Alok Mukherjee, The Way I See It

A guest blog by Arnold Minors

[We are delighted to publish this guest blog and thank Arnold for permission to publish it from his unpublished book, Black Humour: Recipe for a Healthy Planet.]

If you drive south on the Don Valley Parkway, you can take the Richmond Street exit to get to downtown Toronto. Near the top of the exit ramp, just as you drive around a curve, there’s a sign saying, “BEWARE OF CYCLISTS”.

I think that’s very strange. It seems to me that it would be smarter to warn cyclists to beware of cars. Generally, in any confrontation between a moving car and a moving bike, the bike loses. If I were running the city, I’d put up a sign warning cyclists.

When I saw that sign, I was reminded of others that I’ve seen. One personal favourite was in New York. It was posted on the Brooklyn Bridge, after the so-called Cuban missile crisis in the early 1960’s. The sign directed readers to do the following: IN CASE OF ATOMIC ATTACK, DRIVE OFF THIS BRIDGE.

Yeah, right!

Then, there’s the sign I saw on the Van Wyck Expressway on the way to my godmother’s house. (She had moved to Queen’s, New York from Bermuda by this time.) We would have left Idlewild Airport, where we landed after the flight from Bermuda. The sign in question said: WATCH OUT FOR LOW FLYING PLANES.

What exactly was I supposed to do? Duck?! Sit hunched down in the car?!

Another example is on doors of schools of the Toronto Board of Education. This is usually a sticker. It says, “Entry upon these premises for purposes inconsistent with the Education Act is prohibited.” Now I know why our public education system is often described as being in trouble. It had to be an educator who designed or approved that sign. Certainly, teachers and principals must see it every day. What are you supposed to do before you go into a school? Read the Education Act; understand it; and recognize what may be inconsistent with it? Seems like it must be tough for six-year-old children to decide whether they can enter their school.

There are signs on the McDonald-Cartier Highway in Ontario – otherwise known as the 401 – which say “100 km/h MAXIMUM.” They’re simply not true. My car does more than that. Maybe my car can’t read.

One of the reasons I’m writing this is because signs can be very effective. In fact, some are much more effective than I hope was intended. For example, there are the signs which read “MERGE RIGHT.” God knows, they’ve worked in Canada, the U.S. and Britain. (See N – is for Neo-Conservative in the verse: Your ABC’s.)

My friend, Arun Mukherjee, reminded me of what can happen when people take signs into their own hands. She told me of a story described in “Daughters of the Twilight” by Farida Karodia.

In this story, the author tells of a trip she took with her mother to South Africa. On the trip, they got lost outside of Johannesburg.  While trying to find their way back to the right road, they saw a sign which originally read: BEWARE OF NATIVES CROSSING HERE.

Someone – apparently irritated at being referred to in a way which sounds like natives are like cows or other animals – changed the sign to read BEWARE. NATIVES VERY CROSS HERE.

Maybe what we need is a group of citizens – ordinary folks – who review signs and give constructive advice to engineers and educators. We’d get better signs.