Clickers

    At the moment, there are car-counters all over town. Those double tubes that snake across the road, counting the vehicles that drive over. I assume that they are double so that somebody just stepping on one wouldn't count as a vehicle, but perhaps I'm way off the beam. I also don't know how they factor in 18 wheelers and other vehicles with extra wheels, but since they on average do a lot more damage to roads than cars do, I guess they're worth counting as extra cars.
    Seeing them reminded me of the days of full-service gas station, when such devices would ring a bell or bells and bring out whatever you were supposed to call a pump jockey back then. A service technician, maybe, though that sounds more 21st century. And what occurred to me is that very few people very much under 50 would even be able to remember such a thing as a full-service gas station. I mean, there are still a few around, but not enough that most of us have visited one in any recent decade. What I remember about the car-counter is that we, being wonderful well-behaved children, would jump on them to try to make the bell ring. Of course, maybe an adult stepping on one would make the bell ring easily, but a little kid jumping makes a lot of force. So I conclude that I don't know if a person stepping on a car-counter today would register or not. But if not, I REALLY can't make any sense out of there always being two of them. Once again, I could look it up, but once again, I sort of dig the mystery.