27 December 2006

Signs of Stupidity

Some 30 minutes from My house in Cabo Rojo, over on the north side of Mayagüez where State Road #2 makes a beeline to My birthplace of Aguadilla, there's a blue-faced official sign that reads "Tsunami Zone Limit."

For those of you not aware of Our geography, Puerto Rico is an island of roughly 100 east-west miles by 36 north-south miles, and the area I just mentioned lies along the western coast. The "Tsunami Zone" sign sits about 2.5 miles from the ocean. And why it's there is anybody's freaking guess.

For one, there doesn't seem to be any other sign like it anywhere else in Puerto Rico. It's not like We have only one coast, right?

For another, the sign is not some cheap knockoff: this is a government sign, with the requisite bolts and cement base and probably cost more than the average quarterly salary of a mid-level manager to make and install.

In third place, what pea-brained dipstick figured out that the sign actually marks any reasonable limit for a tsunami? My first thought was that now that I know where the freaking danger zone ends, when the warning is issued, I can drive like mad to that sign, park east of it and lay out a picnic lunch to watch Nature's Salty Revenge from a front-row seat. Might get My shoes wet, but--hey!--I'll be safe!

And lastly, just what the hell's the point of putting up a sign that means nothing? Unless it's some sort of continuing trend like putting up signs that proclaim "Your Tollbooth Monies At Work" where no such progress is evident, or taking out ads that state that "The sales tax is for everyone's benefit" or to see posters that display a candidate's smiling face and a variaton of "X will work/is working for you!"

Uh-huh.

Maybe the sign isn't so stupid after all, given how the average sign's smarts are so disgustingly low anyway...


The Jenius Has Spoken.

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