Sunday, August 31, 2008

Security Transmitted Diseases

Security signs usually make me laugh. They're so earnest and serious and I can imagine them being discussed and approved by a committee somewhere. I suppose that people may see signs reminding them to abide by security procedures for the few weeks that it takes for them to have the security procedures ingrained. Then they completely stop seeing the signs.

This one amused me more than usual. It's a good sign, really, drawing on the psychology of the stop sign, and it's trying to come up with a catchy acronym for the security area. But while SIDA is something you can catch, well-displayed security badges are not the usual prophylactic technique. I believe SIDA is also the Spanish acronym, so perhaps the reference is deliberate, rather than having been conceived in monolingual innocence.

The one below was repeated at about eight metre intervals all along the fence of the Salt Lake City ARTCC. They wanted to be very sure that even casual invaders with poor peripheral vision understood about the threat to human life that their invasion proposed. The facility behind the fence shared an architectural style with my highschool, and probably every other institutional building constructed in the 1960s, but it was in good repair. I guess the signs, and the absence of teenage hordes, kept decay at bay.

And I have no idea what the "flying colors" forbidden on this one are. It must be a gang thing. I didn't go in there.

6 comments:

Colin said...

"Flying colors" is a motorcycle gang reference. It is unlikely that the urban gangs would know what that meant, so they were targeted separately.

A video showing what it might be like if a design firm were hired to redesign the stop sign:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqPYeTSYng

A friend wandered through a missile silo (decommissioned) and apparently there were a lot of No Lone Zones:
http://flickr.com/photos/aallan/537431715/
Those are places where if you were seen by yourself (without your buddy) you were shot on sight. It was assumed that if you were there by yourself you were up to no good.

Anonymous said...

SIDA is AIDS spelled a'la Espanol.

"Flying colors" is also used by prison-matriculated people or their associates or wannabes not only as wearing gang colors, but exposing your tattoos to reveal your affiliations sort of like prisoners in Russia, I meant USSR .
(;)>>>.

Kevin said...

"Colors" in this context refers to the sleeveless, usually denim, vests that are worn over motorcycle jackets and have gang or club patches sewn on to them.

Kevin

Unknown said...

......but you may have gained entry if you had used one of the approved "ID" cards shown on the right :-)
Well, they say "money talks"

Richard said...

SIDA is most certainly the normal French acronym for what Anglos call HIV/AIDS

Anonymous said...

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