Fooled by a TV prank

It is certainly not funny when a prank you saw on TV happens to you or you assumed if it happened to you.

Sometime ago I had seen a TV prank which at that point I thought was outright funny. A guy is traveling in a car on a backroad in an Australian outback when he comes across a Traffic light right in the middle of nowhere and its on red. This is a straight road and there is no crossing. Added to this there is absolutely no traffic for miles. He waits patiently for a long time and when he loses his calm he tries to jump the signal. And the moment he crosses, a huge black patrol helicopter lands from nowhere and gives him a ticket. Before he can recover from the shock, a bunch of guys who were recording all this in a hidden camera come out and reveal that he's been tricked. They go on to explain that the traffic light, the helicopter, etc, were actually a set up. It felt quite funny too. Imagine a patrol chopper coming from nowhere to give you a ticket in the middle of nowhere because you could not wait forever for a red light to turn green in the middle of nowhere.

Speaking of which, almost a similar thing had happened to me and I nearly ran into trouble. While driving down on a side road from the famed Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, me and my friend came across a Stop Signal that never turned green for a long time. We waited and waited but the light would stubbornly stay red. Mind you this was not even a cross road or a crossing. It is a narrow single road with a Stop light right in the middle of nowhere. You see what I mean? Similar scenario to what I had described earlier. Just ahead of the traffic light the road turns a sharp right and it is a blind spot because the road runs right next to a mountain.

As we patiently waited for what we thought was forever, there was another car that came and sat with equal patience behind us for the light to turn green. I had narrated the traffic light prank to my friend only a few days earlier. Finally, we were almost certain that either this was the same joke now being played on us or that this light was broken. Why else would you need a traffic light on a road without a crossing? Thus thinking (like a bunch of smart alecs) that we were smart enough to put the prank back on the pranksters we started to roll forward. That's when the car behind us started to honk at us like mad. Usually, a car behind you honks if you don't move or they feel that you are getting in their way, right? But there are some rare (very rare) drivers who honk to warn you. We got the feeling that this guy was the latter. Otherwise, why would someone honk at us as soon as we were trying to get out of his way? So we stopped and backed up to start waiting again. Soon we realized, what the light was all about. This road which I mentioned took a right and went right through the mountain as a single-laned tunnel. At any given time traffic from only one direction can pass through this road. So once every 5 minutes, traffic is stopped on one side to let the traffic from other side flow. In our case there was no through traffic coming from the opposite direction when the light was red for us and hence our suspicion of this being a prank had become stronger. Since the road turned right immediately it was difficult to guess what was on the other side. Probably a chopper waiting for you to make a mistake. Thanks to the driver behind us, we avoided getting into trouble. We later had a good laugh about it but it still haunts me to think what'd have happened if we hadn't heeded to the guy who had alerted us.

Looking back, it felt funny the kind of things can get you into trouble. A silly TV prank playing on your mind! Nice.