Signature folly

The other day, Bear and i made some purchases with my credit card, and i was amused when the cashier didn't check my signature. This made me wonder if she was being negligent, but then was she really? After all, its my signature, and i can't make any two of them identical, vaguely similar at best. What's more, any idiot could surely take aside a minute or two to practise a passable signature from the stolen card, and since its unlikely for cashiers the world over to be trained in signature comparison even if there were such a reliable process, isn't it just pointless posturing to make a point of looking at the signature? After all, even when they look so different, as mine constantly do, no one has ever questioned me, so I decided it was all a futile exercise in pretense of security. Like gated communities.

And then we proceeded to the supermarket, and I paid for our groceries again with the credit card. Now this time, the checkout girl, who was curt and rude and giving me these mean looks, god knows what i did to offend her, took my card and did the whole punching in numbers thing and returned it to me. Because i had settled in my own mind how foolish the whole enterprise was, i proceeded to pocket my card immediately after signing the receipt when she glared at me and asked to check the signature. At which i thought, okay you're just being mean for the sake of it. The signatures were, as usual, so different! But she made show of examining them and then handed them back to me.

Maybe she felt better by doing that, relishing the chance to make me look a fool, or maybe she was just pissed off at the world that day and why did this stupid sunburnt person not understand the Proper Procedure for paying with a credit card?

:P