30 Hard Things People Did Before Realizing There Was An Easier Way.
You may find if helpful to learn from their mistakes.
Published 3 years ago in Facepalm
4
We had a pool when I was a kid, swam at the public pool all winter. So lots of water time. Worst thing was having to get out and go pee, because as a girl you’d have to pull your bathing suit down and sit there cold and naked and then have to pull on a cold, wet suit and it was sticky and icy and awful. I’d hold it until I absolutely had to go. Occurred to me as an adult you can just pull the crotch part to the side, and it stays put while you pee.
5
My dishwasher is across the kitchen from my utensil drawer. For years, while unloading the dishwasher I would stuff as many utensils as I could in my hands. I’d inevitably drop some, and there are a few knicks in my hardwood floor from dropping forks and spoons. One day at work, a coworker unloaded the dishwasher and removed the utensil basket and carried it over to the utensil drawer. I never felt so dumb
6
For dusting things like baseboards, windowsills, and picture frames, the best tool is a (clean) paintbrush. I always used to either use a cloth or something made specifically for dusting, but the paintbrush is much faster and easier. I keep a cheap 2-inch paintbrush exclusively for dusting now. Also works great on cobwebs.
7
Hanging pictures. I used to meticulously measure and line up so my nails so they’d match the hardware on the back of the frame. Now I just use a piece of painters tape, lay it on the back of the frame, mark hardware on the frame and then remove the tape and place it on the wall and that gives you the exact placement for your picture hanging hooks and nails.
11
Keep shaking the shaving gel and struggling to more than a quarter of the can out...till it dawned on me that they are pressurized and every shake causes it to lose pressure therefore makes dispatching it harder...I've now used many and actually got the bottom of every can by simply not shaking them...I'm 40 and also an engineer. Had a complete and utter brain fart since I started shaving.
13
I have mixed hair and would always brush from root to end because that's how everyone else did it and how I was taught. Wasn't until I was watching a movie in my late 20s and a character's maid brought up that the character with mixed hair needed to brush out the knots on the end before working up to the roots. I gave it a try and then got confirmation at work from other girls with similar hair that that's how it's supposed to be done when you have a certain type of tight curls...the years I spent crying while having chunks of hair ripped and torn out
15
Existed. Turns out I had undiagnosed ADHD. Getting a diagnosis and medication, at the ripe old age of 27, was life-changing. It’s like your whole life you’re walking against a current, never knowing any different; then, suddenly, the current is gone. (Disclaimers: everyone’s ADHD is different; medication isn’t a magic “cure”; medication isn’t the solution for everyone, and that’s okay.)
22
Up until the end of high school, every time I'd take a shower, I would turn on the water while standing in front of the shower head, and brunt the cold. I was later informed by a friend that he turns the shower on first, then steps in once [it's a good] temperature. I truly made his day when I told him I was dumbfounded at that advice
23
As a digital artist, I started out coloring inside my lines with my stylus, meticulously not missing any blank pixels inside the lines. Then on a new layer, add the shading, doing the same thing but being careful to make it look like a shadow on the figure. Three years later I learned there’s a toggle on the magic wand tool so when you select a space, it selects only that contiguous space and not jump across lines so select the same color (or lack of color) space on a layer. I could basically fill an entire drawing and then go back and just fill in the details where the lines touched so the selected area didn’t reach those crevices. Four years after that I learned about increasing or decreasing your selected area by N pixels. Somewhere in there I also learned about layer clipping for shading (only colors on the occupied space of the layer it’s clipped to) and layer masking.
25
When I was a kid I was bad at nail clippers. I knew to put my nail in the chompy bit at the end, but I didn’t realize that the handle/lever folded out. So I would just squeeze really hard until I broke my nail off in the blades. This went on for an embarrassingly long time before my mom saw me and taught me how to open the lever.
27
There's a scene in some teen movie where the girl was trying to convince her brainwashed boyfriend that he was brainwashed, that she wasn't the enemy, yadda yadda. One of the things she said to him to convince him that she knew him intimately was "you always double knot your shoelaces." I remember watching it thinking "well, yeah. Doesn't everyone? If you don't double knot your shoelaces, they'll come untied!" It was enough of a weird moment that it made me wonder if there was something I was missing about the way people tied their shoes. And lo and behold, after some furious googling it turned out that I didn't know the difference between a square knot and a "granny knot", and I had been tying my shoes wrong for my entire life.
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