Through a Glass, Darkly

One afternoon while driving home from work, I was talking with Mike on my cell phone and he said, “I am watching from the upstairs window, and you just ran that stop sign.”

“What?! There’s no stop sign in our neighborhood.”

“There is now. And I ran it, too.”

Apparently that day, without warning, stop signs appeared at a four-way intersection in our neighborhood that previously only had two stop signs. An intersection, dare I say, that only needed two stop signs. I didn’t even see it for a couple of days, and then I would get home and realize that I must have run it again. Don’t I sound like a safe driver?

They don’t look like real stop signs – shouldn’t new stop signs be bright and shiny? These are already plenty dinged up, which makes me doubt their validity. Even though I am pretty sure that the whole thing is simply an elaborate prank, I have managed to remember to stop for an entire week. And, may I say, Mike and I aren’t the only ones in the neighborhood who I have noticed running them. Who decides this stuff, anyway? Who are “they?” Can they put stop signs up in the neighborhood without anybody knowing about them first? Don’t they care that previously law-abiding citizens (never mind that the speed limit in our neighborhood is 15 and I can usually be caught going 25-30) are now breaking the law without even knowing it? Don’t they know that it will only make me drive faster on the non-stop-sign part of the road in order to save that three or four seconds where I pause just enough to be considered “not breaking the law?” And, uh, why do I care so much?

This is what happens when I have to work on Saturdays.