untweetable

Yesterday on my way home I stopped on a traffic island. A poster was cable-tied to the pole the lights were attached to. The poster had slipped down so only the top half was visible. I grabbed the poster to pull it up and look at the whole image. And I forgot about the image. The poster was soft and bulky. I wanted to tweet the experience but there didn't seem any way to reduce it to 140 characters if I also wanted to explain why.

What seems to have happened is that the poster was laminated as part of what looked like a professional print job. In order to fix the poster to the pole holes were punched at top and bottom for the cable ties. The hole at the top then allowed rain into the envelope. The water was unable to run out the hole at the bottom sufficiently quickly and its weight pulled the poster down allowing more water to gather and making it impossible to escape except by overflowing or bursting the laminate.

It's a shame it wasn't possible to tweet because it's exactly this kind of overlooked detail that works well in that format.