You can tell a lot about the health of a civilization by their warning
signs. Places with a lot of dumb folks will have very broad, very dumb
warnings in public. “No feeding the birds," “Stop swimming in this
drainage pond." That kind of thing.

Advanced civilizations have very precise signs. They’ve covered the
bases of their regular, run-of-the-mil idiots, and now they’re working
hard to cover that other end of the bell curve: the talented Idiot. When
I was in Germany last time, there was a big warning sign that
consisted of a 76-letter-long word that means “stop bothering this
particular goose, Sven” I don’t know who Sven was, but the goose
looked pretty calm. It worked.

Now, I have a secret to tell you. You can just make your own signs.
There’s no law against it, except perhaps “littering” and the municipal
sign factory doesn’t have very good security. If you show up there past
close and put in the door code that you shoulder-surfed off one of the
employees returning from lunch a week prior, you have all night to
fuck around with their sign-printing machine, making the most
official-looking placards you can think of.

Is this wrong? I don’t think so. Its a public space, and being able to put
up an aluminum sign that says wacky crank shit is your right. For
instance, just last week, I banned pickup trucks from parking by the
playground. The cops figured out something was going on, because
they didn’t get any calls for toddlers getting backed over for a couple
of days and sent a patrol truck to investigate. Took my sign right
down.

What I discovered after that is that nobody keeps records of what
signs are supposed to be there. Why would anyone put up a sign for
no reason? They cost money, after all. The city is now suing the shit
out of that officer for stealing the "no trucks” sign, thanks to an
anonymous tipster who called in the theft. Guy wearing a reflective
vest came by and put like four more of them up after the lawsuit mode
the news, just out of spite. I’m not entirely sure if he’s actually a city
worker; we an into each other at 3am at the sign factory and just
grunted. He was working on some really crazy signs about not feeding
a particular swan. Probably German.