The Crosswalk That Entered My Brain

At certain crosswalks, you press the button and wait for the light to change while a Martian voice begins issuing a command:

Wait.

A few seconds pass.

Wait.

Then again.

Wait.

I assume this auditory feature exists for visually impaired pedestrians who need a clear signal before crossing the street, an entirely sensible and necessary function. But apparently nobody designing these systems has discovered a way to make the human voice both audible and pleasant. The crosswalk voice doesn’t merely enter the ear. It arrives through the skull. Each Wait lands less like a word than the neurological thunderbolt that shoots through your body when your bare toe collides with the leg of a dresser.

A couple of weeks ago, my family and I encountered these talking crosswalks while walking around downtown Carlsbad. At first, I merely disliked the voice. Then it began drilling into my brain. After sufficient exposure, something peculiar happened: my mind decided that the only way to survive the sound was to absorb it.

I became a victim of Auditory Possession: the involuntary internalization of an irritating sound until you begin reproducing the very noise you desperately want to escape. The crosswalk doesn’t merely assault you with Wait. It enters the nervous system, establishes residency, and eventually begins broadcasting through your mouth. You haven’t imitated the machine. The machine has acquired a human speaker.

So I began walking around downtown Carlsbad saying Wait in precisely the same robotic voice.

Wait.

My family asked me to stop.

Wait.

They asked again.

Wait.

At this point, they were presumably reconsidering the wisdom of bringing me on vacation. Perhaps I should have remained safely in Torrance, where I could work out, watch true-crime documentaries, and pose no threat to pedestrians.

Instead, I wandered around a pleasant seaside town sounding like a malfunctioning piece of municipal infrastructure.

By the end of our walks through Carlsbad, the only true crime anyone had actually witnessed was a grown man roaming the streets repeatedly barking Wait at strangers while his mortified family maintained a safe distance behind him.