Home & Garden: Privacy Plaque

It's been a long, hard day at work. You've just sunk back into your favorite stained, overstuffed chair with a bottle of cheap red wine and a trashy movie when someone has the audacity to come pound on your door.

Chances are that it isn't anyone you'd want to talk to even if you weren't beat: it's probably a college student offering to aerate your lawn for money (scattering huge blobs of clumped earth resembling dog turds across your previously immaculate lawn), or a neighbor complaining because you threw porn magazines in her garbage can and now the garbage men think she reads that trash, or a politician collecting donations.

It's time to take control and protect your privacy. Head 'em off at the pass. Don't even bother to answer the door. Use our special plaque to let them know that they aren't welcome!

Inexpensive unpainted wood plaques are available at crafts and DIY stores, a side effect of the tragic popularity of "country decorating". (Did you ever notice that the people who espouse "country decor" don't have any real "country decor" around, such as cow pies or rotting horseapples?)

Give your plaque a simple paint job featuring one or more of our saccharine motifs and an appropriate phrase, as shown below. If you aren't comfortable painting, you might want to find a "welcome" plaque which is already painted, paint over the "welcome", and substitute your own greeting.

Phrases		Saccharine Sweet Motifs
(may vary according to local idiom) Go Away Get Lost Unwelcome Hit the Road Piss Off Take a Hike Nobody Home No Vacancy		bumblebees butterflies ladybugs froggies sunflowers daisies