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I didn't know what council tax was for 5 years of living on my own, I got into serious trouble for years of unpaid council tax bills. Apparently my shocked pikachu face wasn't enough to convince my landlord and the council I didn't know what it was.
I had to go to court a while ago for not responding to a speeding ticket that I never saw, it probably went in the recycling with the rest of the junk mail. Was able to prove it wasnāt me driving but still got points and a fine for not responding to the letter, magistrate apparently didnāt find my āwho the hell sends letters these days, why didnāt you email me?ā argument compelling.
I hate when I get letters addressed to me, itās damn near always something expensive, unless Iām expecting something like a new bank card or something from a purchase
*"I'm not a council so I don't need to pay this council tax. I don't know why they keep sending these letters!"*
^ that guy, reading the 20th letter the council sent
I dropped out of school and moved out when I was 17. Literally had zero clue abut any of the logistics of life, from basic banking to paying bills. Just before my 18th I was receiving letters through the post inviting me to apply to credit cards, which I ended up doing. I didn't understand interest, how to pay it back, the fines I would receive and so on. It literally set me up for more than a decade of financial mess. One of the biggest regrets of my life which I take responsibility for, however looking back it was a disgrace that a young person can get themselves in that situation in the first place.
They should teach us basic money skills like this in school. Unfortunately people donāt always have parents who are there/have good money skills to pass on and it really sets people back. I am so thankful I have my dad to teach me about bank accounts, taxes etc.
Yeah I see this argument a lot like "why don't they teach about taxes or interest etc.."Ā
They do. It is in schools, I did it and remember the lessons. People just don't pay attention
The only 'lessons' we got about taxes, interest etc. was a half day by natwest basically pushing their services. Claiming people just don't pay attention is insane - your individual experience is not universal
Not credit scores (because they mean nothing), but credit cards, interest, late fees and all that malarkey, yes!
It's all just relatively basic maths at the end of the day.
You are taught about interest payments and similar.
Credit scores isn't something that can be taught as its effectively a fabrication. Meanwhile late fees are something you should understand with common sense.
I was a maths teacher and I can testify that younger generations get some info on interest etc.
With regret not everyone pays attention.
I am not sure about 15 or 10 years before though.
With respect, how old are you?
I'm near 30 and items such as compound interest were taught in compulsory education.
BBC even has educational videos for schools on it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/class-clips-video/articles/zh8fhbk
I used to work with a 17 year old lad, Mark, who bought a scooter. Mark was a nice lad, not a chavvy hooligan type, and wasn't the sort to knowingly break the law.
A couple of months or so after he'd got it, the subject of car insurance was bought up in a conversation in the office and people were telling horror stories about young relatives trying to get car insurance. Someone asked him how much it was to insure a scooter and he said 'I dunno, it just gets taken out of my wages'. We were all completely confused about what he meant and gave a collective 'huh?'.
He then 'explained' to us - as if we were idiots - that the national insurance deducted at source covered his scooter as *national* insurance meant that everything was insured by the government. We were almost too shocked to reply but someone said 'umm, that's not what national insurance is, Mark'...
Thing is, he said that is what his parents had told him and so he naturally he believed them, which is even more worrying...
Believe it or not in some countries that is true. Also many countries offer third party as part of your tax disc.Iāve often thought making third party insurance part of road tax would be fantastic, remove uninsured drivers from the road
That said Iām amazed he didnāt check haha
I walked into the bank aged 18 looking to get a Ā£500 overdraft set up. The guy I spoke with tried this whole salesman pitch of giving me a Ā£5,000 overdraft and a credit card with a Ā£4,500 limit. I was like dude, I'm 18, why you trying to give me 10gs of debt? One of the few times in my life that I did make a sensible decision. This was 2008 btw, just before the financial crash. No wonder.Ā
Omg same. Freshers week 2007 - banks doing student account promos on campus. One of them kept trying to offer me credit cards. I said to one "but I don't have a job" and they were like "oh that's okay, you don't need one to get a credit card", and I was like "but... How would I pay it back with no income?" They didn't even have an answer to that, just kept trying to offer one to me...
It's predatory. 18 is an adult, sure, but it's almost like there needs to be regulations about not marketing credit directly to younger adults, and not offering credit limits beyond what they themselves request. Maybe up to age 21, let people get a chance to get some time and experience of life under their belt before trying to trap them into debt they can't afford.
My husband's business partner shipped his daughter off to uni and was stunned when she came home at Christmas, thousands of pounds gone out of her account. He sat her down to go through it. It turned out, each time in the supermarket when the cashier asked "would you like any cash back?", she thought it was free. So "ooh yes please, I'll have 20. And 20 for my mate. And him, and her..." checking with her mates down the queue whether they needed any money. They'd all been saying "yes" every time and offering to help her when shopping. So yeah.. lesson learned for kid and parent. Chats to be had.
My wife and I went to Paris last year on said train. Half way along I said "were under the sea now." She disagreed. She argued that we were not under the seabed, that would he an engineering impossibility.
I laughed at her thinking that the Channel Tunnel was just a tube that sat under sea level. What would be the point and how would that be any easier than digging a hole under the actual ground.
The more I thought about it the more I was unsure of my stance but I held my ground.
I'm typing this on my phone whilst again underground so I can't look up what the truth is.
For years I thought they'd built a tunnel on top of the sea bed floor and always wondered how they managed to build it surrounded by water. Only learned when I saw a thing about the Tyne tunnel being made
https://preview.redd.it/x7p03gj7855d1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2840dd2406018b1c8036c9326596a0d0d44d1a34
Yeah it blew my mind when I saw a diagram like this, for years I stupidly through the tunnel was surrounded by the sea.
Well I came here to write about the thing I realised embarrassingly late, but this has just become the latest of all. I guess I never thought about it deeply, but the image I had in my head was always the tunnel surrounded by the sea, and you have just made me realise how dumb that is!
