"Polite Notice"

[Bathsheba]

I'm currently staying at the Camping and Caravan Club campsite at Keswick.

Every notice appears to be titled "Polite Notice".

AIBU in wanting to rip them all down for ridiculousness.

The C&CC is a professional business and we are all paying customers of it.... As such they shouldn't have to tell us it's a polite notice - it should just BE a polite notice....

There's one at work:

PLEASE LEAVE THIS TOILET AS YOU WOULD HOPE AND EXPECT TO FIND IT

In red.

Then in tiny grey writing: Polite notice - thank you

It makes me laugh every time...

The original idea behind writing something starting with 'polite notice' is that you write it in white on a blue background.
That way if you write 'polite notice, no ball games' or some such people will see the blue and white and miss read it as Police Notice.

Why do people think the Police would give a shit?

I used to have a friend who had self catering holiday lets. Inside one she had a huge laminated notice that said;

'POLITE NOTICE'

The dining room may only be used for evening meals.

By order of the management.

It made ME (not even staying there) want to eat toast and marmite in the dining room with my feet up watching Jeremy Kyle.

I always imagine the writer of 'polite notices' as a particularly dull person from the 1950s. They're dull until someone transgresses and then they leap out from their privet hedge and scream profanities at the offender.

It's that fooling the eye thing - like having a cardboard cutout of a police officer outside a shop. Anything to do with the police and most people will stop doing whatever it is they shouldn't be doing.

I bloody love that site! It's my favourite site in the whole, wide world.

"Polite notice" is just an established, customary formula that is supposed to signal courtesy. I agree it's a bit strange and ineffective but their motives are good.

Sadly, experience has shown me that you can't presume that people will behave reasonably on campsites without rules or guidance. On non-CC or CCAC sites, I've often seen large groups of adults pissed up and rowdy around a fire or brazier with music blaring until the early hours, then next morning their toddlers and littlies are wandering around in their onesies for ages before their parents emerge. I daren't offer them breakfast because of the risk their parents would kick-off if they saw/were told. It's also not uncommon for people to let their dogs wander of lead so of course they don't see when they curl one off or cock a leg against a tent.

Despite the "polite" signs, I've seen kids cycling or using scooters around the toilet blocks at Keswick, the sloping paths are irresistible. Kids on bikes around toilet blocks are bad news, as the one who collided with my daughter in her wheelchair coming round the blind corner on the wash block perimeter path discovered. My daughter luckily somehow escaped getting hurt but the poor little Dutch boy really smashed his face. He can't have been more than 6. That wasn't at Keswick, it was in Holland, but there were signs in three languages with symbols all around.

The word gentle used like that really irritates me. Especially on here. "I would sit her down and gently tell her..."
Makes me think of hand holding, shoulder patting and whispering.

This, this, this ^

I have the same reaction to "I calmly said" on here. And nearly everyone who comes on here after an argument has apparently been speaking, calmly, quietly and reasonably the entire time so it crops up a lot.

I saw a sign in a pub once that said

"Unaccompanied children in the bar area, will be clamped and towed away"

I actually thought of Mumsnet and what some of the killjoys would have to say about it.

Worra

I hope you called 101??

The word gentle used like that really irritates me. Especially on here. "I would sit her down and gently tell her..."
Makes me think of hand holding, shoulder patting and whispering.

Oh god yes, with some hair stroking thrown in.

I couldn't SirChenjin

I dumped my kids at the bar and was too busy running...

I thought they were done that way so at a glance it looks like police notice.

I've been told that explanation too, but it would only really work if they actually looked like police notices, wouldn't it? My guess is it started out with people doing it for that reason, then others saw it and thought "oh, that's a nice idea, put "polite notice" at the beginning and maybe people won't get offended and will be more likely to do what we want them to..."

Quite right. If you can't leave your kids in the bar on their own when you're on holiday where can you leave them?

"Gentle reminder" emails give me the absolute rage. So patronising.

They're not meant to be patronising, honest I may have sent one or two in my time. They're more of a wee nudge, as in come on people, please, before I have to get heavy handed.

The Camping and Caravan Club and the Caravan Club both have a very unpleasant jobsworth vibe about them. We used them a fair bit when our kids were small and weak wanted good facilities and quiet sites. They (management and other customers) obviously really hated kids bring there, even well behaved ones. Constant moaning about them playing (interfering with their telly watching), moaning about our trailer tent lowering the tone and spooling the view, moaning that we had a better pitch (trailer tents should be hidden away apparently).

I've never found that about them - the ones we'very used have always been very friendly and welcoming (we choose them specifically from their reviews)

We use the C&CC ones with a tent

C&CC are slightly better to be fair.

To make a notice truly Polite, important words, like 'Poo', should be capitalised and, ideally, underlined.

Too pages through, and I'm still giggling at this Earthbound

I think you will find that people add Polite Notice to their notices in the hope that people will misread it as a PoliCe Notice and therefore pay more attention to it.

I live to serve, Choc 😀.

There's a "POLITE NOTICE" in the window of my local Sainsbury's with black and white chequerboarding across the top and bottom. Blatant fake-police. No idea what it says. I don't deign to read it

On our last visit to a C&CC site the "keep the loos clean" notice was a very badly written poem about making the cleaner sad.

And for anyone who reads this from work I was the one who threw away the ancient sign in the kitchen with the fairy picture on reminding us what the dishwasher is for.