the road. Did anybody see the rider pedaling? No, all that the man did was to sit comfortably with bent knees without moving his legs at all.

Gamini Premadasa

The old Sydney suburb of Balmain, where I was a child, had long been an almost self-sufficient town, with it's own Town Hall, Courthouse, Police Station, Fire Station, large Post Office, ferry, tram and bus services and a number of sporting facilities. It also had long rows of shops, three cinemas, four Primary schools, three secondary schools, a major hospital, several big churches (the Roman Catholics with their own convent and seminary). There was a major shipbuilding dockyard where my grandfather worked, a coalmine, several large factories and a big power station, together with many other enterprises. As a little kid I assumed that all suburbs were like that, and was horrified to visit relatives in places just full of houses and where all the people seemed to do was go there to sleep!

Swanny

When I was little and visited the Greek isles with my parents, I always saw "Rooms to let" signs and wondered how is it possible that 'toilet' is mispelled EVERYTIME? I also couldn't understand why the signs mentioned toilets-didn't all rooms have them as standard? And signs that just said 'Rooms'-did they not have a toilet?

Vicky

When I was young and probably before I could really tell time, I used to believe that the big signs outside of gas stations with the price on them were clocks and I always thought that the gas price was the time.

Kelly

When I was younger, I always thought (for some reason) that when the sign for a service station said 'Not 24 hours', it meant that it didn't take 24 hours to get there (and the ones that didn't say that did take 24 hours to get there, I suppose).

One day while I was in the car with my Dad, I pointed it out to him, and he asked me if I knew what it meant. I said yes, so he asked me what, and I was about to say what I thought, when I suddenly realised it meant that the service stations weren't open 24 hours.

So I quickly said that, and never told him what I really believed.

Sarah

As a kid I once asked an adult how all the streetlights knew when to turn on and off. I was told that they were all linked to a clock.

I immediateley imagined each streetlight as having an alarm clock inside it (like the old style bell & hammer ticking ones). But I was told they were all linked to the same clock.

I therefore thought that every streetlight was physically coming out of a MASSIVE alarm clock underground inside the earth, big enough for every streetlight in the world to come out of.

Fledge

I used to think that all the street lamps were controlled by one giant light switch, hidden behind some bushes somewhere in the town. I used to imagine it was switched every night and every morning, by a surly caretaker.

Tufty the Squirrel

that DOT was a particularly popular brand of motor cycle helmet.

Gary Watrous

when i was little i thought that when you moved to a different house you would just trade houses with the other person

maria