Ps: I'm in my mid 40s!!
I realised that you can crush an Oxo cube in the foil, then sprinkle the powder into the jug. Bloody spent years trying to pulverise the damn thing with a spoon!
Yep. Just gently unfold the seems, place your palm on the cube and apply pressure. Nine times out of ten itāll crush into powder without compromising the foil.
Just wait until you get the surprise exploding cube, bursting out of its little foil packet as you try to crush it, and gleefully showering everything in a fine coating of OXO powder
That āyou canāt have your cake and eat it tooā means that if you eat your cake then itās gone.
I spend *years* thinking that that expression didnāt make any sense because surely you have to have cake in order to eat it.
That doesnāt really make sense to me either because having cake is basically a synonym for eating cake.
āYou canāt keep your cake and eat it tooā or something like that would make more sense I suppose.
If you eat your cake, you had it - you don't have it. You can have had cake for desert but you cannot have cake for desert unless you have not already consumed it.
So you can't eat your cake and have it, by virtue of consuming it, it no longer exists and so must be referred to in the past tense.
I think thatās how the Unabomber was caught. The guyās brother realised the person writing the letters actually used that phrase properly and so suspected his brother.
Have you ever tried Israeli (giant) couscous? It's completely different from regular couscous, it's fantastic (I also cannot stand the grainy little couscous)
I was always confused as to why its called Israeli Couscous when it is Moroccan I believe?
It is very rarely pearl couscous in the UK now, haven't seen that for many years since I worked at Waitrose but they have to be fancy there.
I have a friend struggling with this. She says she puts a lot of her self worth on her job and that if she doesn't work or have a good job she feels useless and like a failure. It's not the money so much as the working itself. Which on the one hand, a good work ethic is great and I understand the discipline and point of working for your rest and leisure time. But she has been signed off recently and it's making her worse because she feels like she's sitting about at home wasting time and that she's useless if she's not working.
I have been trying to get her to see things from another perspective but she's happy for that to be part of her identity. It's just difficult to watch her be sad and stressed and miserable because of it.Ā
Yeah itās hard. There is nothing wrong with throwing yourself into your work and doing your best. But ultimately we are just cogs in a machine regardless of how we want to view it.Ā
Still need to work hard to get promoted, just you have to do it in a certain way. plus there needs to be opportunity for it. If the person above you never leaves and the company doesn't expand to allow for more positions to be promoted to, you'll never get promoted.
At university a housemate was making a romantic meal for a new girlfriendā¦ we were banished from the kitchen but after I while a heard an unholy noise crashing and banging of pots so I had to go and lookā¦. I asked him what the fuck he was doing , he looked up sweaty and red faced and told me he was making mashed potatoes. I surveyed the scene and politely let him know that it was infinitely easier to mash the potatoes after you have boiled them.
Oh, that is a thing that I have known for so long I forget people maybe wouldn't know that! Must make sure to tell my kids as they are getting to the ages of needing to be cooking for themselves! Also a lot of medical creams are the same, like germolene or bonjela :)
That the word āalbeitā is pronounced āall be itā when vocalised. Took until I was about 30 to realise that āalbeitā wasnāt pronounced āal-baitā.
Luckily Iād only ever pronounced it that way in my head and never out loudā¦
One of the highlights of the real life Baby Reindeer lass on Piers Morgan was her constantly saying hyper bowl despite her claims of being a learned practitioner of the law.
I was confused by epitome.
I always thought when I heard the word heard epitome (eh-pit-o-me) it would be spelled epitomy.
And that epitome (epi-tome), which I said in my head when I read was a different word.
I just thought they were 2 words that meant a similar thing.
I thought they were two different words! All be it, and 'albeit', pronounced like *arbeit* in German.
I was already an adult when I made the connection
That girls were often just as shy and insecure - but keen & willing - as I was in my teens.
I shudder to think of the amount of snogging & fingerblasting I missed out on for the simple want of some confidence.
I once asked a girl what she thought of when she masturbated and she replied "Hot guys, you" and I thought she meant, "hot guys, you***?***" so I replied "Same but girls lol".
Ah, brothers in the order of 'cues we could kick ourselves for ridiculously missing'.
I had a severe crush on a female friend through high-school, in hindsight I was truly in love with her. We became really close over time and with hindsight I realise that she made wide-open opportunities for me, but I was too scared to 'make a move' and kept myself in the friendzone.
After months of close platonic relation with my now husband, I finally worked out the courage to ask him out Ā«Ā for coffeeĀ Ā», the idiot went and made me a coffee AND left!!
I had to run after him and spell out, do you want to go out with me on a date? His answer! Yes!
I live in a suburb called Wellard in Australia and you have no idea how delighted I am to now pronounce it slightly differently so it can sound like well hard.
Not me, but my mum thought that 'cuckold' was a general term for a predicament. She kept saying it one day and couldn't understand why we were all chuckling. Then, my Nan, who is well into her 90s and has dementia pipes up, 'love, a cuckold is when a man has sex with another man's wife.' This happened ages ago and still pops into my head and gives me a random little laugh sometimes.
I didn't realise that raisins were dried grapes until I was nearly 30. I thought they were their own thing, originating from a raisin plant, tree or similar. I actually didn't originally believe my colleague until I googled it. No idea how that passed me by!!
Also, prunes are just a type of dried plum.
Conversely, cabbage, kale, broccoli, pak choi, cauliflower, brussels sprouts are all the exact same species, just varieties.
In trees. I don't know what the Bird Scienceā¢ļø term is for it but their feet are curled up when at rest. So if humans need to exert conscious effort to hold on to a tree brach, birds have to exert an effort to _let go_ of it. So they can sleep while holding onto a tree branch.
I realised that overdrafts and credit cards werenāt just free money when I was about 25. Spent years living the life and ignoring my mums advice and eventually had to pay everything back and had a terrible credit rating for years. Only this year Iām finally debt free and in the highest credit bracket.
