in the street

When I saw signs stating "Lots for sale" I thought it meant that there was a lot for sale.

Robin

There was construction going on outside of our house one day when I was five or six, and I was curiously watching. There was a cement truck and I remember being very intruiged by it, until it started to move. The shoot (the long thing in which the cement flows out of the mixer) faced toward me and suddenly I went crying and screaming bloody murder out of the room. Horrified, my dad asked what was the matter and I dramatically replied "That truck stuck its tongue out at me!"

Apparently I use to believe that construction machinery had tongues.

Kindsey

You know those "Maximum Occupancy ###" signs in buildings? I used to believe that when a building reached it's maximum occupancy, if just one more person stepped inside, the whole building would collapse. For the longest time I would, to my great frustration, try to count the people in any building I went into.

Jong

I grew up in Los Angeles. Once, when I was about 4, I saw an opening ceremony for a new freeway on the news. For a while after that, I believed that the the freeway was closed every night, and that mayor came out every morning to cut the ribbon and open it.

Anon

Downtown, the crosswalks have regular lights to tell you when to walk, but they also have highpitched beeps to alert blind people of when to cross. I never put it together... I always looked up on the stoplights for birds that were making the sound. Eventually I concluded that they were trained birds that lived inside the streetlight poles.

Ellyy

I used to believe those odd black pouch-looking things up on telephone wires held the workmen's tools so they wouldn't have to keep going up and down the pole to their truck to get tools. Still don't know what they're for however...

Cathryn NY USA

When I rode my bicycle my mother always told me to eb careful of strangers. I didn't know what the word "stranger" meant, and I thought that strangers were the maintenance men who worked in my apartment development. Anytime I'd ride past the boiler room doors past a building (where the maintenance men kept their supplies), I'd go really fast in case one of them was there and tried to catch me.

Anon

the street we live on is the same as our surname so when i was younger i believed that we were the first family to live on that street so it was named after us!

Leea

As a child I believed that when you put letters in a mailbox, they would magically find their way to the recipient by way of underground tunnels and chutes--operated by gnomes living deep underground. I thought that the earth's core was a series of tubes that connected mailboxes!

unpezzogrosso

i believed for the longest time that after about 8 pm all the roads were closed (just like stores) and everyone had to be at home with their families and going to bed...

darcy

when i was kid, i believed dynamite was something you sprayed on rocks and then they would dissapear

big googely

I used to see signs all over the place saying 'PARK AND RIDE' and wondered why my parents never to took me to this Park, which I presumed had swings and slides and Rides, like a fun fair.

Imagine my dissappointment years later when I discovered that PARK AND RIDE were out of town car parks where you can PARK your car and RIDE free on the bus into the town centre.

Angie

I used to beleive, upon viewing half demolished houses, that they had in fact 'fallen down'. Thanks Mum and Dad.
Went home wondering when ours would collapse in on us.

andy mac

Begin a big fan of Stephen King when I was a kid, I came across the word 'mausoleum', and wondered what the purpose was. I asked my mom (who obviously got the word confused with 'asylum'), and she informed me that mausoleums were where they 'locked up all the crazy people'. For years after, whenever we drove past a cemetary, I would listen for the hoots and howls of the crazy folks locked inside he little stone buildings.

Jim

When I was about five or six, my dad brought me along with him to go to work and on the way we crossed this parade where there were a bunch of bears giving out candy, and apparently I was REALLY fascinated. So about a week after, I asked my dad if we could go see the bears again, because I thought it was perfectly normal to see blue and green bears dancing around in the streets on your way to work.

Mary-Snow

I used to think that when the roads were 'all finished' all of the streets with the same name in all the towns in the world would connect.

tony

When I was young I couldn't get all the info about firefighters to fit together. I knew they slid down a pole to get out to the fire. I knew the firebox on the corner telephone pole summoned them to the fire. I could understand how they could slide down a small pole inside the big telephone pole and how they could get out.

Ar

i used to believe that the "coin wash" was to clean my dirty pennies.

rmutt

I used to go with my dad in the car when he went to the gas station. He would always say "fill her up Ethyl." I used to think all gas station attendants were named Ethel. One day I asked my dad how come the gas station attendants (who were all men back then) had the same woman's name. He set me straight.

Sameera Sutton

Well when I was a little kid, the coin slot on a parking meter looked like the one on a slot machone to me. So I thought that people putting money in a slot machine were playing for time, never knowing how much time each coin would buy them.

Craig Stallone