Overly Protective Warning Signs

What a fabulous collection of unnecessary warning signage. You can see the well intentioned rules that are being blindly followed .... ie: “All products containing peanuts must be so labeled., etc.” Folks in charge apparently understand just how dumb the public actually is. Or, folks in charge are actually just that dumb.

At Barnes Engineering we built a classified, very complex, photo-electrical auto-collimator system for all the US Navy’s ballistic missile submarines. It was enclosed in a rugged, sealed aluminum box the size of a suitcase. There were two rules from BuShips (the ancient and hidebound U. S Navy Bureau of Ship Construction Standards) that our contract said we had to apply that we found amusing: “Any equipment affixed permanently to the ship must support the weight of sailors standing on it.” “ Any watertight container must be affixed with a suitable drain.”

You can actually understand the logic of that. After a battle you must be able to let the water out of something that has leaked.

The PEAC instrument probably weighed less than four pounds, but with its “suitable enclosure” it weighted twenty five pounds. At the time Barnes Engineering was collecting generous incentive fees when we met weight reduction goals, measured in tenths of an ounces, for our spacecraft instruments. Different customers .... different environments .... different design requirements.