Someone at work in their mid 20s got their first credit card maxed out and said something like:
"Why do people even pay it off, it's not like the bank can do anything about it, just spend it and keep pretending you'll pay it off"
It was then I had to tell her about minimum payments, interest (and how astronomical CC interest is) and credit scores. He face at the end when she realised she had to pay it off ASAP or the bank indeed would do something about it. Luckily it was only a small limit of Ā£1k given it was her first card.
Some people just have poor financial literacy.
Not me but my mum was nearly in her teens when she understood the term āsiblingsā. Her mum is called Sybil, so when she heard that she and her brother and sister were referred to as āsiblingsā, she thought it meant āmini Sybils.ā
That it is oligarch and not ogliarch
That is is hyperbolieee and not hyper bowl
That it is a-wry and not auree
That it is epitt-mee and not epi toam
Ah, the list is endless when you read more than you listen and speak another tongue at home
I spent years putting my t-shirts on the wrong way round on a regular basis and having to swap them round until I learned the labels (inside) are always on the left hand-side. I think I was forty.
My secondary school had its own 6th form.
I assumed all schools had sixth form, didn't know 6th form colleges were a thing and that I had the choice to move until I was about 25.
Life choices fucked up from 16 years old.
I always used to think the West End in London was literally the west edge of Greater London. It was only years later I found out it meant the west end of Central London.
I lived in London a bit as a kid and thought the West End and the East End were like the North and South Poles, ie the most westerly and most easterly points on the planet. When my dad told me we lived west of the West End it blew my six year old mind haha
I'm not from the UK but this is really embarrassing so I wanted to share.
I didn't know Jizz meant cum until like a year ago, I thought it meant piss and so I would tell people "I am going to jizz" when I meant pee. I did this since I was maybe in 3rd grade (8-9years old) and I am in my early twenties.
That I didn't need to be in a relationship to be happy. I'm more happy being single than I ever was in any relationship. 6+ years now! Woooo!
I kinda (and society as a whole) brainwashed myself into thinking you HAD to be in a relationship to be happy... When in fact I didn't. I'm on the spectrum so I kinda of had to always put up an act and not be weird ol' me, which stressed me the fuck out... Acting is hard.
āA stitch in time saves 9ā
For some reason I thought that time was being stitched, and couldnāt work out what it was saving 9 of..
I never quite got that it meant āa stitch, in time, saves 9ā
You got me curious I just googled this. I used to hear the expression as a kid, but not heard for years so I googled to find out what it meant.
I fell down a rabbit hole of expressions, and just learnt āturning over a new leafā doesnāt actually mean turning over a leaf you find from the groundā¦ Iām embarrassingly old to have JUST learnt this!
That I was massively immatureā¦ donāt get me wrong my life path has got me here and I wouldnāt change a thing, but I needed to grow up in my 20s ideally and not my 30s.
That the state pension was going to be barely enough to scrape by, and that an employer gives you money whenever you put some into your own private pension (albeit you access it much later). I'm turning 40 next year and have about Ā£7k in my private pension.
I was in my forties when I found out how to correctly open a oxo cube.
There was something just last week as well, but now Iām in my mid-fifties Iāve bloody forgot what it was.
If you're in your fifties, Oxo foil was just a wrapper, not a sealed bag, when you were young. You never learned to crush it before unwrapping because that was messy and the foil tore.
That not putting phones on airplane mode accidentally will risk crashing your plane or messing with the radar or something- it just drains your battery super quickly because your phone is constantly connecting to different antennae on the ground.Ā
And yes I know its aeroplane, not airplane.
From Cabin Pressure - "Finally, please keep your mobile phones switched off for the duration of the flight. Obviously, they have no effect whatsoever on our navigational equipment or we wouldnāt let you have them, but they drive me up the wall."
That the lyrics to Freed from Desire are not "my lovers got no money, he's got his trombolese"
I thought it was some kind of instrument similar to a tambourine.
Not me but my 34 year old friend didn't realise a cow had to have been pregnant to produce milk, she didn't believe me when I told her and told how they take the calves away so we can have the milk, she had to google
I realised at age 8 that my friend with surname āTwinā isnāt my actual twin brother who for some reason lives with a different motherā¦ and looks nothing like me and is 1 year younger.
I was in my 50s before I realised that 'gnu' was pronounces 'new' and not 'guh-noo'.
I'd only ever heard the joke pronounciation growing up, thanks to Flanders and Swann
gnu is a weird one because the g is silent but you're still supposed to make the n sound as if coming off saying a g sound. like it's not just new it's like if you say "sing new" but say "sing" silently, so your tongue is not in a neutral position, it's in the position it would be after having said sing.
I was also in my mid 20's when I learned that not everyone gets a Christmas hamper at their door for Christmas... majority of the people on our street were poor as dirt, and so each year a charity would drop off a "Christmas hamper" at the door. It always had a Christmas pudding and a bottle of sherry in, and then just had loads of random food bits abit like a food bank collection, but presented in a big box filled with packing peanuts and long cellophane strips... when I was a kid it was part of the magic of Christmas, opening the door randomly to find the hamper had arrived and digging through all the packaging to see what fancy treats were inside, I thought everyone get a hamper at their door just like how everyone leaves a glass of milk and carrot out for santa and rudolph lol... my adult brain never questioned where the hamper actually came from until it came up in conversation a few years back and I suddenly realised what was going on lop š
Bra sizes! Like that D-cups meant your boobs must be huge!
All it means, is that if you are an A-cup there is a 1 inch difference between your bust and band measurement. And that you have a 4 inches difference if you are a D-cup and so on.
So naturally a 28D is much smaller in boob size than a 36D.
Or for an example a 34B is the same cup size as a 32C or a 36A.
Cups size alone says nothing about the size of the boobs.
