One of the cleverer graffiti I've seen has become a meme and spread so widely that it's now found in trains all over Sydney. Each one of these trains displays, in every carriage, a warning poster which says:
At night, travel near the guard's compartment marked with a blue light.
Some smartass sometime realised that, by scratching away parts of the poster or through careful use of liquid paper, this message can be modified to read:
At night, rave near the guard's compartment naked with a blue light.
...and several dozen wannabe smartasses have since stolen the idea and vandalised many copies of the poster with voracious abandon.

Of course, if the authorities had written the message unambiguously in the first place (is it telling me to travel marked with a blue light?) then the whole thing would never have got off the ground. I'm glad it did.

The signs used to be made up of little individual letter stickers, and you could pull them off or rearrange them as you pleased. In the sentence At night, rave near the guard's compartment naked with a blue light, for example, you would have to strip off half of the m to make an n.

Sometimes you see the carriage numbers reversed in this way, so there's no way to tell which one you are actually on, which isn't a big deal unless you're having to call a cleanup crew or a rescue team (CityRail trains have a tendency to derail. Some, like the Millenium Train, don't even fit through some station platforms). It was perhaps five or six years ago that someone had the bright idea to alter the guard's compartment sign. Within a few months, every single train in Sydney's CityRail network had been thusly disfigured. Immeasurably amusing for your average high school commuter, let me assure you.

Until, gasp, tragedy struck.
Some wise guy decided to replace all the sticker stencil signs with large printed images last year. No more raving naked. Ever.

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