Look at Me!

The “me” in the title isn’t a person. It’s a thing, and you can see two of them in the picture below. The longer, colourful one is advertising a company, Bunnings, and the other shorter, plainer one is advertising itself. They are both billboards.

They have a waterproof covering, and they’re nailed all along the top, the sides and the bottom to keep them in place. Sometimes, when it’s windy, you can see the centre moving in and out. 

Billboards aren’t usually at eye level. Instead, they’re pretty high up, and when an old one is coming down or when a new one is going up, workers have to use a special machine to help them work safely. It’s called a cherry-picker.

Billboards are big because people need to see them easily. You won’t see billboards on side-streets. They’re always on main roads or near motorways because that’s where most of the traffic is, and that way, more people see them more often.

The two billboards in the top picture are traditional ones, and they never change. They’re always the same. 

But there’s another kind of billboard. This one is digital or electronic, and this kind changes.

Here’s how it works. An ad appears and stays for about fifteen seconds. Then it disappears, and another ad appears to take its place for another fifteen seconds. Then that one goes and another one arrives, and on and on until the first ad reappears.

How do I know the ads stay for fifteen seconds? Well, one day, I stood and I counted in my head. I watched about half a dozen ads, and the average time they stayed was what I told you.

Now standing on the street looking up at billboards isn’t very exciting, so why was I doing it? Well, I was walking along, saw an ad, and wanted a picture of it. But as soon as I took out my phone, the ad vanished.

So I decided to wait until the ad came round again. I waited. And waited. And waited some more. And then some more. I waited a long time, but the ad didn’t come back. I was just about to walk off when it re-appeared, and because I already had my phone in my hand, I got the photo, and here it is.

There’s a reason why I wanted to take this picture. This blog is for language learners or for people who find reading hard, and I noticed that there are four words in the ad. Each word has the letter “o”, but only two of those “o”s have the same sound. Which two?

Importantly, don’t forget the message of the ad. If you’re playing around water or swimming, be careful, stay safe, and live to see another billboard.

And if you haven’t figured out which two words rhyme, they’re the first and the last.

And after I went to all that trouble getting a photo of the know how to float billboard, I saw a better one at my local swiming pool a few days later!