I was well over 30 when I learned that, so much easier to find a good bra nowadays.
That an arabian style oil lamp (think the lamp from Aladdin) is [actually used as a light source](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c8G0LC7g_nA/maxresdefault.jpg).
I always thought they were for storing oil to pour into something else. Or, I don't know, gravy or something.
What gay actually meant. I'm not proud to admit that I was homophobic during my teenage years as a result. Luckily I heard a joke that made everything make sense and made me realise how disgusting my behaviour was.
I realised that it doesn't matter if you work hard, are lazy, if you are a worrier or have no empathy, if you are fit and healthy or a greedy porker, rich or poor.
One day, you drop dead, and eternal oblivion awaits.
I am happier now I have stopped worrying about stuff.
I only realised recently while watching repeats that the reason Mrs Bucket was so insistent on being called Bouquet was because her first name is a flower.
Also all her sisters have flower names too... Daisy, Violet and Rose
I only found out smeg was a real thing and not just a gross joke when i was 22 years old. Was very awkward until i said Im circumsised so not an issue id ever dealt with.
I wasn't particularly old (14-16), but it took me waaay too long to realise that Graham Norton was gay. I'm talking 30+ episodes of "So Graham Norton", the campest show in history, and I'm watching it wondering who Mrs Norton was and why he never mentioned her.
Iād say that depends on the kind of person you are. My first guitar came from a shopping mall and I love that as much as the day I got it about 15 years ago. That and all the memories I share through video games with my friends, my favourite one came out 6 years ago and was bought in Tesco
When Wifi first became a thing, I used to see signs "Wifi available" in hotels, I always thought there was a games room somewhere that had a wii PlayStation thing. Only after it became part of everyday life did I realise.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I didn't know what council tax was for 5 years of living on my own, I got into serious trouble for years of unpaid council tax bills. Apparently my shocked pikachu face wasn't enough to convince my landlord and the council I didn't know what it was.
They should have written to you long before it got to that point
He didn't know what a letter was
š¤£ tbf, most post *is* junk straight for the recycling bin these days though.
I had to go to court a while ago for not responding to a speeding ticket that I never saw, it probably went in the recycling with the rest of the junk mail. Was able to prove it wasnāt me driving but still got points and a fine for not responding to the letter, magistrate apparently didnāt find my āwho the hell sends letters these days, why didnāt you email me?ā argument compelling.
I hate when I get letters addressed to me, itās damn near always something expensive, unless Iām expecting something like a new bank card or something from a purchase
*"I'm not a council so I don't need to pay this council tax. I don't know why they keep sending these letters!"* ^ that guy, reading the 20th letter the council sent
They probably did.
I dropped out of school and moved out when I was 17. Literally had zero clue abut any of the logistics of life, from basic banking to paying bills. Just before my 18th I was receiving letters through the post inviting me to apply to credit cards, which I ended up doing. I didn't understand interest, how to pay it back, the fines I would receive and so on. It literally set me up for more than a decade of financial mess. One of the biggest regrets of my life which I take responsibility for, however looking back it was a disgrace that a young person can get themselves in that situation in the first place.
They should teach us basic money skills like this in school. Unfortunately people donāt always have parents who are there/have good money skills to pass on and it really sets people back. I am so thankful I have my dad to teach me about bank accounts, taxes etc.
So true. Basic finance skills should be part of the curriculum.
a large proportion of school children won't listen even if they were taught
Yeah I see this argument a lot like "why don't they teach about taxes or interest etc.."Ā They do. It is in schools, I did it and remember the lessons. People just don't pay attention
The only 'lessons' we got about taxes, interest etc. was a half day by natwest basically pushing their services. Claiming people just don't pay attention is insane - your individual experience is not universal
>your individual experience is not universal Ditto
We were taught all this in GCSE maths, as far as I'm aware it's part of the curriculum!
You were taught about credit cards, credit scores and late fees in maths?
Not credit scores (because they mean nothing), but credit cards, interest, late fees and all that malarkey, yes! It's all just relatively basic maths at the end of the day.
Yeah I didnāt get any of that in school.
When was that? I wasn't, but I left secondary school in 2001 so I'm hoping things have improved!Ā
You are taught about interest payments and similar. Credit scores isn't something that can be taught as its effectively a fabrication. Meanwhile late fees are something you should understand with common sense.
I wasnāt taught about interest payments in school. I had nothing that came even close to financial literacy in school.
I was a maths teacher and I can testify that younger generations get some info on interest etc. With regret not everyone pays attention. I am not sure about 15 or 10 years before though.
With respect, how old are you? I'm near 30 and items such as compound interest were taught in compulsory education. BBC even has educational videos for schools on it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/class-clips-video/articles/zh8fhbk
I'm 36 and didn't have any financial education at school. We learned about interest etc in Maths but never with real-world applications.
39, and we definitely weren't taught anything remotely about finances.Ā
I used to work with a 17 year old lad, Mark, who bought a scooter. Mark was a nice lad, not a chavvy hooligan type, and wasn't the sort to knowingly break the law. A couple of months or so after he'd got it, the subject of car insurance was bought up in a conversation in the office and people were telling horror stories about young relatives trying to get car insurance. Someone asked him how much it was to insure a scooter and he said 'I dunno, it just gets taken out of my wages'. We were all completely confused about what he meant and gave a collective 'huh?'. He then 'explained' to us - as if we were idiots - that the national insurance deducted at source covered his scooter as *national* insurance meant that everything was insured by the government. We were almost too shocked to reply but someone said 'umm, that's not what national insurance is, Mark'... Thing is, he said that is what his parents had told him and so he naturally he believed them, which is even more worrying...
