No Listening to The Partridge Family on the Lift?

Your author and her husband encountered a rather cryptic public safety sign while riding an elevator, ahem, lift, in Edinburgh, Scotland, recently. A round red, white and black sticker above the buttons on an Otis car operating panel showed stick figures inside a suspended box with little black shapes off to the side that looked like the partridges from The Partridge Family 1970s American TV show logo stacked vertically on top of one another. What on earth did that mean? No listening to “Come on Get Happy” while suspended in a box? Otis Senior Manager of Public Relations, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific Richard Howat, who is based in the U.K., provided an answer: “It’s a ‘do not use the lift/elevator in case of fire’ symbol,” Howat said. “It seems to be a generic one used in Europe, rather than an Otis one.” Your author still believes the so-called flames on the sticker look nothing like flames. For comparison, alternative signage that clearly spells out the warning (and includes slightly less partridge-y “flames), as well as fire signage from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), are shown. In any case, now you know. The mysterious sticker means, “Take the stairs if there’s a fire; not the lift.”