The company I work for uses mail mobiles to deliver paperwork throughout the office. These are carts about as tall as my shoulder. They get loaded with mail and sent around the buildings. They follow magnetized tracks under the carpeting and are programmed to stop at certain spots to be unloaded and reloaded.

I’m used to them, but it’s still kind of cool to see them chugging along and beeping.

Anyway, I was walking down a long hallway last week and suddenly wished I had my camera. Apparently some work had been done on the tracks, because there was a paper sign sitting on the floor looking like a large place card from a dinner party. In big, bold letters, it said:

“Please do not step on the wet, invisible line.”

Most people walked past this sign without pausing — busy, no doubt, with Weighty Corporate Matters. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  • If the line was invisible, how would I know if I was stepping on it or not? I could be on it right now. Or now!
  • And it wasn’t just an invisible line, it was a WET invisible line. Are wet invisible lines slightly more visible than dry ones? Or more dangerous?
  • And finally, what would happen if I or someone else accidentally stepped on the wet invisible line?

It was kind of like how the young boy must feel in Helen Palmer’s A Fish Out of Water when Mr. Carp the pet store owner tells him:

When you feed a fish,
never feed him a lot.
So much and no more!
Never more than a spot,
or something may happen!
You never know what. 

Of course, the boy feeds his fish too much. This makes the fish grow to gigantic proportions and causes all sorts of chaos until Mr. Carp steps in to save the day, (thoroughly debunking the notion that children in picture books must solve their own problems).

When I walked down the hall later in the day, the signs were gone, leaving me to assume that the wet invisible line was now a dry one.

Too bad, I had planned to step on it.

Just to see what would happen.