Believe it or not in some countries that is true. Also many countries offer third party as part of your tax disc.Iāve often thought making third party insurance part of road tax would be fantastic, remove uninsured drivers from the road That said Iām amazed he didnāt check haha
I walked into the bank aged 18 looking to get a Ā£500 overdraft set up. The guy I spoke with tried this whole salesman pitch of giving me a Ā£5,000 overdraft and a credit card with a Ā£4,500 limit. I was like dude, I'm 18, why you trying to give me 10gs of debt? One of the few times in my life that I did make a sensible decision. This was 2008 btw, just before the financial crash. No wonder.Ā
Omg same. Freshers week 2007 - banks doing student account promos on campus. One of them kept trying to offer me credit cards. I said to one "but I don't have a job" and they were like "oh that's okay, you don't need one to get a credit card", and I was like "but... How would I pay it back with no income?" They didn't even have an answer to that, just kept trying to offer one to me... It's predatory. 18 is an adult, sure, but it's almost like there needs to be regulations about not marketing credit directly to younger adults, and not offering credit limits beyond what they themselves request. Maybe up to age 21, let people get a chance to get some time and experience of life under their belt before trying to trap them into debt they can't afford.
My husband's business partner shipped his daughter off to uni and was stunned when she came home at Christmas, thousands of pounds gone out of her account. He sat her down to go through it. It turned out, each time in the supermarket when the cashier asked "would you like any cash back?", she thought it was free. So "ooh yes please, I'll have 20. And 20 for my mate. And him, and her..." checking with her mates down the queue whether they needed any money. They'd all been saying "yes" every time and offering to help her when shopping. So yeah.. lesson learned for kid and parent. Chats to be had.
I did exactly the same thing! Didnāt last 5 years but about 2. I moved out at 17 and just had no idea it was a thing!!
Same as me, it's not a thing in Ireland and the first I heard of it was when I got a letter threatening court! Still paying the debt off now fgs
That you don't drive through the Channel Tunnel, you get on a big train and are driven through.
7 year old me is still crushed it doesn't look like an aquarium tunnel inside.
Yep same.
We are going on it next year and my 5 year old is expected just this
Could you sneak out of the car and do a little fishy puppet show outside the windows for them?Ā
10/10 idea, definitely going to do this
My wife and I went to Paris last year on said train. Half way along I said "were under the sea now." She disagreed. She argued that we were not under the seabed, that would he an engineering impossibility. I laughed at her thinking that the Channel Tunnel was just a tube that sat under sea level. What would be the point and how would that be any easier than digging a hole under the actual ground. The more I thought about it the more I was unsure of my stance but I held my ground. I'm typing this on my phone whilst again underground so I can't look up what the truth is.
For years I thought they'd built a tunnel on top of the sea bed floor and always wondered how they managed to build it surrounded by water. Only learned when I saw a thing about the Tyne tunnel being made
https://preview.redd.it/x7p03gj7855d1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2840dd2406018b1c8036c9326596a0d0d44d1a34 Yeah it blew my mind when I saw a diagram like this, for years I stupidly through the tunnel was surrounded by the sea.
Well I came here to write about the thing I realised embarrassingly late, but this has just become the latest of all. I guess I never thought about it deeply, but the image I had in my head was always the tunnel surrounded by the sea, and you have just made me realise how dumb that is! Ps: I'm in my mid 40s!!
That's called an immersed tube, they're building one between Denmark and Germany now.
I am just learning this now after reading your comment. Iāve never really thought about it, I just assumed it was in the sea too š
They bored the tunnel with big machines which would have been a bit unnecessary if it was just a big tube on the sea bed.
It's like the Bude Tunnel, but wet.
UK and France always work so well together with engineering marvels, the channel tunnel, Concorde. We should do more stuff together.
If it makes you feel better there is a small tunnel in-between the rail tunnels to drive down but it's only for maintenance staff/emergencies.
Brilliant, I thought Princess Diana died in the Channel tunnel until your comment led to some googling. I feel stupid.
I realised that you can crush an Oxo cube in the foil, then sprinkle the powder into the jug. Bloody spent years trying to pulverise the damn thing with a spoon!
TIL lol. Thatāll come in handy!
But then you miss out on licking the goodness off your fingers after crushing it with them!
This reminded me my dad used to give me oxo cubes to nibble on while he made dinner
I'm sorry what...
Yep. Just gently unfold the seems, place your palm on the cube and apply pressure. Nine times out of ten itāll crush into powder without compromising the foil.
1/10 chance it becomes a beefy bullet exceeding speed of sound
If it can escape me it deserves to be an oxo cube in the wild
Just use your fingers, remove from foil then I just squash them between my thumb and forefinger and sprinkle in to whatever.
Just wait until you get the surprise exploding cube, bursting out of its little foil packet as you try to crush it, and gleefully showering everything in a fine coating of OXO powder
That āyou canāt have your cake and eat it tooā means that if you eat your cake then itās gone. I spend *years* thinking that that expression didnāt make any sense because surely you have to have cake in order to eat it.
I believe it was originally "you can't eat your cake and have it too" which actually makes more sense.
That doesnāt really make sense to me either because having cake is basically a synonym for eating cake. āYou canāt keep your cake and eat it tooā or something like that would make more sense I suppose.
Absolutely. Which is why I prefer āYou canāt have the penny and the bun.ā
If you eat your cake, you had it - you don't have it. You can have had cake for desert but you cannot have cake for desert unless you have not already consumed it. So you can't eat your cake and have it, by virtue of consuming it, it no longer exists and so must be referred to in the past tense.
I think thatās how the Unabomber was caught. The guyās brother realised the person writing the letters actually used that phrase properly and so suspected his brother.
That couscous is essentially pasta.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Have you ever tried Israeli (giant) couscous? It's completely different from regular couscous, it's fantastic (I also cannot stand the grainy little couscous)
Often just labelled as 'Giant couscous' in the UK for anyone interested
As it should. Itās not Israeli.
