Impermanence of a signature

 

I got a friend who is quick to understand the truth of 'impermanence' as expounded by Lord Buddha.

Many years ago, my friend went to a hypermarket in Penang to do a purchase. He paid the bill by signing a credit card. The cashier found that his signature was not similar to or identical with that appeared at the back of the credit card.

She asked my friend to sign a few more signatures trying to get the best signature that was closely resemble to that appeared on the card. But it was just a futile attempt.

In the end, my friend gave up and he had to leave the hypermarket empty-handed as he knew fully well that even if he had signed one hundred times or more signatures, he would never get one identical signature as requested by the cashier.

I had another friend who had a similar experience. Since his secondary school years, his signature kept on changing like the outcome of the Roulette game as he could not maintain a consistent signature over a period of time. Every signature that he had signed would not be the same as his previous one, so much so that he dreaded signing a document as he was afraid that he had to go through another round of tedious authentication of signature later on. In the end he had tried to create a signature as simple as possible.

In the past, I got the impression that a signature should be signed as complicated as possible so that others would have no chance to imitate it. But, in doing so, I fell into my own trap as I myself could not imitate my own signature.

Now I came to realize that my previous headmistress, Miss Oh, who had the wisdom of signing her signature in a very simple form.

The signatures signed by a person can hardly be consistent all the time. The impermanent nature of signing a signature has created the problem of verification of the identity of the signer. Luckily, in recent years, new technology enables us to overcome this problem by using the identity card of a person coupled with a thumb print reader. This is now widely used in the commercial banks.