This was inspired by the awesome fortune cookie thread.
I have always been fascinated with minutiae and urban flotsam, for lack of a better term. Found objects. I’m the kind of person who will pick up a fortune cookie fortune I see on the ground, as a kind of volunteer oracle.
Well then. I have encountered several times in my life a certain type of object with a printed message that has completely mystified me, at least until I figured out what it was.
My all-time favorite was “TURN THE END OUT”. I used to find little cardboard discs that said that from time to time. (I call this a tacit command, like “Tear along dotted line”.) I thought that was such a cool little phrase, like in a song about a dance:
“Get down, do the bump, turn the end out.” It was years before I found out that they come from New Year’s Eve confetti champagne bottle poppers. (say that three times fast!)
Another one was “NON MARKING-OUT SOLES”. Non marking-out soles? Turns out it means your sneakers won’t leave those black scuffs you see on gymnasium floors. Okay.
Then there’s “DO NOT LEAVE BURNING UNATTENDED”. (from the bottom of candles) When my baby’s father, with whom I was deeply if inadvisedly in love, left me with a two-month-old infant, I made a collage about my love and my grief with that as the centerpiece. Do not leave burning unattended.
(And then there was the cartoon of the ant in running shoes, tearing along the dotted line. Hee hee hee.)
A local grocery used to have a large green container in its parking lot. The container looked like an oversized trash can. On the side of the container were these words:
INEDIBLE
DARLING
I asked the assistant manager of the grocery about this, and he said that the can contained inedible materials from the store’s deli. The container was manufactured by a company called Darling International.
Even after the matter was demystified, I continued to entertain odd thoughts…
You’d be so incredible,
Dear, if you were edible:
Just a tiny nibble,
Little sweetheart kibble.
Mmm, you smell like nectar.
…Love, Hannibal Lecter.
Back in my all things nautical decorating phrase, I bought a brass bell to mount on my wall. I later used it in a play. Inside the bell was the stern warning “Do no use for serving food.”
I seem to remember that all the garbage cans in Disneyland used to have fancy lettering reading “Trash Please” on their little flippy lids. Well, since you asked nicely…
I collected a chemical waste container once that was labeled ‘Excess Jubilation’. It turned out that ‘Jubilation’ was a product for maintaining bowling alley lanes.
There was also the guy who always labeled his waste containers ‘Bad Juju’, but that was in addition to the contents list, as kind of an editorial aside.
In the General Motors cleaning school, we learned about putting trash cans (Litter Awareness Devices, or LADs) in the best possible places. Then I won free round trip airline tix, and I chose to go to California to see my favorite baseball team play the locals. All around the stadium, all the trash cans were labelled LAD. “Ooo, neat,” I thought, “they’ve been to General Motors cleaning school.” After a while, I realized LAD stands for Los Angeles Dodgers. :smack:
Years ago, when I was a student, I needed a slide projector to prepare for a presentation. I booked one out from the AV department, took it home and when I set it up and turned it on, there was a slide already in it. The message seemed somehow apt to me at that point in my life, it read:
I’ve tried to restrain myself from cluttering up a nice thread with these potentially off-topic additions, but I can’t help myself.
One has to do with walking into the Men’s room at work one morning, earlier than most others had arrived, only to find one of the sinks in the middle of the floor. I assumed the maintenance man or crew had had to go someshere else to get parts or a bigger hammer. But I couldn’t resist the temptation. I got a piece of typing paper and a magic marker and made as official looking a sign as I could and placed it in the sink on the floor. The sign just read: Out Of Order.
The other event was in that same restroom and I can’t recall if it was before or after the sink-in-the-floor affair. There was a crudely written notice taped to one of the mirrors that read “Do Not Throw Paper Towels In The Toilet.” I puzzled over the need for such a notice and decided to retaliate. I put another sign right next to it that said, “Do Not Shit In Sink.”
In heavy traffic one day, I managed to get much closer to a slow-moving dump truck than I normally would in faster traffic. There was a sign about the size of a dollar bill on the bumper that said:
Danger: Falling Gravel
Stay 100 Yards Behind
All I could figure is that they must have been noticing a lot of drivers wearing binoculars.
A coworker at the grocery store had a sticker on hiw name tag that read, “Do not oil shaft or head bearings.” Turns out he got it out of the receipt printer. He was asked to remove it but not nearly as quickly as the time a girl put a “Ready to Eat” sticker on her tag.
No shit! Really? Not handwritten, but printed or molded? Wow, manufacturers really hate to use words like “lethal” unless they absolutely must! What on earth could it have been from, I wonder?
I guess that’s why there was no sign of the container and the erstwhile lid-remover anywhere.
Many years ago, when I was a gangly young teenager, I found a small square of green notepaper, upon which, in neat blue handwriting, were found the words: ‘Roxell Roxell Bowshot’
I found a weird list among my papers after a move once. There are fifty or so items on it, noe of which relate to each other in any obvious way. The first ten items are:
Lokal Newspaper
Rolling Pin
Violin
10 Liter Bucket: Old Maid
2 gj. Plastic Glasses
Coffee Pot
Drum
20 Twigs
Small Water Pistol
Keyboard
And it just goes on from there. I don’t know where it came from, or why I have it. It’s on my bathroom door now.
It was printed on. Now, it was in Swedish, so “lethally dangerous” is not what was literally printed but just the best translation I could muster for the Swedish word, which does however mean “so dangerous that you’ll die from it”.
