The title being inspired by Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss which I’ve not read, but bought for my father last Christmas.

An office in the same building as mine has a sign just about a door bell saying “Please press if our reception is unattended”. For whatever reason, reception is quite often unattended which is what I assume prompted the door bell and sign to begin with. While it probably makes me one of those jerk programmer types, the idea of pressing the door bell every time I walk past and notice the reception area empty keeps rolling around in my head. Afterall, they did ask so politely, and I wouldn’t want to be rude.

I’ve no idea if this is true, but the whole thing reminds me of a story I heard about some address at google receiving occasional emails containing only a number which was slowly increasing over time. The story goes that eventually, someone got curious enough to try to work out what the deal was, and discovered that the number was the number of words on the google homepage. Apparently someone was getting increasingly annoyed at the size of the page, and so decided to make their obscure, unexplained protest.

So anyway, I don’t really feel like I can go down the whole zero tolerance logic path here until I know how they should have written their little sign, but I haven’t been able to work out anything which sounds right.

  • Please press if our reception is unattended and you want to come in.
  • Please press if you would like our receptionist to open the door.
  • Doorbell below, use your common sense.

None of them really have quite the same flow, even if they get message across well enough. I guess it’s the last one which really points out what bugs me. When I see this sign I’m walking out of my office, which is a little world of trying to cover every base and accounting for every posibility. A computer program wouldn’t think twice about pressing that door bell every time.