List Day: Childhood Confessions

• I used to think that EXIT ONLY signs on the interstate meant that you would get stuck in some backwater town where the only way to get home would be via dirt roads and wheat fields.


• As a child, when people would sing the melody from "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega, I simply presumed it was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song.


• When I was a child, I did not realize that John Cryer and Matthew Broderick were two separate actors.


• I once broke a light fixture in the now bankrupt hardware store, Hechinger. That's probably why they went out of business.


• As a child, I believed that the correct phrase was "take it for granite", because if you typed "TAKE WALL FOR GRANITE" next to the granite wall in Zork I, you would get teleported to an Easter Egg room.


• When Cheerios had mail-in prizes for boxtops, I thought that it was common operating procedure for a family to buy all twenty boxes at once and send in their box tops immediately.


• As a child, I had a kid crush on from the sitcom, Day By Day.


• When I had to go to work with a parent on a snow day, I would bring my computer games and install them on the computer of whichever coworker was out. I once installed Savage Empire on four different official USDA computers before finding the one with the VGA graphics.