Warning: Take excessive caution reading this column

Have you noticed they no longer have salt and pepper shakers in restaurants? They don’t trust you to adjust your own seasoning. You might add too much pepper, you feckless fool, and thus ruin the chef’s “vision”. Or you could add too much salt, harden your arteries, and bring yourself to the attention of your doctor.

It’s part of the trend of treating us like children. “You can’t be trusted” is the working principle. It’s why everything now comes with a warning. On the bus, I’m told to remember to hang on when the bus is in motion. Really? With the help of a fellow traveller, I was about to attempt the pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty, just to break the tedium. Notified about the possible perils, via the video screen, I decide to stay put.

Hot coffee is hot, who would’ve thought?Credit: Getty Images

Later, I buy a cup of coffee. My cup is printed with the warning that “contents may be hot”, which I’ve always considered a useful feature in a hot beverage. Do people no longer understand that hot drinks are, well, hot? Many of my friends believe they are not hot enough, much to the annoyance of the barista. I’m also told to “dispose of the cup thoughtfully”, so there goes my plan to throw the thing into the middle of the road.

Is there any point to these warnings? Was there one court case in Tennessee in 1963 in which the plaintiff achieved a big payout? “I hadn’t dreamed that darn coffee might be hot, your honour, otherwise I wouldn’t have poured it down my shorts”. “Fair point,” said his honour, awarding him $10 million in damages. Is that why billions of coffee cups are now printed with a statement of the bleeding obvious? Will they soon add warnings to ice-blocks about the risk of brain-freeze? Or tell us that six muffins, consumed in one go, might make you fat?

People are not trusted to understand the most basic things. I’m told, courtesy of an advertisement in This Newspaper, that if I invest in the Australian sharemarket there’s a chance my shares may fall in value. Who would have thought? I assumed they always rose. All these years on, it’s good to finally understand what happened to my investment in second-tranche Telstra.

If I buy insurance, I’m told, I should “check the PDF”, which is code for understanding they’ll never pay, not if they can find a way of rejecting your claim. I knew that already. And if I smoke cigarettes, I’ll die – although this one may be fair enough, as smokers, a group of which I was once a member, really don’t seem to get it.

Will they soon add warnings to ice-blocks about the risk of brain-freeze?

My laundry cupboard bristles with warnings. I’m told not to glug the bottle of methylated spirits as it is “a poison”, which makes me wonder why I am keeping it in the fridge. Aerogard is “for external use only”, which destroys my plan to use it as a mouthwash. Bleach, I’m told on the bottle, is for the purpose of bleaching things. I screw the top back on the bottle, and refrain from pouring it all over Jocasta’s favourite black dress.

Later, visiting the supermarket, there’s a forest of signs telling me not to abuse the staff. I hate the idea that supermarket staff are abused, but are the perpetrators swayed by these signs? Or do they just make the rest of us feel like we’re in hostile place, surrounded by fellow customers with a short-fuse? Do the signs, weirdly, normalise the idea that you might consider abusing the staff?

And why can’t alcohol be in the supermarket alongside everything else? Why does it have to be in a separate shop, tucked in next door? Are the authorities worried that I might see the wine and beer and be so over-excited that I’ll put back all the nappies and vegetables, and instead stock up on a dozen bottles of Hunter shiraz? “Someone has to make sacrifices,” I’d mutter as I reef the baby food out of the trolley.

After the supermarket, comes the trip home. My car, long ago, formed the view I cannot drive. “Keep Your Eyes on the Road,” it beeps, when I’d just been picking my teeth. Unattractive, I realise, but hardly a safety risk. It also goes “bing, bing, bing” because I’ve put some heavy shopping on the front seat. OK, the “shopping” is a slab of beer – bought at the shop next door. But does the beer really need a seat-belt? And is the constant beeping helping my driving, or making it rather worse?

I should write a letter of complaint about all of this, but the reply email would come with yet another warning: “Please consider the environment before printing out this email”. The warning, as usual, would push the print-out onto a second-page, so, if there’s a need to print it out, it’s two pages rather than one, thus adding to the very environmental waste they were trying to discourage.

But that’s the thing with warnings. They so rarely achieve what they set out to do.

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