Entry 25: Traffic Control

From the archives: In the mid-2000s, Kookie Banjo Jr. had a very short stint as a traffic controller hired to direct street traffic during some construction works. Here’s the full story, from the unauthorised biography by Louis the lorikeet.

In the newspaper archives, you’ll find an obscure report about Kookie Banjo Jr., who singlehandedly caused the biggest road accident in Sydney in August 2004 due to, and I quote, ‘The negligent and unreasonably animated handling of the lollipop sign until it speared the passenger-side window of a passing vehicle, causing an unfortunate series of events to occur.’ One wonders why such a report would be so obscurely placed, on the back pages. The accompanying image is even more damning: there’s a crane on one side of the street, with construction workers and cones all around the kerb, and in the dead centre there’s a heap of wrecked vehicles. The car at the fore has a metal handle jutting out of the window, with the red ‘Stop’ sign tilting up towards a bleak, grey-orange sky.  Next to this car, there stands Kookie Banjo Jr., his expression both smug and stumped as he looks on at the wreckage. He wears a fluorescent yellow vest and a cheap cap. He’s standing on a large crate, which was meant to give him height for the job, but now has a couple pigeons trapped under it.

In my best efforts to get to the bottom of this shocking story, I decide to look up the hiring manager at the time, Mr Crums, who was named in the newspaper report but declined to comment for the story. I find him on LinkedIn. Apparently, he’s left the traffic control business and is now an elevator technician, “to get as far away from birds as possible by doing an indoors job”. He agrees to an interview and recounts the following.

On a fine July morning, chilly but fresh, Kookie Banjo Jr. entered Mr Crums’ office for a job interview. His written application had been so-and-so, Mr Crums recalls, but he was desperate for workers. “I was a bit surprised he was a bird, to be honest,” Mr Crums confesses, “but he had the accreditation and, well- wings or hands, who cares so long as you can hold up the sign, you know?”

When Mr Crums asked Kookie why he wanted the job, Kookie said he roamed the streets anyway in search of “minimal wage bird workers” and this was a bonus activity for some extra cash. Mr Crums assumed he misheard the thing about the minimal wage workers, and Kookie reassured him he “very much cares for employment integrity”.

“My biggest regret, in retrospect,” Mr Crums tells me, “Is that I never ended up calling his references. He had a reference in there for an insurance company he used to work for... Well, I’ve since learnt that he took great joy in declining insurance claims and artificially inflated claims just so he could decline them. Still trying to figure that one out.”

So Kookie became a traffic controller. His first job was controlling traffic on a busy residential street during construction on a new apartment building. Kookie started out pretty well. He knew how to swivel the sign from ‘Stop’ to ‘Slow’ and back, and usher some cars forward and shake his head and put up the palm of his wing at others. Then, on the third day, things went downhill. Kookie, according to pedestrian witnesses, was growing increasingly agitated after failed attempts to recruit pigeons to his minimal wage schemes. “As he became agitated,” Mr Crums said, “Well, his traffic controlling methods became a bit erratic. He would swing the lollipop from wing to wing, spin it in a circle like he was in the circus, point at any passing driver who drove a bit too fast and threateningly motion with the throat-slitting gesture...” By the fourth day, Kookie’s traffic directions became fully erratic: he would put up the ‘Stop’ sign to a car only to immediately swing it to ‘Slow’ and yell and pontificate about the driver being too slow at following the direction to drive slowly. His arguments with drivers became heated until they were so long and extended that they were almost academic in nature, ranging in topics from the ridiculousness of the shade of cerulean blue that the driver had chosen to ‘dare to wear’, to the particular angle of Kookie’s throw of the sign from one wing to the other, which was usually in the same trajectory as the passing car’s windshield.

Kookie’s mood improved as his ‘negotiations’ with the pigeons improved. He informed the closest homeowners of the progress being made in these ‘negotiations’. However, they couldn’t help but notice that the pigeons only became more amenable to working for Kookie after being trapped under his crate for a few hours.

By the fifth day, disaster struck. Kookie’s improved moods, far from returning him to the saner methods of his first couple days, made him even more animated and active than before. He began to motion with the lollipop sign like a rhythmic gymnast. Photographers began to gather on the footpaths to take pictures of the fiasco. “Look, I know that was a sign to step in,” Mr Crums admits, “But in a car crash, it’s hard to do much more than look, you know? Wait, did I just pull off a double pun?” Mr Crums grins with so much happiness, that I wonder if this is the peak of his success.

There were two photographers at the scene when the ‘incident’ happened. One of the photographers, whose image was used by the newspapers, recounts that there had been a lull in traffic for a good hour before the accident, so Kookie was bored and pumped for a fight. When a car finally came up the street and waited for direction, Kookie intentionally faced the exact edge of the sign towards it, so the driver couldn’t tell if he should stop or continue driving. Finally, the driver popped his head out of the car and said, “Hey! Can I go?”

“What do you think?” Kookie yelled back, pointing at the sign.

“I don’t know which side’s facing me. This is craz- can you just tell me?!”

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” Kookie said, too calmly. He began to spin in a circle with one wing outstretched and flailing, holding out the sign. As he spun at dizzying speed, he yelled maniacally, “Why don’t you guess now! Guess now!”

“Wow, you’re nuts, man.”

What happened next is up for debate. It is unclear if Kookie let go of the sign on purpose, or accidentally because he was spinning at such high speeds. Either way, the sign hurtled towards the car and speared it through the passenger-side window. Luckily, it didn’t hit the driver but in his panic, he turned the steering wheel sharply and the car turned sideways, blocking the road and hitting a couple more cars, which also pivoted and hit some more cars…

“It was a sad state of affairs, really,” Mr Crums says in conclusion. I hate to ruin his good mood from the earlier “double pun”, but can’t help pointing out before leaving that Kookie is regularly indoors and, in fact, prefers it to the outdoors.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding- what did I become an elevator technician for-#@?!”

I can’t help but wonder if the bigger problem isn’t that Mr Crums hasn’t been outside in 20 years.