Warning: This Mailbox is Harmful to Your Health

There are very many dangers to the existence of humanity. Cereal, for example. The difficulty is that, as dangers proliferate and we are forced to write more warning labels, we might get a little lazy. Now, in the beginning, warning labels were very clear about what bad things might happen to you: for example, "Surgeon General's Warning: cigarettes contain carbon monoxide." Granted, children probably wouldn't know what that actually is, but it sure sounds bad. After all, children know how painful "hydrogen peroxide" is, so any word that rhymes with it is just inviting trouble.

Well, now that my wife and I are finished our dissertations and going to teach at university (yeah!), we went to look into housing. Something that we found slightly disturbing--both at our hotel and at some of the apartments we visited--is that there was a warning (I do not remember the exact words), "This contains substances that are harmful." Now, I'm perfectly happy that they informed me that I might possibly die if I stayed in the hotel or lived in their apartment. However, I would have liked to know more about how I would die--would it be in my sleep? Would my intestines simply liquify? And it also would have been nice to know what "this" is. In one particular case, we saw the notice posted in front of the group mailbox at the apartment complex. So, did this mean that I was safe so long as I never visited "this" mailbox? Or, since the mailboxes were near the swimming pool, perhaps it was referring to the pool area itself? Perhaps the oddest thing is that, when we asked the apartment complex person didn't even realize there was a notice posted. (Or, at least, she pretended not to know.) She remarked that the signs were so ubiquitous that one didn't even notice they were there anymore. And really, what would be the point of paying them if they aren't even telling you how you're endangering your life? What's the point of printing a notice that is hopelessly vague and useless? I wish the notice said something that I could actually understand, like, "Warning: laboratory experiments have determined that this notice harms the environment by wasting paper."