Welcome to Nanny World

I replaced a broken blade, years ago, when it was easier and cheaper to replace it with one I had in supply than to order another (I was in Japan, in the US Navy, and it was an S.A.E. tape, so I needed inches, not mm. YOU guess what local stores had in stock.) and, yep, the old one said that.

Admittedly rare circumstances, but kids pull them too far all the time just to see if they can. I would assume the warning is so that the observant father can stop the (non-reading) child before the child destroys the father's tape measure. Can't imagine the 3-4 year old who'd rip the tape all the way out stopping to read the funny warning!!

I worked at a company that got paranoid over news articles about employee e-mail liabilities. So they set up our e-mail server to add a tag line to every out-going e-mail that essentially said that the company did NOT support anything contained in the e-mail, and that the e-mail contained the sender's own personal opinions ONLY.

Unfortunately, we did a lot of business correspondence via e-mail. Things like project cost quotations and schedules, and warranty information, and proposals. Soon many customers were asking whether our quotes et. al. were real or not.

Eventually they softened their tag line, but not until a few project managers showed them that it was costing business. Several employees complained about the company's willingness to throw them under the bus. Today many companies still use e-mail disclaimers that just don't seem logical.