Is this sign confusing to you?

by Milos Topic on February 5, 2009

Don't fix it yourself!

Is the above message confusing or unclear in any way?

  • No (87%, 13 Votes)
  • Yes (13%, 2 Votes)

Total Voters: 15

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I appreciate your answer as you would be surprised how many people either don’t care for the message or simply can’t read. Furthermore, we had two people say “machine must be broken if there’s a sign on it”, clearly indicating that they didn’t even bother to read those three sentences.

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Tagged as: common sense, Education, faculty, Hardware, IT, logic, phone, staff, Stupidity, support, Technology, university, Work

  • http://plainlanguage.com Cheryl

    Part of the problem may be the format.

    People do not read stuff that is set in all capital letters. change to upper and lower case letters, and do not capitalize more than one or two whole words (I suggest: STOP and CALL).

    And people want to know “why”, so explain that quickly.

  • Milos Topic

    Cheryl,

    this is our third or fourth iteration of the sign (I believe the first one was similar to what you suggested), but nothing seems to work. Some people (small percentage) still open machines, break stuff and then complain about them not working.

    However, considering it’s been a while since we had a sign that fits your suggestion I think that we will try it again and see how it turns out. The only part I’m unsure on is how to explain politely that they shouldn’t open them as most of the time it only makes things worse. :(

    Thank you for the suggestion.

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