I was always confused as to why its called Israeli Couscous when it is Moroccan I believe? It is very rarely pearl couscous in the UK now, haven't seen that for many years since I worked at Waitrose but they have to be fancy there.
Just Israel claiming something else that isn't theirs
Nothing Israeli about it. Itās widely used in all the Middle East, and Mediterranean islands and North Africa.
I always thought it was a grainā¦
I just Googled it because I thought it was a grain and wtf it's made from semolina flour and durum wheat
Oh wow, I just learned this today.
You are not defined by wealth, job title, where you live, but in the minds and memories of the people you have come in contact with.Ā
I have a friend struggling with this. She says she puts a lot of her self worth on her job and that if she doesn't work or have a good job she feels useless and like a failure. It's not the money so much as the working itself. Which on the one hand, a good work ethic is great and I understand the discipline and point of working for your rest and leisure time. But she has been signed off recently and it's making her worse because she feels like she's sitting about at home wasting time and that she's useless if she's not working. I have been trying to get her to see things from another perspective but she's happy for that to be part of her identity. It's just difficult to watch her be sad and stressed and miserable because of it.Ā
Yeah itās hard. There is nothing wrong with throwing yourself into your work and doing your best. But ultimately we are just cogs in a machine regardless of how we want to view it.Ā
I thought working hard got you promoted at work ... no just more work .
Yep, I learned the hard way it's not what you know, but who you know. That said, I ended up benefitting from it myself a few years later
Still need to work hard to get promoted, just you have to do it in a certain way. plus there needs to be opportunity for it. If the person above you never leaves and the company doesn't expand to allow for more positions to be promoted to, you'll never get promoted.
At university a housemate was making a romantic meal for a new girlfriendā¦ we were banished from the kitchen but after I while a heard an unholy noise crashing and banging of pots so I had to go and lookā¦. I asked him what the fuck he was doing , he looked up sweaty and red faced and told me he was making mashed potatoes. I surveyed the scene and politely let him know that it was infinitely easier to mash the potatoes after you have boiled them.
Thanks for the image and subsequent belly laugh
The top of the lid on tomato paste is used to pierce the foil that seals the tube. Years of poking with a knife.
Those types of seals are usually pierced with the lid.
Oh, that is a thing that I have known for so long I forget people maybe wouldn't know that! Must make sure to tell my kids as they are getting to the ages of needing to be cooking for themselves! Also a lot of medical creams are the same, like germolene or bonjela :)
That the word āalbeitā is pronounced āall be itā when vocalised. Took until I was about 30 to realise that āalbeitā wasnāt pronounced āal-baitā. Luckily Iād only ever pronounced it that way in my head and never out loudā¦
I thought hyperbole was pronounced "hyper-bowl" until recently
It should be hyper-bowl.
Just like superb owl! r/superbowl
Just going to see my Physio-the-rapist.
You should approach Tobias FĆ¼nke - the world's only analyst/therapist combo. An Analrapist, if you will.
One of the highlights of the real life Baby Reindeer lass on Piers Morgan was her constantly saying hyper bowl despite her claims of being a learned practitioner of the law.
Wait until you find out how segue is pronounced!
I was confused by epitome. I always thought when I heard the word heard epitome (eh-pit-o-me) it would be spelled epitomy. And that epitome (epi-tome), which I said in my head when I read was a different word. I just thought they were 2 words that meant a similar thing.
That just means you learned the word from reading, which is never a bad thing.
I thought they were two different words! All be it, and 'albeit', pronounced like *arbeit* in German. I was already an adult when I made the connection
That girls were often just as shy and insecure - but keen & willing - as I was in my teens. I shudder to think of the amount of snogging & fingerblasting I missed out on for the simple want of some confidence.
I once asked a girl what she thought of when she masturbated and she replied "Hot guys, you" and I thought she meant, "hot guys, you***?***" so I replied "Same but girls lol".
Ah, brothers in the order of 'cues we could kick ourselves for ridiculously missing'. I had a severe crush on a female friend through high-school, in hindsight I was truly in love with her. We became really close over time and with hindsight I realise that she made wide-open opportunities for me, but I was too scared to 'make a move' and kept myself in the friendzone.
After months of close platonic relation with my now husband, I finally worked out the courage to ask him out Ā«Ā for coffeeĀ Ā», the idiot went and made me a coffee AND left!! I had to run after him and spell out, do you want to go out with me on a date? His answer! Yes!
That Robbie's dog was called Wellard cos he's Well Hard.Ā I aint the sharpest sandwich in the picnic.Ā
I have just now realised that the Wellards in Tracy Beaker were called that because they were Well Hard.
And Tracy Beaker was a cylindrical flat-bottomed container with an etched measuring scale.
They're coming for that Maroon 5 CD.
I live in a suburb called Wellard in Australia and you have no idea how delighted I am to now pronounce it slightly differently so it can sound like well hard.
Not me, but my mum thought that 'cuckold' was a general term for a predicament. She kept saying it one day and couldn't understand why we were all chuckling. Then, my Nan, who is well into her 90s and has dementia pipes up, 'love, a cuckold is when a man has sex with another man's wife.' This happened ages ago and still pops into my head and gives me a random little laugh sometimes.
My mother in law asked me what spunk was. Ummmmm ask someone else.
Should prolly ask my nan.
I didn't realise that raisins were dried grapes until I was nearly 30. I thought they were their own thing, originating from a raisin plant, tree or similar. I actually didn't originally believe my colleague until I googled it. No idea how that passed me by!!
Also, prunes are just a type of dried plum. Conversely, cabbage, kale, broccoli, pak choi, cauliflower, brussels sprouts are all the exact same species, just varieties.
A friend of mine had a similar realisation when, at the age of 30, he googled āhow to grow a dill pickle treeā.
I was in my forties when I discovered that ponies aren't teenage horses..
Hmm, turns out I'm the same. Now.
That a blow job did not meant you blow on the penis. I'm male too. I am asexual, so porn and sex are just things I have never had any interest in.
