Car stickers have become a growing - and annoying trend - in recent years.
I can trace it back to the 1990s, when everyone seemed to be possessed by a curious urge to put either an ‘‘Oakley’’ or ‘‘Vision Street Wear’’ sticker on their rear window.
To this day I’ve never been able to work out why people would want to advertise sunglasses or a ‘‘cool for six weeks’’ clothing company on their car. A modern-day equivalent are the ‘‘Jetpilot’’ stickers.
Then there was the ‘‘Baby on Board’’ sticker, designed to get other drivers to take care because this vehicle had a baby inside (and not, as the urban myth states, to alert rescue personnel in the event of an accident that there is a child in the car). This always struck me as exceptionally stupid because it implied that there were drivers who went around just looking for cars to smash into.
More recently, there was that proliferation of frangipani stickers on the cars of young females, or the Southern Cross or Australian flag decals on the cars of people who could perhaps be less than friendly towards people of different skin colour.
Another source of annoyance for me (and anyone with a bit of respect for the English language) is ‘‘metal mulisha’’, which is some company that has something or other to do with motocross.
But there’s one set of car stickers that has polarised people like none before. I speak of course of the My Family stickers that some people whack on their back window to denote how many husbands, wives, kids, babies, grandparents, dogs, cats, horses, goats, chickens, wildebeest and yaks you have in your family.
They’re so polarising that they’ve spawned a series of anti-My Family stickers, which generally show a stick family coming to some sort of harm with the phrase ‘‘I don’t care about your family’’ written underneath. Sometimes that slogan may also include a few swear words, for those who particularly dislike the family stickers.
They’re so polarising that, just this week, a woman appeared before Wollongong Local Court charged with tearing several of these stickers off a car. Police had seen her removing the stickers and hauled her in, charging her with destroying property and seeking $20 in restitution.
While these stickers wouldn’t drive me to that extreme, I do get a feeling of distaste every time I see them. To me it’s a bit of an exercise in self-importance because it presumes that the car owner thinks other people really do care how many people you have in your family and what their various interests are.
Either that or it’s some odd exercise in self-congratulation - ‘‘Look we made three kids! One of them is really good on the guitar! And we have a dog! And a goldfish! We’re so fantastic!’’
The creators have said the stickers are designed to show people how proud they are of their family. Really? Shouldn’t these people be telling their families how they feel rather than total strangers?
Also, with so many bad people in the world why would you want to broadcast to all and sundry how many children you have?
The stickers also make me wonder about the protocol that goes with them. What happens when the baby grows up, do people then ‘‘upgrade’’ to a child sticker? What if the son no longer plays soccer - does that necessitate another upgrade?
Or what about a divorce? Is there some ceremony that involves the removing of their stickered representation? And does the removed partner then get custody of their sticker to put on their own car?
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