Just put up a sign
Because I've been on holiday recently and am indeed on holiday now, I've been running into one of my pet peeves of being a tourist: the lack of signage.
Before I go generalising, I have always found Scotland to be good at road signage. England and Wales? Shockers.
Absolute favourites include:
- one sign miles away and then no others
- signs only visible once you've gone past them
- overgrown unreadable signs so you know you're supposed to do something but you don't know what
- signs someone printed in size fourteen font you're expected to read from the other side of a gate / when passing in a car
This isn't just road signs or directions either. Or being a tourist. Everywhere could do with more signs and labels.
The venue for a wedding earlier this week was lovely. A rambling farm with barns and other buildings in extremely picturesque countryside. But nothing was signed. Just eighty people wandering around passing intel to each other about where the bar or toilets were. Sometimes of course this intel was incorrect. You could not, in fact, take your drinks up to the field where the ceremony was being held. Leading to people downing them or trying to hide them in the bushes, coming back an hour later to them warm and full of flies. A simple sign on the bar would have prevented this!
A car park in the Lake District had all the "Have you paid?" signs so I trekked up the hill to the parking machines at the centre... Which said to pay as you left. Obviously the signs were intended to remind people who were returning to their cars. But nowhere in the car park did it say that you paid on your way out, rather than the pay and display that is the default in that area. Pay as you leave is better, I think, but not if I don't know.
Just... Tell me what you want me to do. Do you want me to wait to be seated? Do you want me order at the counter? If I don't know and I'm already in a bit of an anxiety there's a good chance I'll just leave. That's not a sensible decision on my part, I know, but it is a realistic one. Don't make me ask. No one wants that.
At this campsite nothing is labelled or signed. Is that drinking water? Who knows! Where is the freezer for ice blocks as listed on the website? Nope, not that one sitting right there next to the wash block, that's only for the caterers. Okay! Great! So write that on it!
At an event I went to there was a map, the labels of which didn't match the physical signs, and none of that matched the guidebook. So the same place was called one thing on the map, another thing on the signs, and yet another thing in the guide. Not obvious synonyms either, like Start and Entry. How am I supposed to know the 'start area' is also the 'swimmer's village'? What am I supposed to do with this information?
On the other hand, less grumpily, I have developed some strategies. For example, once I have gained entry somewhere I might say, "I've not been here before. Would you mind telling me where the changing room is," or somesuch. Sometimes people mind very much. But I think the "I've not been here before" triggers a helping mechanism.
Another approach I wouldn't necessarily recommend but has saved me more than once, is people thinking I don't speak English, so shouting instructions very slowly at me.
Websites, emails, and the like, have no excuses not to just lay it all out. If people don't need an excess of information they won't read it but some anxious asses like myself love an excess of information. Like I'm going to a thing tonight, I booked it online... And silence. Just tell me how this works!
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