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Don’t Let This Happen To You!

warningsign-squashed.jpg For reasons that only my team of highly paid psychiatrists, psychologists, venipuncturists, and ventriloquists can explain, I’ve always found these dire warning signs amusing. Not because of what happens to the people (if you can really call these “people”), but by the sort of noncommittal, unemotional way these tragedies are depicted.

Most of them are found around industrial or construction equipment, and — without saying a word — they warn that your hands could get cut off, your feet could get smushed, you might get electrocuted (usually by lightning bolts!), you could get bonked on the head, and all sorts of other hazards. Why, it’s enough to make you just stay in the house all day. Which probably explains why I do just that.

But this sign is one of my favorites, because it shows the awful fate that awaits anyone who — get this — doesn’t get out of the way of the gate of a certain parking garage downtown. My, that is one deadly powerful gate! Seems to me they might adjust the spring tension on it, so it wouldn’t just crush the life out of you, as it has done with this nameless (and footless, handless, and neckless) fellow.

Poor dumb bastard. What a way to go.