Signs, pointless and otherwise

This is a subject that Phut briefly touched on a couple of months ago with his "Autistic child in area" sign, and also a subject that is quite close to my heart.

Signs are everywhere, they're like intravenous advertising, try as hard as you can but you still can't get away from them. Of course some of them are quite useful, but the large majority of them are completely useless. For now I have two examples:

The first is one that I saw when I was back in the UK a few months ago. Please regard.



Note the numbers. No (1) is the sign and apparatus for both topping up water to your car and blowing up your tires. But, more intriguingly, is no (2), the two signs telling you that you cannot park there. Interesting.

Now the other one I unfortunately do not have a picture of, so you will have to leave it to your imagination. Thinking about it, it's in French anyway so it probably wouldn't help you much.

On the Metro in Paris, there are signs above some seating on the trains. I will translate for you to make it easier:

The 4 seats below are reserved for the following people, in order of priority

• Injured war veterans
• The blind and the industrially handicapped
• Pregnant women
• Those aged 75 or over

Now lets just take a moment to analyse that. In other countries they have signs saying something like "please give up this seat to someone more needy than you". Not in France. Ohhh no, they have to have a pecking order even for the infirm. Realistically they only need to put a sign for pregnant women, because the other categories are rarer than rocking horse shit on the Metro.

Firstly you have injured war veterans. Not too many of those really, seeing as the army tend to turn tail at the first sign of trouble - the mostly likely war injury is when they put their hands up a little bit too quickly and pulled a muscle or maybe dropped their rifle on their foot.

Next you have the blind, who will have probably fallen down the stairs on the way down to the train, or more realistically from experience they are still in the station upstairs begging for money. Interestingly, they have been put in the same category as the industrially handicapped. Now in Paris this means office workers - and the only injuries they are likely to have received are scalding themselves on a minute cup of coffee or getting their fingers trapped in the coin return slot of the coffee machine. Nothing to warrant a free seat particularly.

Category 3 is ok, but the fourth is also very rare. Once again, on experience I can say that anyone over the age of 75 in Paris is not on the Metro, but on surface level dithering whether to turn left or right in their enormous cars whilst blocking a main throughfare.

I also had to wonder (and I've almost finished now), does it work on a 'points accumlated' system?

What happens if someone from categories 1 and 4 is looking for the last available seat against someone from categories 2 and 3? Does the 1 take priority, or does the 2 added to the 3 count for more than 1 and 4? Suppose it's not important, but every time I take the Metro I am secretly looking forward to a fight between an 80 year old one-legged soldier and a blind pregnant woman. What a mental picture to leave you with.