transport: traffic lights

When I was very young (3-4) I use to think there were little men/creatures/elves...whatever you want to call them...that lived in traffic lights and they were responsible for changing the colors. I can remember getting stuck at a really long red light and I was sitting in the backseat thinking..."Gosh, this guy is NOT doing his job! He must be asleep..." Silly me!

When I was growing up, my friend's dad was always able to count down exactly when a red light would turn green. I never understood how he could tell the future, until one day I mentioned to my friend how cool her dad was and she told me he just watched the other lights, and when they turned yellow he'd start the count down.

I used to believe that there were people or something under the traffic lights waiting to switch them back to don't walk. How else did they switch back when people stopped walking over. I couldn't see what ever it was, so presumed they were UNDERGROUND, so whenever I crossed a road i used to tap dance and stamp so they wouldn't switch before i crossed.

You know how at some stop lights there will be a green arrow and you have to go the direction the arrow is pointing? Well when I was little, I would always worry that when the light turned green, it would be an arrow, and it would make us go a direction we didn't want to go. I didn't realize that there were different lanes for different directions... woops!

When I was younger, I believed that the way the stoplights at intersections worked, were by construction men in underground dirt rooms, looking at the traffic through tiny cameras. And they decided when to change it from green to red. I still have no idea why 'till this day.

When I was younger, my mom told me how traffic lights and street lights worked. I thought she was totally lying, and so I became convinced that all the lights that moved or turned on at certain times were operated by tiny gnomes who sat around and knew when to change the light.

I used to think that my mom controlled the traffic lights because she'd say the incantation that the Sesame Street magician said, right as the other light was turning yellow. So she'd say, "A la peanut butter sandwiches," and the light would instantly turn green!!!

From when I was like 3 to 10 I used to think that there was a HUGE room with little moniters in it and there was one guy in a swirly chair with wheels and he controlled the lights. When I was like 7 I realized this was impossible I concluded that his chair automaticly went to the next light that needed to be changed (by magic of course). This soon made me think that only one traffic light in the whole world changed at a certain time.

My Dad always said he had telepathy for when lights would turn green. I could only come to the conclusion that he did actually have superpowers...not actually some genius idea to look at when the other light turned red.

When I was young I used to believe that "traffic light changer" was an actual occupation, and it involved sitting in a little office underground at an intersection, with something like a submarine telescope which stuck out of the ground above you so you could watch the traffic and know when to switch the light from red to green.

When I was younger, I thought there was some guy who's only job was to sit in a little booth by a streetlight and press the buttons that made it turn green, yellow, and red. I would always look for the booth and even though I never found it, I still held fast to this belief. I still remember the day when my preschool teacher burst my bubble when she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said, "A stoplight changer."

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of Star Trek. So, to me, it seemed perfectly plausible that a man in an invisible bubble was sitting above each and every intersection, waiting for cars to show up so he could change the color of the lights.

A friend and I, when we were about eight years old, if we found ourselves sitting in the car stopped at a traffic light, would chant "Red light, red light, turn turn GREEN!" to make the light change. If it didn't change immediately we'd start in with "Please? Pretty please? With a cherry on top?" until it changed.

I'm not sure if I actually ever believed that it was working, or if I knew in the back of my mind that by the time we got impatient and started the ritual, it would be time for the light to change anyways. I strongly suspect that she really did believe in our powers of persuasion over traffic lights.

When I was very young I was convinced that if you pressed the pedestrian crossing button too many times the pavement would project you into space.

When I was little i thought that there were people whose job it was was to stand inside a stop light and make the lights change.

I was always amazed as a kid that the traffic lights knew when to change. I imagined that there were little tiny people inside (I saw them with little elf-type hats and shoes) who sat there looking out over the road. When they saw cars coming, they'd hit this big button that would change the colors of the lights. I believed this until I learned about the sensors in the road at about age 12.