A childhood belief about technology

I used to believe that you could tell how much room there was on a blank video cassette tape by how much writing was on the label. If the label was completely covered with writing the tape was all full, and if it was only half covered the tape was only half full, and so on. It didn't matter if the person who wrote it just had really big or really small writing, or whether what was on the tape was a movie or just a TV show - as long as the label still had room on it, you could still tape more stuff.

So when I decided to tape my favorite show one day, I chose a tape that only had a tiny bit of writing at the very top of the label, thinking I'd have lots of room to tape as many episodes of my show as I wanted. I couldn't believe it when the tape ran out after only 1 1/2 episodes. Turns out almost the whole tape was taken up by three of my parents' movies that had short titles, but were about 2 or 3 hours apiece. That blew my theory out of the water.