work

This girl in my 2nd grade class told me that when her mother was going to become a teacher, they put a tube down her nose in order to check her knee. I believed it until 8th grade, when I confronted her about it and she told me it was not true.

Glad it was not, since eventually I would teach for a couple years as well.

Scandia

When I was a very little kid I'd ask Mom where Dad went in the morning. She said he went "to work". When I asked why, she thought that explaining what a lawyer was to a 4 year old might be a bit complicated so she just told me that he went to work to "make money" For a long time I thought my Dad went to a workshop and literally manufactured money.

Dave

I used to love spelling words because I was really great at it. So I thought I could be a "speller" as a job when I grew up, just like a doctor or lawyer.

Diana K.

When I was younger my dad used to phone my mum everyday while on his tea break....this made me want a job that didn't have tea breaks as I don't like the taste of tea.

marty f

I was convinced that anyone belonging to the Masonry had to be a stone mason who built houses and brick walls. It did seem odd that they should be considered so important, but I reasoned that out thinking how important building walls and houses was.

diana

When I was a kid, I used to think that every business built their foundation on a block of ice, but left one building on normal dirt. This was usually called the "off-ice".

Adam

When watching the news, I would see reporters talking into these things they held in their hands. They looked sort of like ice cream cones. So I figured TV reporters were always eating ice cream.

Horatio

When I was young, I would always believe that when my dad went to work. He would just turn this great big wheel ( like a ships wheel ) with his bare hands. That's what he did all day.

Alex

I thought cashiers and toll collectors got to keep all the money they received.

Anon

I used to think that Mormon missionaries were men who had received too many speeding tickets.

This came from a line of questioning when my dad had explained that "If you speed, a policeman might pull you over and give you a ticket."

Somebody giving me something for free, especially a "Ticket" (to a park? to a movie?) sounded like a good thing to me, so he had to explain further that "if you get too many tickets, you cant drive a car any more."

A few weeks later, I saw two men, dressed nicely with dress shirts, ties, and slacks riding bicycles.
I must have realized that they looked far to dressed up to be riding just for fun, and assumed they were going to work, but "must had received too many tickets" and couldn't drive in a car.

I didn't mention it for a long time, and would occasionally see pairs of men riding bicycles, and it just seemed obvious that, indeed, some people got too many speeding tickets and had to ride bicycles to work.

Matt Taylor

When I was a child, i was told I could be anything I wanted to be when i grew up. So naturally, i wanted to be the guy who got to ride on the back of a garbage truck. They had all the fun.

Davoo

i used to believe for a long time that engineers are those people who drive railway trains(i.e the engine)

Anon

Until I was 23 I honestly beleived that the practice towers at firestations were for firemen to stand on top of and watch for fires.

Ally

I must have been about seven or eight, and my little brother maybe four, when Uncle Ken came to stay with us for a couple of weeks, all the way from Australia. He wasn't a real uncle, just a friend of my dad's, but we'd never met anyone from Australia before. Naturally we wanted to know what his life was like.

He told us in all seriousness that he was an alternative kangaroo tamer. He would calm the spirits of rowdy kangaroos by playing them Rolf Harris records to hypnotise them. The kangaroos would bounce up and down in time to the beat until they fell into a sleepy trance.

I must have been twelve when it clicked that bouncing up and down did not lead to a hypnotic trance. Naturally it took another couple of years for me to be sure he'd been having us on.

silverstar1809

When I was around four, I used to think that my doctor lived at the doctor's office. Then one day she mentioned something about going home, and I said, "But don't you live here?" She and my mother got a laugh out of it..

Anon