This plaque presides over the toilet in a bank’s rest room.
It takes me many minutes – which I am doomed to spend anyway, thanks to a lethargic prostate gland slowed even further by the frigid room and my own cold hands on Big Poppy – but I figure out this isn’t a depiction of a magician levitating a variety of objects out of the head of a dog whose scalp has been neatly flipped open.
No, it’s a non-verbal prohibition about what sorts of things shouldn’t be dropped into the bank’s toilet. But what are those things?
I can identify about half these icons, including “soap” because it says so (but why the hell would anybody drop an entire bar of soap into the toilet of a bank’s rest room? Why would anybody bring a bar of soap into a bank’s rest room?). What’s the thing on the extreme left? What’s on the bottom left – it looks like a squashed WW2 aviation cap with ear-flaps. Is that the largest razor blade in the world under the soap? If it is, do you want to give orders to whatever giant bearded creature uses it?
The scary part is, whatever all these things are, they made it to the sign for a reason — it’s happened somewhere. The same reason shippers write DO NOT EAT THIS on packing material. There are human beings out there who without these cautions would do the unthinkable, so parties with something to lose have to dumb themselves down to protect themselves.
You can bank on it. (Sorry.)
Objects are from left….insulated coffee mugs, black thimbles, paper airplanes, small doll shoes, human hands, Halloween “Negro lips”, razor blades, spittoons, small ice scrapers, and a band aid. It’s perfectly understandable that the bank should worry about improper disposal of these objects, especially the ice scraper here in south Florida.
I’m guessing: Origami, Glass, Plastic, Depends (!), Barf bags, Band-aids, Trash cans (very tiny ones), Razor blades, and Soap – unless they misspelled “soup.”
Interesting what isn’t there: tampons, syringes, fetuses, gerbils, diapers. Depending on the neighborhood, I might add Seventh Day Adventist brochures.
Upper left – Ghengas Kahn’s paper hat
Lower Right – Ghengas Kahn’s jock strap
Extreme Left – An alternator
Middle – Andre the Giant’s butt plug
Severed hands.
Wouldn’t it be better to just say… DON’T THROW SHIT IN TOILET
On second thought, no. People would just shit on the floor.
I know I would.
Simplify: WWJT
(What Would Jesus Throw?)
“I figure out this isn’t a depiction of a magician levitating a variety of objects out of the head of a dog whose scalp has been neatly flipped open.”
I keep going back to this — everything okay at home?