My wife, to this day, shuts off the shower and then immediately steps out while water is still running off her soaking wet body, inevitably creating a puddle in the bathroom.
"Honey, why don't you drip for like five seconds, or even grab the towel and give yourself a quick dab before you get out?"
The first time I told her this she just stared at me for a solid 20s while her brain rebooted. But then her "never admit anything ever under any circumstances" instinct kicked in and she responded "wow are you really policing my shower habits?"
So anyway, now she knows better, but still does it because marriage is about compromise, or something.
There's an episode of The Office where Pam and Jim are trying to make Dwight think he's in The Matrix, so they keep arranging "glitches." Pam trains a cat to walk past Dwight's door and then around to repeat it. As they're telling the camera about it, Jim says "Why didn't we just get two black cats?" and Pam looks at him with the expression I imagine this guy had with his girlfriend.
When I was about 8 years old my aunt told me she returned a belt to the store because the buckle wouldn't fit through the belt loops in her pants. I'll never forget the look on her face when I told her to put it through the other end first.
I didn’t realize I could dry off with a towel while still standing in the bathtub/shower until I was 26. Now my bathroom floor doesn’t get wet on a daily basis.
So, one day I'm hanging out with my friend, and he introduces me to his friend. Middle-aged guy, seems pretty nice, but he's having a shit day. Why? Because he had to copy something from an email, and he spent about an hour, flipping back and forth between two windows, copying the email into a Word document or something. I was dumbfounded, and I said "Why didn't you just copy-paste?" The guy stalks off with his head down, muttering under his breath.
I was about 25 years old before I realized I could use warm water to wash my hands in the winter. I'm usually considered a very intelligent individual, but for some reason this never occurred to me. Maybe it's because I grew up poor and we tried to use as little hot water as possible, or maybe I'm just not as smart as people think I am.
Reminds me of the guy that spent his entire life sitting on the toilet with the seat up because he was told "girls use it with the seat down and boys have the seat up".
It wasn't until he got comfortable enough with his partner that when she saw him and asked why he wasn't sitting on the seat did it even occur to him that he could.
Growing up we had a walk in shower, the way it was setup there was no way to reach in and not get hit by cold water. Especially a short kid with short arms, you were getting a full blast cold water trying to go "out" of the shower. The tap was the push-pull type and very difficult to modulate so limiting to low pressure trickle was basically a game of russian roulette. The best I could do was hug the wall and let it only get whatever corner of my body I wanted to sacrifice to temporary hypothermia that morning.
I remember in first or second grade when I realized that, when I made a mistake, I didn't have to erase the whole word and I could just erase the part I messed up.
A friend of mine told me a story once about an intern that was tasked with writing a text. She delivered one page of text and was told to write more. She asked how. She didn't know that you could write more than one page in Word.
Someone on Reddit once said they didn't realize the white part of your finger nails are where it's unconnected to your skin, and they'd just clip wherever, and often bleed because they'd clip the skin.
I lived in a place I had to do the opposite. The heater was broken, but the tank was outside exposed to the sun. So to get as warm water as I could, I had to go in right away and get the best of it.
My version of this was renter's insurance. I knew about home owners insurance, but somehow I assumed that in the case of an apartment the owner would already have insurance. When my oven caught fire I learned that I'd be responsible for it. I don't recall too much of the initial rental process as that was years ago, so I don't know if it were somewhere in the paperwork but I never recalled even being asked about it.
It took me several years to realize that Canadians were from Canada. Specifically, I didn't connect the spoken words. I was fine with the written words.
When I was 30 I learned that I had pronounced and spelled the German word "unbedingt" wrong my entire life. I thought it was "umbedigt" as in "um jeden Preis". I thought all others spelled and pronounced it wrong or spoke more elaborate than I.
Pretty mild, though an ex struggled with a standing light for years. It had one of those skinny, turntable hatched poles that you twisted. This one was rather tough to turn to the point that your fingers would slip. I remember looking at her struggling with it one day and asked, "Do you have any rubber bands?"
Same thing. She stopped, stared at me, and got flustered, "I...can't believe I never thought of that...".
I'd be willing to pay the plumber to put in a couple extra hours and put in a couple more pipe bends, if it meant not getting splashed with cold water every day.