Mixed Messages

I really don't know what to make of this. The "Kids Funtown NAPA AutoCare Center" in Montrose, CA. Really, who thought this signage combo was a good idea?

The mind could stretch to the possibility of a NAPA AutoCare Center WITH a Kids Funtown attached - gotta keep the kids occupied whilst getting the struts restrutted, and there's only so many times Junior can leaf through "4x4 Aficionado" before he becomes mutinously bored. Send him to the NAPA Funtown Kids AutoCare Center Happytime Park and Bagel Bakery! There he can put together 70 of the pieces that still exist from the 500 piece jigsaw puzzle or move around the multicolored beads on the much-sneezed-upon activity center that rests in the middle of the room on the foam-rubber KidMats. Now that's a Funtown. In all honesty, though, I never understood those activity centers. I remember being very young and asking myself, "Now what am I supposed to do with this thing exactly? I don't want to follow the prescribed path for these beads." Ok, so I didn't use the word "prescribed" in my 2-year-old internal monologue, so sue me. Nevertheless, I had no interest in moving wooden shapes on a thick, crayola-colored wire - back and forth, back and forth - with no freedom of movement, and no payoff. Inevitably, I would be shifted from my tenuous attention to the activity c. by some largish, 3-yr-old devotee who was thrilled as a tick at the Westminster Dog Show to be sliding beads on a wire. No thanks.
One of those things resides in the waiting room of my "favorite" Pep Boys mechanic; I usually end up casting sidelong glances at it while I sit in the waiting room. I still don't get it. Why is it such a ubiquitous item in the most miserable of places? - doctor's offices, mechanics, & pathetic, paperback-strewn public libraries.


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