transport

I used to believe…

when i was little i used to belive that cars had genders, and the way to tell was by the shape of the headlights, if they were more square then the car was male if they were rounded then it was female

I used to believe…

when my younger cousin was about 5, my dad and I made him believe that our minivan was actually a space shuttle and we could make it blast off into space, only the wings were broken and we couldn't get them fixed. he actually believed this for quite a long time.

I used to be so enthusiastic after having had a banana outdoors.
If I passed by a parked car, I ever put the rind carefully in front of one of its tyres, which were pointed towards the open road. It was obvious to me that the car would skid when the driver set off and I always felt sorry I didn't have any other bananas for the rest of the tyres.
Well, I never practised that about buses and trucks for I would have had to eat kilos of bananas in order to make the driver happy. (But I didn't want my tummy to hurt out of overeating.)
My mother gave birth to this flawless belief and she was the person to kill it. Once (years later) she told me she'd been just kidding me.

I used to believe…

My mom told me when I was 3 that the car won't start unless if I buckled up my seatbelt. She didn't start it untill I did. Untill we went on a trip and the car started and moved w/o my seatbelt buckled, I was around 6 when that happened.

I used to believe…

When i was about 11 my dad let me ride in the front seat of the car and one day i asked him what the big red button next to the handbrake did.
He told me it was an ejector seat and if you pressed the button the front passenger seat shot up through the sun roof and parachuted back down. I asked if he would let me have a shot and he told me to shut my eyes and he would press the button. He did and all the lights started flashing 'cos the "ejector seat" was actually the hazard warning switch.
I still get teased about it years l8r!

I used to believe…

When i was little me and my older sister believed that cars with one headlight out were Chinese people, so everytime we were riding in the car with our mom and saw one, we'd scream "Chinese people! DUCK!!" and hide under the seats! why we hid from them... i have no clue.

I thought that underneath intersections there were big control rooms with lots of buttons and lots of men who spent their day randomly pushing buttons that controlled the traffic lights.

i used to think there was a underground traffic light control unit. i always cursed the ppl working in there when the traffic lights stayed red for a long period of time.

I used to believe…

my older sister loved to torment me when we were younger. when i was 3 or 4 she told me that if you leave the car running for too long it will explode. well, mom always ran short errands and left us in the car with it running. As soon as mom left the car to do whatever she did, my sister kim, would remind me about the car exploding. i would scream and cry and bang on the windows yelling that the car was going to explode and my sister would just have this devilish smile on her face. i learned about a year later it wasn't true when the poop truck came to pump out our septic tank, and of course, left his truck running. I was expecting the truck to explode at any minute. "Mommy, won't his truck explode?" she laughed and asked me where i heard that. so i told her. Boy, did kim get in a lot of trouble that night. hee hee hee

I used to believe that traffic lights had little monkeys living in them. There were three, one for each light color. When it was time for their appropriate light to come on, they would jump on a little lever and it would light up. Then they would jump off when the lights changed.

I used to think that every traffic light was controlled by one person. I imagined a fat sweaty man in a small room underneath the traffic lights turning them to red and then to green.
When the traffic lights went out I assumed the fat sweaty man had quit.

I used to believe that the turn signals on cars appeared because the car's "memory bank" knew where we were going (we made the same trip to school every morning in 1st grade) and was trying to remind Dad when to make the turn. But one day dad made a turn and the light kept blinking even as he drove straight...I was baffled...

I used to believe…

As a child I could not understand why there were blinking red lights in the sky in certain places (on top of radio transmitting towers, but I didn't know that at the time). My dad told me they were there to keep airplanes from running into them. So I wondered why anyone would waste time building obstacle courses for the planes.

I used to believe…

You know the triangular road works sign with the man and a shovel or something? Well, my dad used to tell me that it was a man trying to put his umbrella up, but he couldnt do it. So every time we passed one of those signs, I would get upset because the man hadnt got his umbrella up....especially if it was raining...

I used to believe…

Traffic lights always baffled me as a child with their mysterious powers of regulating the roadways. I used to believe that at every traffic light there was a man who worked in those little boxes on telephone poles whose job it was to watch the cars and press buttons to make the lights green when the roads were clear, and turn them red when he felt the cars should stop. Hour after hour, every day. It wasn't until when I was about six during a trip to Washington DC, I saw their traffic lights were horizontally placed, and somehow discerned from this that there could not be any little man in a little box somewhere regulating traffic, and I had been wrong all those years...

I used to believe…

My dad told us that there was an Indian who had escaped from prison and his name was Falling Rock. So every time we saw one of those signs that say "Watch For Falling Rock", we would look up and down the mountains convinced we would see that Indian lurking there. I think he probably told us this to keep us quiet on long car trips because it worked.