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February 18, 2006 12:03 AM
Broken: Town Centre sign
Phillip Wells submits this picture he took of a sign in Bermuda:
This sign to the Town Centre of St. George's in Bermuda is five minutes down the road from where I
live. Presumably, it was erected for the benefit of visiting cruise ship passengers since it is near the cruise ship terminal.
The sign is strictly correct as you can get to the Town Centre from either direction. However, it seems pretty redundant as there are no other ways to go unless you fancy a swim in the harbor ;)
This is because too many drunk tourists get off the boat and ask " which way do I go?"
When it just doesn't matter. Otherwise some local guide will have to sitt there an point. But that could be fun. Randomly tell people to go left or right.
(Second!)
Broken, pretty simple. I'll hazard a guess as to how the discussion will go, though. We've already had the obligatory "First" post. My post will be followed by anywhere from two to five witty, quipy posts, all basically saying broken. We might get our first not broken post here, some ultra-Republican bag of wind who believes the sign-reader should've known better. Then we'll get a series of posts dedicated to analyzing the fringes of the pic, or commenting on minor details. Someone will suggest the sign was photoshopped. Someone will wonder why the category is 'Just For Fun' instead of 'Signs'. At some point a misspelling will occur, or a comment offending Mac users or disabled people or Americans will be made, and we'll have posts commenting on that. If this had anything more to do with computers, I would say that the rest of the discussion would devolve into programmerese and M$-bashing. Since it doesn't, this posting probably won't get more than 20 comments.
For any one who has been to Ilwaco, Washington on the way to Long Beach, this might seem familiar. Driving from the south you would come across a sign like this:
I would say that this is not broken seeing as it is correct.
This is an edited sign. You can see clearly that the tip of the "left" arrow is hand painted. You can assume that the red line used to go all the way across, but has ben painted over white in the middle, or otherwise removed.
It looks like a local updated the sign to make it more useful, since you can go either way. Maybe he had a business for the tourists to the left of the rock that no one ever visited because the sign said to go right.
I'd go so far as to classify this as "FIXED" instead of "Broken"
Not broken. The sign is accurate, and is meant to dispel confusion among visitors as to how to get to the town centre. It's unusual that two opposite roads would lead to the same destination, so that fact needs emphasis.
I'm sure the question "which road leads to the town centre" was getting asked far too often, hence the sign.
I love how everyone is ignoring Tic's comment...
Oh, crap, what did I just do?
Anyway, engunneer is right. It solved an existing problem. It clarifies, rather than obfuscates. It doesn't provide any incorrect information, and it appeals to the lowest common denominator. It's funny, though, and has something to do with being broken.
So this is my first "not broken" post. Ding!
It looks edited to me. The left arrow appears to be painted in using MS Paint or something. The shading of the two different reds are off. Person = Broken
...at a loss to make a 'witty, quipy (sic)' response to Tic.
Looks not broken to me.
Happy Saturday :-)
I don't think it's been edited... just somebody had vandalized the right arrow and they didn't want to repaint it, so they used a magic marker :P
I think Tic may been throwing the proverbial turd into the crowded room just to see what would happen. Did you intentionally misspell "quippy", perhaps? Maybe I'm giving this guy (or gal) too much credit. I agree that it's broken, though. The sign has to cause more confusion than it prevents, especially for the aforementioned drunk tourists. It should point in the direction of the shortest route, since it's highly unlikely both are exactly the same length.
Like Confused Shopper, I suppose had they put an upward arrow, or no arrow at all, people would still consider the sign broken. I think this was the best alternative to writing a full sentence on the sign.
gamer look at it. its real paint, you can see the brush strokes. if someone had edited it on the computer they could have done it far neater.
um hello? he probly jsut put redeletricial tape to make it look broken (u cna see it s tape if u see the larger picture) and also it might mean its up, sings like this usally mean that there is a stircase on both sides so definity not broken.
Hmmmm, actually to a non-english speaker, this sign is broken. If I spoke Korean, then I might look up both town and centre in my English-Korean dictionary. I might think there are two separate towns. If this sign were fixed, it would just name the specific town and leave the red arrows as they are.
I agree with engunneer that the arrows were fixed to probably direct half the tourists equally each way so that the various businesses on both routes got some business. Although there is a slight possibility there was vandalism and that the red arrows were cheaply repaired.
Jonathan
NOT broken. Not even a little bit. The majority of tourists arriving at this intersection will want to know which way is town. The sign answers this most common question perfectly well.
I do agree that the arrow pointing left is an amateru modification of the sign.
I'm guessing that the road to the right is more direct but the left road also gets there--and some business on the left road wanted more traffic.
Not Broken, pretty simple. We've had the obligatory "First" post and even a "second" and "third" post. Then some blowhard went on to tell us what we would post. His post was followed by about four witty posts, all basically saying not broken. Instead of an ultra-Republican bag of wind who believes the sign-reader should've known better we got she-snailie's impression of Dr. Evil or Boris Badenov or someone. We did not get a series of posts dedicated to analyzing the fringes of the pic, but a dialogue on whether the sign had been "fixed" on purpose, by vandals or by being photoshopped. Nobody wondered why the category is 'Just For Fun' instead of 'Signs'. The blowhard committed a misspelling that was commented on, but nobody posted anything that would offend Mac users or disabled people or Americans. The blowhard did predict correctly that the posts would not go into programmerese or M$ bashing, but this is the 22nd comment.
Tic.... You forgot that someone might manage to bring up the McDonalds coffee burn victim crapola. that stupid beeaatch.
I wonder if the sign originally had no arrows, people arriving looked at the sign and said, "This is the town centre? there's nothing here."
Just to make sure we fill our quotas:
"That sign was clearly mouth-painted by an disabled American Mac-using Republican. Broken!"
Did I miss any? ;-)
Well I have ADD and one thing that irritates me is lack of understanding that some people have for disabled persons. The broken part here is that there is no handicapped parking sign nearby, and not only that, um , er, ... O wait, What was this about?
You've got it all wrong.
The TOWN is to the left.
The CENTRE is to the right.
The broken part is spelling CENTRE with the vowel at the end.
WillF,
I didn't notice at first, but the word center is written with the french spelling. Thus either it was misspelled, it was written by a francophone, Centre is the name of a place or it's supposed to be bilingual. ¦)
It's not the French spelling, it's the correct spelling. Some Webster bloke thought it would be clever to publish a dictionary before learning to spell :-P
This sign is NOT broken, despite the modification made to it. There are in fact two roads to the center of St George's from the cruise ship terminal, they both wrap around that wall. If a photo was taken of the sign square on, it would be more clear.
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: MS Word - Well-being vs. well being | Main | Next: Temperature indicator on sign
At least the arrow isn't pointing down (or up for that matter)! People getting off the boat might otherwise think that they didn't survive a shipwreck. LOL.
Posted by: Confused Shopper at February 18, 2006 12:10 AM