Sign my life away

At this time of year there are delivery men (& women) scurrying everywhere, taking parcels and packages of all shapes and sizes all over the place.

The DHL van stops so often outside our house that Logan (who is not blessed with the greatest of intelligence) can recognize the yellow van at 100 paces and expects food from whoever should have the misfortune to step out of the van and into Logan's path. The delivery men know that the only way to a dog's heart is through the stomach and therefore always* have a dog treat to pay for admittance into the dog's garden. And so Logan now equates the colour yellow with food - another reason not to get the new car in yellow, Logan would be like Pavlov's dog, and constantly salivating.

All the delivery people want 1 thing, a signature, or so I had thought. For surely a signature is proof of who I am, I'm quite certain no-one else can scrawl my signature quite the way I do, although those damn little electric reader things don't make it easy. Without a signature, anyone could be taking receipt of your ordered goodies and making off with them, which is actually what happened to Simon's fancy TV. The delivery note said it had been delivered here and at a time when I was in, but that certainly wasn't my signature they had. Someone got an early present and it wasn't us.

Some of the deliveries require proper id, which is a pain in the bum, because they expect to see a German 'Ausweis'** and they get a British passport, which has the wrong number of digits...they're never happy.

But recently a delivery guy thrust his electronic reader thingy at me for a signature and after I'd done my scrawl he stared down at it and asked my name. So I confirmed that yes, I was the person to whom the parcel should be delivered, and he stared down at my mark on his screen and then he got the stylus out and wrote over the top of my signature in block capitals "EVANS".
Now if he'd wanted me to write my name in the manner of a kindergarten kid then I'd have happily obliged, I can do capitals, I'm so advanced I can even do joined up capitals, but I always thought that by signing your name you were committing to something, I thought the signature had value? I guess not.


* unless we're the very last house on the run, in which case Logan is a very sad and dejected pupppy.
** Ausweis = identity card