WELCOME MATS

I always thought this was kind of a weird idea. You know, the mat says welcome, but the idea is you are supposed to step on it.

Now maybe it is only me, but for some reason I have trouble figuring out how come they think it is a good thing for them to step on the welcome before you open the door? Think about it? To me it is saying, hey come in and step on me!

At least it does to me. So you get somebody to you know step on that welcome mat and then they start thinking, hey this dude is saying come on it and make yourself at home. Take whatever you want because I already let you walk all over me. Boy is that a temptation or what?

I've been giving a lot of thought to ways of fixing that problem. And it is a hard problem to change, let me tell you.

First of all, you don't want to get rid of the welcome mat. Otherwise you just are saying, go away and don't bother me. And that is no way to make friends or encourage folks to visit.

But you can't leave that mat the way it is because that just leads to other problems. So there just has to be a way to fix the mat do you don't worry about visitors getting weird.

Well, so far I guess my first thought was to get rid of the welcome part and just leave the mat. Then I figured a mat that doesn't say welcome is just about the same as having no mat. So that ain't the best idea either.

That left me with only one other idea. I figured, well I could like say hello and then add something to make sure everyone who visits understands.

You know how they have those directions on stuff? And sometimes they have other things like warning labels?

I figure people see those all the time so it might work great for a welcome mat too. You know put a little sign under the welcome part. It could say something like, "knock on the door, come inside when I say so and no funny stuff."

That ought to do I figure. Well except for perhaps the warning part. I mean you don't want to say, "do something weird and I'll clobber you." That might make things a bit difficult.

Then I remembered those signs that say, "enter at your own risk." So I figured adding after no funny stuff something like "enter, but don't mess up" would work.

Yep, I bet that will take care of the concern I have over this whole welcome mat thing. It could be a real plus. I wonder how old Reverend Analbe will like it? Shoot, I doubt with him it will matter. He doesn't like anything anyway.