Someone has been posting dramatic signs on the front door of my building
Up until about a week ago, when Paris managed to crawl out from under its little ice age, there was a sign on the door that read:
THANK YOU FOR KEEPING THE DOOR CLOSED DURING THIS GREAT PERIOD OF COLD
That is, not “this period of great cold,” but “this great period of cold.” I don’t know who wrote it, but it struck me as a bit theatrical, albeit charmingly so.
Around the same time as the city was thawing out (and perhaps because of it?), our digicode-controlled outer door suddenly malfunctioned and still isn’t working. It’s now permanently propped open, which is fine because there is an inner door (with its own digicode).
As of today someone (the same someone, unless my eyes and ability to distinguish handwriting deceive me) had posted another sign:
PLEASE LOCK THE DOOR AS IT IS OUR ONLY SECURITY!!
The emphasis and multiple exclamation points are there in the original, except in French, when it sounds even more insistent. Our only security! Against the world! As if there were no locks on our individual doors, and as if would-be Parisian buglers didn’t have their eyes on better loot.
So now I’m kind of hoping that this will be a seasonal thing, and that come summer this mysterious sign-writer will admonish us to KEEP THE DOOR CLOSED DURING THIS GREAT PERIOD OF HEAT, and will warn us in autumn that FALLEN LEAVES ARE TO BE KEPT OUTSIDE, THIS IS OUR ONLY FLOOR!!
