The sign on the dry floor
Halfway down the corridor of a shopping centre, at two in the afternoon, a yellow plastic sign stands on a floor that is completely dry. It is folded into a tent, the way they all are. CAUTION: WET FLOOR, it says, and under the words a little figure is going over backwards with one leg in the air. The floor was mopped at about nine. It dried by twenty past. The figure has been falling ever since, and everyone walking past steps round the sign, which is now the only thing in the corridor you could trip on.
Putting the sign out is part of mopping. Taking it in is not part of anything. The mop goes back to the cupboard because the cleaner needs it for the next floor, but the sign has to be left behind on purpose, and then somebody has to come back for it once the floor is safe, at a moment nobody is watching for. Usually nobody does. So the sign is put out by a person and taken in by a schedule: at the end of the shift, or the next time the same cleaner happens to pass, or never, until it is found in the same place a week later with dust on its feet.
It is also cheaper to be wrong in one direction than the other. A sign on a dry floor costs a few people a small swerve. A wet floor with no sign, if someone falls on it, costs a claim, and the first question in any claim is whether there was a warning. So the sign is allowed to be wrong for hours on the safe side and not for a minute on the dangerous side. Nobody decided that the sign should lie. That is just the only mistake it is allowed to make.
Everybody who walks past learns this. The sign is right for the first twenty minutes of the hours it stands there, and people can tell. They glance down, see a dry floor, and walk on without breaking step. The trouble is that the lesson travels. The next sign they pass may be standing on the one floor this week that is still wet, and they will look at it with the same glance.
This atlas has a cousin of this sign already. In Entry 47 there is a yellow stripe on the single odd step down to the toilets of an old pub, with MIND THE STEP painted beside it. That warning is true every hour of every day, because the step is always odd. The wet-floor sign is true for twenty minutes and stands there for six hours. Both are yellow, and both are addressed to a foot that has stopped looking. Only one of them is about the floor.
Read properly, the folding sign is not about the floor at all. It is a record of something that happened: someone was here with a mop, early, before the shops opened, and did their job and went. It has no date on it and no name. It is the cleaner’s only signature on a floor that, by design, shows no trace of having been cleaned. You can walk the whole centre and not see a single person mopping anything. What you see is the signs they left.
The floor dried at twenty past nine. The sign is still telling you about nine o’clock.