I was little and going through that "ask an unending stream of questions to figure out how the world works / determine the limits of your parent's patience" phase. At one point during this my mother, who had up until this point used this as an opportunity to teach me how to research things and overall handled it with grace, began to hit her limit. And so one fine morning when I had perkily jammed myself underneath the toilet in a way that startled the living daylights out of her when she came in and I asked how toilets worked, she said in great exasperation "toilet gnomes, and you shouldn't be down there bothering them". This of course made perfect sense to me - someone had to crew the little boat, and humans would never fit in there.

I maintain to this day that it was an act of class solidarity that I shouldn't be mocked for when, several days later, she found me pooping in the yard because I "didn't want the gnomes to work too hard".