Road Rage

We're given the basics early in life. An arsenal of tools to get us by, you might say. We learn to talk, walk, write, think, count, pee, and get what we want. And the rest of our lives is spent focusing on and mastering one or two of those arts. (Though don't ask me how the masters of peeing fare in our dwindling economy).

Of course, at some stage or another, we may opt to equip ourselves with entirely new pieces of armour. In fact, one of them increases movement speed by an average of 1200%! Yes, you guessed it. The Emerald Cloak of Coordinated Driving.

Naturally, when traversing the suburban terrains on our petrol-powered, five-to-seven-seater steeds, we automatically apply some of the more fundamental tools as they become necessary. Of these, reading is a must. We read everything from traffic lights to indicator lights to police-car-in-my-rear-view-mirror-lights... You get the idea. It's all thanks to our heavily armoured brains, which lug around the elementary skill of reading.

Which is why it pains me to say that there are trolls in our midst. These trolls have three unique abilities, which render us powerless to stop them and make us perpetually susceptible to their misdeeds.

RACIAL ABILITY LOWDOWN

CHARACTER CLASS: TROLL

1. Can assume invisibility while on the job

2. Looks a lot like a human

3. Can warp road signs at will

'1' wouldn't matter if  '3' wasn't their sole purpose in life.

From the moment we English-speaking people could read, we did so from left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Now our brains don't like it any other way. And when we're hard-pressed for time, zooming across the aforementioned suburban terrains, there isn't time for skill retraining. Our long-learnt methods are all we have to process visual information. Needless to say, five years after taming poor old Carrie, I still get confused when I see this:

AHEAD

X-ING

PED

What the heck?

No wonder most of them have been replaced with diamonds.

Yet there are other, non-crossing-pedestrian-related road markings like these, and they get me every time! In my very first encounter, I had to scan it, scan it again, and then scan it again as it approached, focusing on nothing else, and almost running over an old lady in the process* (to appease my guilt I convinced myself that she was a troll). Then, still confused, I thought, "Well, that doesn't make sense. Try reading it upside-down." I've no idea why anyone in the world would think this; but it worked, and the apparitions of confusion were slain, finally.

Okay, I get it. I'm supposed to read the words as they come, because apparently the 'Ahead' is too small to read before I'm close enough to read 'Ped'. Not so! And even if so, I still see three words no matter how I look at it; and my brain directs me to the top of them. As Carrie draws closer to the sign, I'm patiently waiting to read the top-most word first because, again, I think, "There's no point reading a sentence backwards." Evidently, common sense has an exception.

Now, five years later, I take considerably less time to reverse the white painted text. I only read it the correct way once, and I'm watchful for oldies.

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*There was no old lady. There was, however, a troll.