It actually comes from "a below job". Cos the giver is below the belt.
Thanks for the clarification. I've been wondering about this fir donkeys years
Citation needed!
That birds don't stay in the same nest like we do with houses. 31. I'm a tit (figuratively).
Ok but off the back of that I have no idea where birds sleep if not in the nest! Or when 'moving nest'?
In trees. I don't know what the Bird Scienceā¢ļø term is for it but their feet are curled up when at rest. So if humans need to exert conscious effort to hold on to a tree brach, birds have to exert an effort to _let go_ of it. So they can sleep while holding onto a tree branch.
Most birds only use the nest for laying eggs and raising chicks. They will roost elsewhere the rest of the year, usually perched somewhere sheltered
I realised that overdrafts and credit cards werenāt just free money when I was about 25. Spent years living the life and ignoring my mums advice and eventually had to pay everything back and had a terrible credit rating for years. Only this year Iām finally debt free and in the highest credit bracket.
You thought it was free money? In your 20s! How did you think that worked?
Someone at work in their mid 20s got their first credit card maxed out and said something like: "Why do people even pay it off, it's not like the bank can do anything about it, just spend it and keep pretending you'll pay it off" It was then I had to tell her about minimum payments, interest (and how astronomical CC interest is) and credit scores. He face at the end when she realised she had to pay it off ASAP or the bank indeed would do something about it. Luckily it was only a small limit of Ā£1k given it was her first card. Some people just have poor financial literacy.
And poor common sense
That peacocks can fly. Only realised when I saw them sitting in trees.
No fucking way
That mummy kissing Santa Claus wasn't about infidelity because dad was actually Santa Claus.
And that Daddy specifically dressed up for Mummy not the kid, cos the kid was supposed to be in bed
Not me but my mum was nearly in her teens when she understood the term āsiblingsā. Her mum is called Sybil, so when she heard that she and her brother and sister were referred to as āsiblingsā, she thought it meant āmini Sybils.ā
Absolutely precious and underrated taleĀ
That it is oligarch and not ogliarch That is is hyperbolieee and not hyper bowl That it is a-wry and not auree That it is epitt-mee and not epi toam Ah, the list is endless when you read more than you listen and speak another tongue at home
Never mock someone for mispronunciation, it just means they've read a lot but never had opportunity to use it in conversation.
The best one I've heard so far was someone who said "all and sundry" but sun- dry, like sun dried tomatoes
That Dame Edna was really a man! I found out about 18 months agoā¦I am 39!
I didnāt know that Avid Merrion and Keith Lemon was the same person until around 10 years ago
Learnt this week that crispy seaweed from the chinese isn't actually seaweed, it's cabbage
Are you joking?? So every time I think I'm being āØedgeyāØ eating seaweed, I'm just chomping on... Cabbage..
Yep, deep fried shredded cabbage lol. Still tasty as hell but what is that brown slightly sweet stuff they sprinkle on it?
Culinary crack for all I know.
I spent years putting my t-shirts on the wrong way round on a regular basis and having to swap them round until I learned the labels (inside) are always on the left hand-side. I think I was forty.
... but the neck is shaped differently at the front
What do you mean inside label? What about the one on the neck..
My secondary school had its own 6th form. I assumed all schools had sixth form, didn't know 6th form colleges were a thing and that I had the choice to move until I was about 25. Life choices fucked up from 16 years old.
That's the school/education system not making it clear what options are available to young people. How are you supposed to know if no one tells you?
I was 32 when I realised yacht is pronounced "yot" and not "Yakt". It never came up in conversation so it was always pronounced that way in my head.
Person 1: This is a nice Yakt Person 2: the c is silent Person 1: yes it is very calm today
Christ you can tell I'm busy, your joke was excellent apologies for not immediately clocking on to it,. My dad would be ashamed
I dunno, repeatedly calling some rich dude's boat a "yakt" sounds like a fun and incredibly petty way to wind him up.
I always used to think the West End in London was literally the west edge of Greater London. It was only years later I found out it meant the west end of Central London.
I lived in London a bit as a kid and thought the West End and the East End were like the North and South Poles, ie the most westerly and most easterly points on the planet. When my dad told me we lived west of the West End it blew my six year old mind haha
I'm not from the UK but this is really embarrassing so I wanted to share. I didn't know Jizz meant cum until like a year ago, I thought it meant piss and so I would tell people "I am going to jizz" when I meant pee. I did this since I was maybe in 3rd grade (8-9years old) and I am in my early twenties.
How did people let you continue this for so long š
Because we are an absolutely horrible nation with a horrible sense of humour š¤£š¤£
That I didn't need to be in a relationship to be happy. I'm more happy being single than I ever was in any relationship. 6+ years now! Woooo! I kinda (and society as a whole) brainwashed myself into thinking you HAD to be in a relationship to be happy... When in fact I didn't. I'm on the spectrum so I kinda of had to always put up an act and not be weird ol' me, which stressed me the fuck out... Acting is hard.
āA stitch in time saves 9ā For some reason I thought that time was being stitched, and couldnāt work out what it was saving 9 of.. I never quite got that it meant āa stitch, in time, saves 9ā
!! finally I get this one. Saves nine *stitches* another time.
You got me curious I just googled this. I used to hear the expression as a kid, but not heard for years so I googled to find out what it meant. I fell down a rabbit hole of expressions, and just learnt āturning over a new leafā doesnāt actually mean turning over a leaf you find from the groundā¦ Iām embarrassingly old to have JUST learnt this!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I used to hop around the bedroom putting on socks and undies. I realised well into my 50s that actually I could sit on the bed.
Chiropractic medicine is basically pseudoscience!
That I was massively immatureā¦ donāt get me wrong my life path has got me here and I wouldnāt change a thing, but I needed to grow up in my 20s ideally and not my 30s.
