Here’s a sign in the subway that entertains me a lot. The first time I saw it, I thought maybe it meant not to break glass. If you look at the two major objects in the lower left half, they look like a broken wine glass. However, on closer inspection, the objects are revealed to be a hammer, a pair of pliers, and some nuts. The caption basically reads, “Do not litter”. Who’s going to litter by throwing their tool chest down on the ground?

It might not be completely odd. In the East there is an old saying something to the effect of “Before discarding a tool that is no longer useful, it should be destroyed.” This might be derived from this saying:

玉石俱焚

(yu4 shi2 ju1 fen2)

It means something like “You destroy both jade and stone together”. Back in the old days, if the emperor had a cabinet of say 20 advisors and eighteen of them were disloyal and two were absolutely loyal, in order to preserve his power, the emperor would need to destroy and discard all of them, destroying both jade and stone.