Safety Will Kick Your Ass

This is my second post about stupid signs I've read- I guess I am obsessing.

The building complex where I work has safety signs posted in almost every single hallway and stairwell. They have two styles: the 'Old School' 1950s style with plain block lettering and a high-contrast color scheme that depends on a lot of whites, reds, yellows, and blacks; and the new clip-art cartoony style that actually attempts to illustrate the safety message. The Old School signs typically have messages like: "Caution: Open Door Slowly" or "Please Use Guardrail". The clip-art signs usually have cute little phrases like "Safety starts with an 'S' but begins with 'You'" or "Be Careful: Every Ladder has its Ups and Downs". Above the phrase will be a lame graphic of a guy falling off a ladder.

None of this shit works.

The older style of sign is so overrused and so plain that it is easily ignored. Nobody pays attention to stuff if they see it everywhere they go. I didn’t pay attention to the ‘Caution: Open Door Slowly’ signs until I blasted a door open and nearly knocked someone out. Of course, after that happened I didn’t really need a sign to tell me to be careful. The cutesy slogan signs are completely different. They aren’t addressing an immediate safety concern; they are just providing random safety advice. I guess they are more effective in one sense because I actually pay attention to them. Every month brings new slogans and signs and new ideas of mine on how to make the characters on the signs look like they are masturbating. I learned recently that water on the ground can be slippery- this is the kind of information that is vital to my personal safety. Before I read that I always walked around staring straight ahead and never looking down to scan the ground in front of me. The bruises and broken bones did not teach me what the sign did. Now I always check the ground for water before taking a step. Even when the cutesy signs have messages that aren’t totally worthless, they still aren’t effective. I just can’t take a message seriously when it’s being illustrated with an androgenous, Ziggy-like, dwarf creature.

I started thinking about how to make these signs more effective.

My first thought was to take the Old School style signs and spice up the text with phrases that people will definitely read and definitely remember. Instead of ‘Caution: High Voltage’ the sign could read ‘Caution: This Electricity Will Fuck You Up’. I thought about replacing ‘Caution: Watch Your Step’ with ‘Caution: If You Fall Everyone Will Laugh Their Asses Off’. A good safety slogan sign could include a picture of a guy with a pencil jabbed in his eye and blood gushing out like Mt. Krakatoa, his coworkers would be in the background screaming, and the phrase could be ‘Horseplay in the Office Is A Bloody Affair’.

Of course, those ideas would lose their effect with time just like the originals. I’m already desensitized to the image of a bloody pencil-eyed mess. A real solution has to involve something that is attention-getting, disturbing, and immune to the possibility of desensitization.

Bring in the clowns.

I think the key to effective safety signage has to involve clowns. Clowns can elicit two very different types of emotions from people: amusement or intense, irrational and lingering fear. A person that finds a clown amusing is probably going to read a clown sign every time they see it. If you laugh once at a clown, you’ll laugh again and again and again. If clowns scare you though (like they do me), then you won’t read that sign ever again. You won’t have to- that sign will be revisited repeatedly in your night terrors. You will awaken from your nightmares and find yourself curled up in a fetal position clutching your pillow and saying over and over: ‘Must use the guardrail, must use the guardrail, Chuckles is watching me, must use the guardrail’. Whether you are pro-clown or not, I think clown-based signs would work for safety.