midnight madness

I saw the funniest thing while I was out walking tonight-

I was rounding a corner, and came across a group of about fifteen macho-looking guys on motorcycles, stuck en masse at an empty intersection. They had obviously been waiting for a green light for some time, and as I approached, I could see it was slowly dawning on them that in blithely sailing past the “Stop Here For Red Light” sign, they had also overshot the trip sensor for the traffic light by about 20 feet.

So now they were, all of them, performing a sort of chaotic dance in the darkness, craning their white-helmeted heads over and looking back and forth at the ground in confusion, trying to see where the lines lay buried in the black pavement. And then one by one, hesitantly, and somewhat clumsily (it had just stopped raining), they pushed their bikes backwards until they were over the grid, attempting to reach the critical mass of motorcycle metal necessary to trip the sensor, looking up hopefully from time to time at the still-red light.

I couldn’t help laughing; they were so darned cute!