Saturday, 3 October 2009

Literary Parallels

Spotted at work:

Spotted in So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish:
'... the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do.'
The sign said:
Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.
'It seemed to me,' said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.'
Edit:
It occurs to me that I've been carrying this around in my wallet for many years now*, for very similar reasons to the above. Funny really, the way some things become so familiar you forget they're there. See what you think: harbinger of the apocalypse or proof of the Hitch Hiker theory about the meaning of the universe?

*since I liberated it from my keyboard when I worked selling mortgages at a certain well-known North East based bank whose long-term plans for profitability were not, it turns out, as thoroughly contemplated as their health and safety advice.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The best bathroom sign I ever saw was in an office building in Melbourne that had a X-ed out image of a guy standing on the edges of the toilet bowl with a fishing line danging in.

Christie Malry said...

The mind boggles. I'm not sure what set of circumstances may have led to that sign being installed, but equally I'm not entirely sure I want to...