traffic lights

When I was about 8, I was visiting the beach in New Jersey. I was walking from the hotel with a group of about 10 neighbors. I saw a stoplight and I wondered how in the world they knew how to change colors when you pressed the little button to cross the street. I asked my friend Mackenzie and she replied "Sakura, you mean you don't know? Inside those little poles that hold up the stoplights, there are tiny midgets who work them." We thought we were so smart knowing that the streetlights were run by midgets.

Sakura

when i was little i always thought that their were little tiny elf people, who ran the lights on the streets( green, red) and when i would see a hole in the side walk or something i would look down the hole to see if i could see the elfs.

Goerge

I used to believe that there was a man sitting under the traffic lights in his own little botth controlling all the stop lights and that the man holes were how you got down into the booth so i would always talk into them.

:-)

When I was little I used to believe that stop lights were operated by tiny little men. These tiny little people each had a flashlight that they would shine against the colored glass in order to change the signals.

Tara

when i was little i used to belive that there were babies with toliet plungers randomly changning and always be correct

L.

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.

Anon

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.

oiman

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.

stef

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.

Muff

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!

Erin

I used to believe that, in every city, a VERY large number of policeman(and woman), sat in a humongous room, looked at all the traffic lights through small TV screens (every single one,) and pressed buttons to make it change from red-yelleow-green.ex: a policeperson looks at a screen, then, munching a doughnut, sits up, pushes a green buton, and the cars start going.

Mi** Dr**, Dall**, 11

I used to believe that blind people could drive, because their dogs could bark at the traffic lights. I stopped thinking this when I found out that dogs were color blind, and couldn't tell one light from another...

Anon

When I was young, me and my family were constantly on the road going somewhere. I always wondered how the stoplights worked. I never asked anyone, I just used my imagination--I thought that the stoplights were worked by angels in heaven who had the specific job to change the stoplights all over the world. So I would always pray to God so that the lights would change just for me!

Anon

When I was little I thought that there were cameras on the traffic lights and these two men were in a building that the camera wire lead to. So I thought that the two men worked there ALL day, and when they saw somebody waiting to go across the street they would change the light to red so the person can go across the street.

~Anonymous~

when i was about 4 or 5 and we would drive through and stop at traffic lights, i thought that little trolls lived underground below the lights and controlled traffic in their little underground cities.

kate

I used to think that police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances would have a button in their cars that when they came to a red light, they could push it and it would make the light turn green and everbody elses would turn red.

Anon

I used to believe that when you turn right on a red light, you were breaking the law. I believed that untill I got really mad at my mom one day beacuse she turned right so I said, "look out mom, a police car is over there!!" But then, she explaned it to me.

Blake

when i was to small to see the green man, and mum told me to wait for the green man to cross the road i expected a life size green man to walk across the road and i was confussed why i never saw him

rhitard

I used to believe that when i pushed the button to be given permission to WALK across the street that there was a little man under the road, and when i pushed the button he got electrocuted, so the more i pushed it, the quicker i got to walk.,

Mychal