This was just recently painted–twice-- on the parking lot at a local elementary school:
So…technically, if I park in the ON parking space, couldn’t I defend myself by saying that the word NO was upside down and I didn’t understand it. I mean, sure, if you look at it from other side, it says NO, but then the word PARKING is upside down.
Funny thing is, they managed to get it right in other places on the lot, and they didn’t screw it up in the disabled spaces at all. Nor did they spell “unloading” incorrectly.
Before anyone rushes in and shouts 'obvious photoshop!", can I just point out that the rectangular artefacts around the word ‘ON’ are caused by overspray of paint off the edge of the stencil, not cut-and-paste colour mismatches. They’re also visible around the outline of the P in Parking.
There must be something about sign making/painting as a job that causes people to zone out and begin seeing the greeeat big letters they’re putting down as just bricks in a wall, instead of units of meaning that must be in a set order.
I just passed a storefront in NYC yesterday with a fairly huge sign reading:
PAOLA POGGI
underneath which was a glass door with big stick-on letters reading:
POALA POGGI
This reminds me of a picture of a similar pavement-painting job that I saw online somewhere (maybe someone else has the time to go looking for it; I don’t):
I have not yet contacted the school district in question. Maybe I should just let it go so everyone can have a bit of fun when school starts up again in a few weeks.
Anyway, working with painters every day - while not all of them are this way, a very large percentage of them are very… er… how shall I put this? Sniffed more than their fair share of fumes in their lifetime*.
Most contractors, when calling in an order, will instruct us to write on the buckets “p-1”, “p-2”, or even “Wall 1” and “Wall 2”, etc. When I asked what that was all about, one of the contractors told me, “Well, dear, the painters aren’t very bright. We have to go into each project and write on the walls: Wall 1, Wall 2, etc on each wall. If we don’t put which wall is to be painted on each can, they will just slap it on anywhere.”
So what this comes down to is that it’s basically colour-by-number on a large scale. If the instructions didn’t include “Put the “N” first and the “O” second”, chances are about 50/50 you’re going to get “ON PARKING”.
Please do note I am not, and never will say, ALL painters are like that. Its not true, and naturally, I know some very lovely painters who’ve been in it for a long, long time, and they’re very bright and wonderful people. For the record, though, most of them, from dimmest to brightest, are friendly as all hell. Good folks, painters are. Maybe they can’t all spell properly, but what the hell, my math blows.
