Imag­ine the sit­u­a­tion: You, a mild-mannered pedes­trian in an urban envi­ron­ment, arrives at a busy inter­sec­tion. A savvy civil­ian, you cross this street often and know that if the “cross” but­ton is not pressed, you will have to wait for another long cycle. Late for class, this might make the dif­fer­ence between that awe­some seat and the one next to that one per­son who asks way too many questions.

This par­tic­u­lar day you arrive at said cross­walk, and there’s some­one already by the but­ton. They were there before you could see it, and you aren’t sure if they pressed it. They’re close enough to per­haps claim own­er­ship and say “hey world, not only am I aware of this but­ton, I depressed it” but far enough away to also pos­si­bly say “I have no idea this but­ton exists and I’m too stu­pid to look for one in case it exists on this par­tic­u­lar side­walk.”

What do you do?

The aver­age Seat­tleite, fully real­iz­ing that he or she lives in the passive-aggressive cap­i­tal of the world, is stumped. Should they go ahead and press the but­ton again, even though the possible-button-depressor is most likely watch­ing and would think the fol­low­ing: “gee, I’m per­son­ally insulted that this fel­low Seat­tleite thinks I am too stu­pid to know that I need to press this but­ton. I hope they are beaten up by the SPD.”

This is clearly not an opti­mal solu­tion, and we will not press the but­ton because of this judg­ment. We would rather be shot in the jaw by ran­dom street punks than press that but­ton. And don’t even think “you know, I could just ask them.” I sus­pect if a con­ver­sa­tion actu­ally starts because of this sit­u­a­tion, a pack of rav­en­ous drag­ons will rip my head off.

Instead of risk­ing judge­ment from total strangers, we will stand there and hope light turns to “walk.” We will dit­fully watch to see what hap­pens, and only, ONLY, if the light does not change to walk when we know it should, will we pos­si­bly con­sider press­ing the but­ton and per­haps recieve unspo­ken attacks from that stranger.

But I’d prob­a­bly just cross the street and press the but­ton there.