Electronic Signatures

Funny. I've never had to use on of those things in my life (have you people never heard of PINs?), but this past week I've had to sign for three separate deliveries for my brother in law, and apparently the post has introduced that kinda of technology now.

I didn't think it was possible to make my handwriting look any worse. How wrong I was!

Also - the gizmo could only read half the barcodes, so the poor woman had to type in the ID numbers by hand. Brave new world, my <squee>.

- Sili

I've been signing as "Palm Tree with 2 birds and a setting sun on a small beach" for a few years :) I work with those mobile devices & the touch screens so I have plenty of practice.

I love the link, that was great. I personally have signed as Mr. Magoo and maybe a few other cartoon characters. I'm pretty sure I've signed Mighty Mouse, Deputy Dawg, and Mr. Peabody.

Yup, you should absolutely check out the Zug article... hilarious, eye-opening, and frankly kinda scary....

I learned almost twenty years ago that any mark I make on a signature line counts as a valid signature so long as I am not intending to defraud anybody. This led to a couple of years of signing my checks anything from "The Lone Ranger" to "Richard Simmons." Out of about 200 chcecks i wrote, not one of them were ever flagged for an invalid signature. These days, I usually deal with electronic capture POS systems by just placing a large "X" on the pad. People either don't check the signature line or assume that I must be one of the millions of functionally illiterate in this country.

http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/

My niece sent me this link regarding credit card signatures. Hilarious!

That link makes me happy... also puts into perspective the fact that my grandmother recently scolded me for a good 10 minutes about how my signature was illegible. Something about disgracing my ancestors.

That reminds me of something that happened when they started using these. I was at home during the summer from high school (end of my freshman year if I recall correctly) and the UPS guy knocked on my folks' apartment asking if he could drop off the package for the neighbor across the hall. Not volunteering that I wasn't 18 and I guess the driver did not care I said "Sure." He gave me the package and the electronic board and asked me to put my John Hancock on it. Being in a particularly jaunty mood I signed it "John Hancock." I quickly forgot about that until much later.

That night when my mom got home we decided to run errands and as the neighbor hadn't been home yet we decided to just leave the package in front of his door as we lived on the top floor of a three-storey building with only four apartments. The next day we asked if he got his package alright and he said he hadn't. Turns out it was a new VCR (did I mention this was in 1989?) and he hit the roof. He called UPS who tracked it back and found that the package was signed by and left with... John Hancock. UPS paid for the replacement rather than try to go after a 15-year old the let take the package as they didn't follow their procedures. Being in insurance this isn't as funny now as it was then...

I have to sign these things every day that I'm at work. I do the receiving for a store that gets lots of packages, about 140 a day. I signed as Tom, Dick and Harry one day, and on different days I have signed as different Beatles and even the Monkees.

My signature on those things looks like a saw blade with increasingly finer teeth towards one end. It never bothered me until my dad showed me the delivery status page on the company website, and there was my digital signature. On the site. Now that's weird... and pixelly. I wished I'd put more artistic effort into it.