you could climb the ladder...
You can climb the ladder,
or melt it down and make a door.
These new UWA billboards make no sense to me.
I understand what they're trying to say: that the University of Western Australia will teach you to work smarter, not harder. The clumsy use of metaphors, however, makes their message unclear. Whoever wrote this advertisement clearly doesn't understand the difference between ladders and doors.
A ladder lets you go up something.
A door lets you go through something.
Even if doors and ladders both metaphorically lead to success, they cannot lead to the same success. The success at the end of a ladder will be physically higher up than the other, and therefore, more successful.
Imagine this: Your dream is to work on the top floor of the South 32 building. This is where the big wigs work and play. Imagine, as the ad suggests, that a job on this floor requires no skill, talent or prior experience, that the only requirement is that you can somehow physically access the impenetrable space at the top of the tower.
Now imagine you are out on St Georges Terrace, drinking a 7/11 coffee, looking up at the 50 floors of steel and glass thinking, hoo, how on earth will I get up there? Then in the alley, you hear someone snoring. It is a dishevelled man in a sleeping bag. Beside him is a ladder, a blowtorch, an anvil and a hammer. "Uggghhh". The man wakes up and informs you that he was once a criminal defense lawyer but gave it up to become a charitable blacksmith. You tell him of your quest, and for the spare change in your pocket he will either give you his ladder, or for the rest of your coffee, he will melt it down into a door. What do you do?
While the ladder would not be long enough to reach the penthouse floor, it would still get you closer to the top than if you melted it into a door. Yes you could rent a glass-cutter and cut a hole in the building and affix your door and walk on through, but even if you did this without somehow alerting the guards, where would you be when you got inside? Still on the ground floor, in the lobby that has been open to the public this whole time. You still would need a keycard for the elevator, so building a door would be a complete waste of time and energy, not to mention a waste of a perfectly good ladder.
But, you say, couldn't you just put on hi-vis, hire a cherry picker and then attach your door to the top floor window? Yes that would work, that's actually a great plan, but then the ad-copy would have to be extended:
You can climb the ladder,
or melt it down and make a door
and also hire a cherry picker.
People hate long stretches of words. If the sentence went from 13 to 19 words, no one would read it. I have found a better solution. The new billboard should instead say:
You can climb the ladder,
or melt it down and build an elevator.