Went to pay my car insurance yesterday. On the door is a printed sign that says:
“CORRECT CHANGE ONLY. SORRY FOR ANY INCONTINENCE. THANK YOU.”
Imagine my surprise when I walked in and saw another sign, taped to the back of a computer monitor. “NO PUBLIC BATHROOMS. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. THANK YOU.”
At my ex’s work, there’s one of those things where you can put in some money for a charity and grab candy. The sign on it says, and I quote exactly:
“Candy coast $0.25. Please don’t just take it, it’s for the starving chidings.”
Coast? Chidings?
At least they got the $0.25 right, and didn’t say “.25c”.
One quarter of a cent. My, that’s cheap.
There’s a Chinese restaurant near me that, during off hours, has a sign on the door reading, “WE ARE CLOSE.”
Yes. Yes, you are.
I’ve got a bit of pictoral evidence of signage and merchandising that was either monkeyed with or poorly thought out:
“I wonder why we’re getting so many people signing up for our driver’s ed course all of a sudden?”
…it made Bud Wiser!
“Oi, shop with the opening and the closing, you want I should catch cold? And take that putz Ken with you, he drives me meshuge!”
Behind the theater where I worked, a neighboring business, run by a man who was pissed off because we parked in his spots, wrote a sign and posted it on the back wall:
No Parking Or You Will Be Toad
Was he Wiccan?
Hee. Our car dealer went to the effort of having signs made that say “Complementary Parking for Customers”. Yes, the gray asphalt does coordinate nicely with my car.
At least one of the signs in the OP was right. I almost always see “Sorry for the inconvience”. Sound it out, people!
Reminds me of something my Social Studies teacher in high school pointed out. We were about to write essays about the causes of WWI, and so he wrote something on the board and said, “Please note this is NOT what Prince Ferdinand was.” The word on the board, in huge caps, was:
ASSINATED
It immediately became my favorite new word, which I privately believe to mean “especially screwed.” As in, “I bounced a check and now I’m totally assinated.”
There’s an Asian buffet in my home town. I certainly am not trying to racist, but there seems to be something lost in translation when it comes to their signs. At the cashier station at the front of the restaurant, there’s a sign that says “Wait for Seat”. It’s a professionally done sign; maybe they didn’t want to spend the money on the extra article. What cracks me up is that none of the signs above the food items are pluralized. One time I went there and under the sign that said “Green Bean”, there was just one green bean sitting in the tray.
This really seemed much funnier in my mind…
And did that piss you off?
The cafeteria in a place I once worked had a sign one day about their lunch special that included “portable mushrooms.”
That’s cute. One person takes the last one and the kitchen runs out with one bean to take its place.
Man, serving sizes at some restaurants are just getting ridiculous.
My local Popeye’s has had, for about four years now, a sign on one of their booths that says “theese chairs is brokin”. It just goes so perfectly with the level of idiocy displayed by the people who work there (I use the term “work” loosely).
My favorite, that I’ve actually seen, was a door in a parking structure that said:
THIS DOOR IS ALARMED
I always pictured it with a suprised, “Home Alone” look on its face.
There was this takeout that had a sign that made me want to get out of the car and change it each time I saw it. I think it was supposed to say:
Eat Cheaply
Hamburgers $3.50 (or something like that)
But it instead read:
Eat Cheap
Hamburger $3.50
I think that’s pretty much the opposite of what impression you should be giving your customers.
One that drove me crazy every time I went to the local Boston Pizza was the big sign advertising that the restaurant can host “Birthday Party’s” . The worst thing is, this in on one of those big signs that look like a chalk board, and it is probably in every Boston Pizza! Horrible.
A fairly minor mistake is on a hand-made sign at work, indicating which side of the coat rack the clean and used lab coats are on. This being Québec, the French is fine, but one end is labeled in English as “Cleans labcoats”. I find it irritating, but I’ll probably never bother to ask anyone to fix it.
Dressel’s Pub in St. Louis used to have the following tidbit on their menu (it’s since been sort of fixed):
We do not allow dogs, except for those with disabilities, cats, or bicycles.
That’s my cartoon! Or it would be if I could draw. My version was “No Parking/Violators Will Be Toad”. It was an idea for a cartoon for Dragon Magazine. It was to have a knight or ruffian leaving his horse near the sign and a frog near the bottom saying, “Psst. Buddy! I thought it was a misspelling, too.”
Anyone with drawing talent is free to use it, assuming no one has drawn up exactly the same thing in the meantime.
