A childhood belief about traffic lights

Here's how I used to think how traffic lights worked:

There were these two people, a brown-eyed, brown-haired boy, and a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl lived underneath the ground. They controlled all of the traffic lights in the world, in this one little room that had wood all over the walls. They had a string for each of the lights, yellow, red, and green. When they wanted a certain one to work, they'd simply pull on the string. They even had a special string for when they got hungry, groceries would appear down a dumbwaiter. When someone pressed the WALK button, it would set off an alarm down where they lived, and they would have to pull a special lever to allow people to walk. And when they traffic lights weren't working, it meant that they had fallen asleep on the job.