Health and safety and uncommon sense

I was met with this poster as I waited on my bus home, with very much TGIF and Friday on my mind. Whether on surrounds to building sites or in workplaces or transport, few posters scream 'important' as much as health and safety one. They're generally red and yellow, and warn us if we do the flaming obvious then death is a near certainty. You wonder about the lives of the designers, who've ended up producing template shouty warning signs when they'd rather be working on their very own Taj Mahal for their loved one. Don't do that, and don't figure out for yourself that performing the military two-step on a swivel chair may contain an element of risk.

I have barely a brain and can't quite figure out for myself that there may, in a bus station, be 'moving busses'. I thought they were all stationary, the only possibly explanation that I had been waiting for one to take me home on Tuesday. And there's CCTV, which is nice to know, as these days, on my couch at home, watching 'CCTV's funniest moments' is in fact the only time in my life as a suburban dweller and city worker that I am in fact NOT being viewed by some guy in a CCTV control room miles underground in some super-baddy palace. It also gladdens my heart to know that there exists somewhere in a bus station a large area that can accurately be referred to as a 'bus operational area'. Heck, if they're operational, then at least they are 'moving' and there's more than a good chance that I'll be transported by omnibus means to my domestic residence.

There's no smoking in the bus, or on top of it, so there's a fair to middling chance there'll be no smoking in the bus station. All well and good. At least the smell of diesel won't be overpowered by the smell of cigarette smoke, puffed out by a nervous passenger who can't not smoke for that ten minute journey home. No unattended baggage either, which dispels for me what I thought happened all the time, that commuters and travellers routinely played hide and seek with their handbag, rucksack or school bag. Perish the thought too that if your luggage was a lit cigarette that you could be breaking the law twice. Sad though that we have to remind people not to chomp on a chocolate bar and discard the wrapper or cast aside sundry litter.

I guess the alternative to reading the poster and taking careful note is signing a memorandum of agreement that you will abide by all rules and regulations. Or maybe, like VW's 'Fun theory' suggests, there's a better way, a nicer way, a less lecture, less shouty way, of communicating that which is so vital. This poster is so didactic, of a fashion that is so out of step with say modern parenting suggestions and modern education (modern of course meaning post 18th century). Personal responsibility seems to have gone out the bus window - maybe the poster is more saying 'don't say we didn't warn you' or maybe it's just outmoded bus station design - I won't walk on the bus operational area if there isn't one. Leave us to make up our own minds that if we choose to chuck litter after smoking on the bus operational, there may be consequences and one of them will be meeting the undercarriage on impromptu terms.

Common sense is seen as uncommon, but maybe because we're not encouraged to be free thinkers, to figure it out for ourselves - the model is preachy, do as you're told. Change the model, turn it on its head, in several ways, and maybe common sense will lose the first part, and just be 'sense'.

Have a great weekend, and watch out on bus operational areas.