Signs of the Times

I’ve written about this before, but it just keeps coming up. Signs … sometimes they just baffle me. They’re trying to tell me something significant (Get it? “Signs” … “significant” … never mind.) but I just seem to get bogged down in their content.

Like, “No Right Turn.” That seems to be a requirement that I turn the wrong way. Why would that be a rule? Why can’t I turn the RIGHT way? I understand “No Left Turn” because there are places we just don’t want liberals to go.

I saw a sign at the entrance to a university campus that read, “Observe All Signs.” Exactly what does that mean? I mean, there are signs I cannot see. MUST NOT see. Like signs in restricted areas or the women’s bathroom for instance. And it doesn’t say, “Obey All Signs.” So I’m supposed to search the campus—“There’s a sign. There’s a sign. There’s a sign.” What good is that?

One time I came to work (back when I was working) on a Monday morning. One wall of the cubicle offices had signs stuck on it, all the same: “Wet Paint.” I’m scratching my head. What did they want me to wet the paint with? And why would they want me to get it wet? That didn’t make sense, so I looked closer. In fine print, it added, “Painted with pride by the maintenance department.” Curioser and curioser.

“Painted with pride by the maintenance department,” eh? Me? I would have used paint, but not them. They used … pride. Strange. Then it occurred to me. The wall was white. They painted the wall with white pride. And it only got stranger when I realized most of the maintenance department was Hispanic. What kind of crazy …?

The sign I saw the other day—the sign that started me thinking about this topic—was a sign on a vending machine. You’ve seen them. “Out of Order.” Now, if there are two machines and they both have that sign, that makes some sense. I mean … switch their locations and they should be in the right order. But this was one machine. And it occurred to me that there must be some Master Map that lays out where every machine goes. That means that somewhere else there was an identical machine that had an identical sign that was not in the right place. What a pain! Worse, I saw the sign on a bathroom door!! Now, how did a bathroom get in the wrong place? And how do they correct that error? You can’t exactly swap bathrooms.

All in fun, of course, but perhaps illustrative of the problem of language that we neglect too often … myself included.