It was on a somewhat, ahem, hazy morning in Cambridge, England that the redoubtable Cranky Robert and myself first beheld the wonder we came to call “birth con-poles.” (The morning was actually beautiful and sunny, as best as I can recall; it was Robert and me that were hazy. You can draw your own conclusions as to why.)

Birth con-poles were these waist-high metal posts we frequently saw around Cambridge’s city centre, where the marketplace and most of the really cool-looking old buildings are located. Positioned in the middle of the road, the posts were (we surmised) intended to keep cars off the pedestrian-only streets in this highly congested part of town. We hadn’t given them too much thought — they were just traffic-control bollards, after all — until, on that one morning as we wandered down Trinity Street, we learned that they occasionally retract into the ground to allow delivery trucks to pass (my guess is that an authorized vehicle has a special remote control, like a garage-door opener), then rise back into position. They rise pretty quickly, and Robert and I, being young men, were naturally concerned about what might happen if a young man such as ourselves happened to be standing over one when it returned to its usual position. Pondering the potentially painful outcome of such poor luck led us to dub them “birth con-poles,” i.e., poles that provide an unfortunate contraceptive effect.
All of which is a lengthy introduction to the following video of birth con-poles in action, and what happens when unauthorized vehicles try to beat the clock and drive where they shouldn’t go…