A Random Thought in a Busy Day

July 31, 2012 Off By Lisa

Today’s random thought is brought to you by Fab Husband.

Some things just make you scratch your head…and wonder.

Fab Husband took this photo and said I should put it on my blog:

That is a photo of a warning label.  I know.  You’re thinking “wow, Fab Husband is not really a funny guy.”  (I think say that a lot when I’m pretending insisting he’s not funny.)  But stay with me…it gets better, I promise.

This is a photo of the item to which the warning label was affixed:

That is a plate.  A nine inch round plate, to be precise.  There are no small parts; there is only the part, the plate itself.  Neither of us could figure out how this plate could be interpreted as a small part choking hazard.  Nor could we recall ever having met a preschooler who attempted to swallow a nine inch round plate.

So why the label?

Have we really become a society of such over-paranoid people that we feel the need to put warning labels on even the most ridiculous of items?  Are we really that afraid that our children might get hurt on…anything?  Or have we become a society so litigious – and so fearful of that litigiousness – that we feel compelled to cover our collective and proverbial tuchuses? (Or would the plural of tuchus be tuchi?)

I can think of several things people my age were exposed to as kids that were perhaps not a great idea.  There were not so many warning labels on life.  We survived.

Maybe someone just slapped that sticker on the plate by mistake.

Or maybe it was done in an effort to make someone laugh and wonder.

CategoryLife
Tagsdads funny stuff kids life moms

About The Author

Lisa A. Listwa is a self-employed writer with experience in education, publishing, and the martial arts. Believing there was more to life than punching someone else’s time clock and inspired by the words of Henry David Thoreau, she traded her life as a high school educator for a life as a writer and hasn’t looked back. She is mother to one glorious handful of a daughter, wife to the nicest guy on the planet, and reluctant but devoted owner of three Rotten Cats. You can find her adventures and thoughts on living life deliberately here on the blog.

7 Comments

  • TheKitchenWitch says:
    August 3, 2012 at 9:27 am

    Had to laugh at this. I mean, why? Kind of like the warning labels on cleaning products: Do not ingest. As if anyone’s going to squirt Dow Scrubbing Bubbles down their gullet…

    • The Meaning of Me says:
      August 3, 2012 at 6:16 pm

      Exactly! Last week I told my sister that a lemonade-flavored drink she suggested tasted like Lemon Pledge. Husband and I then had a discussion about how I could possibly make that comparison, never having sampled Pledge. (He’s so literal.) But if Lemon Pledge has a taste, it would probably be like that. Thanks for stopping by! 🙂

  • Did You Really Say What I Think You Said? | The Meaning of Me says:
    August 4, 2012 at 12:19 am

    […] absurd has become the new […]

  • Super Sister aka Weez says:
    August 4, 2012 at 12:59 am

    Like how NyQuil tastes like “green”

  • Karen Klasi says:
    August 8, 2012 at 9:22 pm

    I bought a ficus recently with a tag that said something like,

    Indirect sunlight
    Don’t let soil dry between waterings
    Not for human ingestion

    I have a theory–Every dumb label is there because the thing being warned against HAS been attempted. I was once telling the Monkey’s 2nd grade teacher that the website for the Las Vegas DMV warns (in a large, rolling script): IF YOU TALK ON YOUR CELL PHONE DURING THE DRIVING PORTION OF YOUR EXAM, YOU WILL BE FAILED. Can you guess what the teacher said? “I know! I did that!” (No, I didn’t pull him from the class, the year was almost over. Yes, I did end up homeschooling him in the 4th grade.)

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