(And yes, it is "pelicon", that is not an error. It's a German-style abbreviation for "Pedestrian Light Controlled". It's got fuck all to do with pelicans and it is an error to spell it like one, even if people are so bleeding ignorant these days that even the Highway Code gets it wrong, the thick bastards.)
LEAVE THE FUCKING BUTTON ALONE.
You are holding the people on the road up, you are holding other people on the pavement up, and you are holding yourselves up. LEAVE THE FUCKING BUTTON ALONE. Are you really such a clueless fucking zombie that you don't know if there's a gap in the traffic unless some bloody machine flashes a light to tell you so? Do you need another machine at home to tell you which shoe goes on which foot, too? Use your fucking eyes for fuck's sake.
There are precisely two instances where pushing the fucking button is acceptable:
If neither of those two apply then FUCKING LEAVE IT ALONE.
Have you really not noticed that a pelicon crossing looks for a gap in the traffic before it changes? Yes, if the traffic is truly continuous it will eventually give up and change anyway. But it rarely is that continuous, and even if it is it takes quite a long time before it does give up. Most of the time the traffic has wider and more irregular intervals between cars, and when the crossing can see this it waits for a long interval between cars before it does anything.
And for a start, it isn't very good at looking. It can't watch individual cars to see what they're doing like a person can. It just gets a sort of mashed-up average signal representing all the cars in its field of view at once with a single figure. All it can do is try and guess when the figure it's getting indicates a gap, which is obviously a bit of a dubious process.
More importantly, though, the size of gap it thinks is enough to make it change is pretty long. As in long enough to cross the fucking road in anyway. This means the lights don't start to change until AFTER you could have already been on the other side if you weren't such a fucking mindless bleeding div.
So all you've achieved by insisting on fucking around pressing the fucking button is to hold yourself up as well as the cars, and all for absolutely no sodding reason whatsoever.
And you've also fucked up the ability of anyone who isn't waiting for a machine to tell them to put one foot in front of the other to make a correct judgement about the traffic, and fucking held them up as well.
This afternoon I approached a pelicon crossing on my mobility scooter and checked out the traffic. It was evident that a gap would soon appear so I sat there watching for it.
Stupid fucking divvy twat in the shape of a perfectly normal and healthy teenager who I have just overtaken arrives behind me, responds to the situation like a mindless mechanical moron instead of an intelligent thinking being, and pushes the fucking button. He doesn't make a noise and he remains behind me all the time, so I have no idea he is even there yet.
A car and a bike behind it pull out of the junction a few tens of metres up the road from the crossing, and drive towards it. I can see there is nothing more coming along behind them for a bit, so I get ready to press the go lever as they pass so the shitty fucking deliberately-slow-responding motor controller in the mobility scooter will have got its act together to have me rolling out into the road the moment they have cleared the crossing.
But then the projection gets buggered up. They start slowing down, for no fucking reason that is visible to me. So now I have no idea what the fuck they are doing. If they continue to slow down at the same rate then I could make it across the crossing before they even get there, but I have no way to tell whether they will or not. For all I know the car driver may just have got his gearchanges tangled up accelerating away from the junction, or even simply eased up on the throttle inadvertently for a moment while he scratches his arse, and he'll shoot off again without warning as soon as he gets it sorted out.
It's not until they actually halt at the stop line that I can be sure of what's going on, as I only now know what they're doing: the fucking lights have changed on them because twat-arsed penis features Cuntybollocks the Moron has pressed the fucking button to make up for not having a functioning brain. Yeah, OK, now I can go. But if young Mr Only Got One Brain Cell And That's Half-Dead had kept his fucking fingers off the bleeding button, they would already have gone past the crossing and I would have already been across the road behind them and on my way. And so would he if he wasn't solid bone from one lughole to the other.
(And yeah, while we're at it, there's another one. Whover designs and builds the hardware for pelicon crossings, will you FUCK OFF with putting sodding great hoods around the lights so it's impossible to see what the road aspects are doing while you're stood at the crossing. Knowing what the road aspects are doing is essential information for figuring out whether dithering car drivers who are fucking around for no apparent reason are actually in the process of stopping or just scratching their arse. And yes I fucking know you put the fucking hoods on deliberately in order to fuck people up by denying them that information specifically to make sure they can't use it to understand why car drivers are fucking around, which is the action of an unmitigated fuckarsed cunthead and if I ever catch you with one of those hoods lying around somewhere to hand I'll stuff the bloody thing up your fucking arse. Shitheaded bunch of fucking cunts it is you are.)
Then of course there are the even stupider bastards with only half a brain cell and what's left of it is at least seven-eighths dead, who press the fucking button as a purely automatic action when there are no cars at all anywhere within sight and then carry straight on across the road without even slowing down. You know the fucking road is clear so what the steaming fuck are you actually doing? Whoever made your jacket must be fucking well skilled at camouflage to have done such a good job of concealing the great big turning key sticking out of your back.
You can't even put it down to zombie cunts liquidising their brains with mobile fucking phones because they were every bit as mindless with pelicon crossings long, long before it became fashionable to shamble around drooling into a portable cerebral disintegrator, indeed long, long before said disintegrators even existed. When the closest approximation they ever had was a very decidedly non-portable 405-line black and white valve TV. Fucksake I worked out how pelicon crossings operate when I was a little kid and I've been struck by how bleeding stupid people are with them ever since, grown fucking adults and all.
LEAVE THE FUCKING BUTTONS ALONE.
Back to Crap Stuff
Back to Pigeon's Nest
Be kind to pigeons