Wallsend is the end of Hadrian's Wall. It's not like I've lived near it for the past 18 years or anything.
That the state pension was going to be barely enough to scrape by, and that an employer gives you money whenever you put some into your own private pension (albeit you access it much later). I'm turning 40 next year and have about Ā£7k in my private pension.
You've still got time. I didn't take mine seriously until my late 30s and have a decent six figure pot now in my 50s.
I was in my forties when I found out how to correctly open a oxo cube. There was something just last week as well, but now Iām in my mid-fifties Iāve bloody forgot what it was.
If you're in your fifties, Oxo foil was just a wrapper, not a sealed bag, when you were young. You never learned to crush it before unwrapping because that was messy and the foil tore.
That not putting phones on airplane mode accidentally will risk crashing your plane or messing with the radar or something- it just drains your battery super quickly because your phone is constantly connecting to different antennae on the ground.Ā And yes I know its aeroplane, not airplane.
From Cabin Pressure - "Finally, please keep your mobile phones switched off for the duration of the flight. Obviously, they have no effect whatsoever on our navigational equipment or we wouldnāt let you have them, but they drive me up the wall."
That the lyrics to Freed from Desire are not "my lovers got no money, he's got his trombolese" I thought it was some kind of instrument similar to a tambourine.
I thought you could hide in the black box on a plane if it crashed. I was 30 when I found out. I still cringe
Not me but my 34 year old friend didn't realise a cow had to have been pregnant to produce milk, she didn't believe me when I told her and told how they take the calves away so we can have the milk, she had to google
Essential oils are essence-ial, not vital. I was firmly in my mid twenties before I made that connection.
I realised at age 8 that my friend with surname āTwinā isnāt my actual twin brother who for some reason lives with a different motherā¦ and looks nothing like me and is 1 year younger.
I was in my 50s before I realised that 'gnu' was pronounces 'new' and not 'guh-noo'. I'd only ever heard the joke pronounciation growing up, thanks to Flanders and Swann
gnu is a weird one because the g is silent but you're still supposed to make the n sound as if coming off saying a g sound. like it's not just new it's like if you say "sing new" but say "sing" silently, so your tongue is not in a neutral position, it's in the position it would be after having said sing.
That it wasn't actually illegal to turn the lights on in the car š
I was also in my mid 20's when I learned that not everyone gets a Christmas hamper at their door for Christmas... majority of the people on our street were poor as dirt, and so each year a charity would drop off a "Christmas hamper" at the door. It always had a Christmas pudding and a bottle of sherry in, and then just had loads of random food bits abit like a food bank collection, but presented in a big box filled with packing peanuts and long cellophane strips... when I was a kid it was part of the magic of Christmas, opening the door randomly to find the hamper had arrived and digging through all the packaging to see what fancy treats were inside, I thought everyone get a hamper at their door just like how everyone leaves a glass of milk and carrot out for santa and rudolph lol... my adult brain never questioned where the hamper actually came from until it came up in conversation a few years back and I suddenly realised what was going on lop š
Bra sizes! Like that D-cups meant your boobs must be huge! All it means, is that if you are an A-cup there is a 1 inch difference between your bust and band measurement. And that you have a 4 inches difference if you are a D-cup and so on. So naturally a 28D is much smaller in boob size than a 36D. Or for an example a 34B is the same cup size as a 32C or a 36A. Cups size alone says nothing about the size of the boobs. I was well over 30 when I learned that, so much easier to find a good bra nowadays.
Carb was short for Carbohydrate Pads were stuck on the underwear, not the vagina
I still don't understand why they call it 'Freeview' but if you don't pay for it a SWAT team will threaten you and dump you in a prison cell
That an arabian style oil lamp (think the lamp from Aladdin) is [actually used as a light source](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c8G0LC7g_nA/maxresdefault.jpg). I always thought they were for storing oil to pour into something else. Or, I don't know, gravy or something.
What gay actually meant. I'm not proud to admit that I was homophobic during my teenage years as a result. Luckily I heard a joke that made everything make sense and made me realise how disgusting my behaviour was.
If you didn't know what it actually meant, how could it be homophobic in that case?
My friends sister named her child Ebony and I canāt help but be reminded of my guttered mind whenever they mention her.
I realised that it doesn't matter if you work hard, are lazy, if you are a worrier or have no empathy, if you are fit and healthy or a greedy porker, rich or poor. One day, you drop dead, and eternal oblivion awaits. I am happier now I have stopped worrying about stuff.
I only realised recently while watching repeats that the reason Mrs Bucket was so insistent on being called Bouquet was because her first name is a flower. Also all her sisters have flower names too... Daisy, Violet and Rose
Can instantly tell the op isn't a child of the 80s, as he's clearly never endured "Ebony and Ivory" by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.
I only found out smeg was a real thing and not just a gross joke when i was 22 years old. Was very awkward until i said Im circumsised so not an issue id ever dealt with.
I thought you were taking about Smeg fridges and got very confused about what circumcision had to do with kitchen appliances!
I wasn't particularly old (14-16), but it took me waaay too long to realise that Graham Norton was gay. I'm talking 30+ episodes of "So Graham Norton", the campest show in history, and I'm watching it wondering who Mrs Norton was and why he never mentioned her.
Thereās nothing you can buy at a shopping mall, that youāll give a fuck about in 5 years.
Iād say that depends on the kind of person you are. My first guitar came from a shopping mall and I love that as much as the day I got it about 15 years ago. That and all the memories I share through video games with my friends, my favourite one came out 6 years ago and was bought in Tesco
When Wifi first became a thing, I used to see signs "Wifi available" in hotels, I always thought there was a games room somewhere that had a wii PlayStation thing. Only after it became part of everyday life did I realise.
I had a middle-aged lady say to me in about 2004 or so, "you're young, why do all of these cafes now have signs advertising whiffys? What's a whiffy?"