Digital Signatures
Signatures are not pretty, like a spider’s web or honeycomb. They can be bold, brash and colonial, or petite like a baby cloud. Then comes digital signatures, complete distortion!
We sign on the dotted line to get jobs, passports, buy or lease cars, buy or rent houses, or sign to allow dentists to fix our teeth. The problem is that tools for signatures are no longer pen, paper and your hand. They are digital.
First of all, the pen is bigger than normal. The paper is not paper, but a digital plate. I start signing but the pen skates like a Canadian hockey player on ice. Letters take their own shape. The more I try to move the digital pen back on the road again, the more it careers to the wrong direction.
I finally get it right. Signature done. I look at it. It’s a far cry from my old school signature. It stares at me, like someone who answers the front door, only to find a stranger with a baby on her back claiming to be her husband’s new family.
If I cannot trust my own digital signature, how can other concerned parties trust it, in case there’s a dispute? Signatures are supposed to be consistent. Digital signatures are not. What I signed digitally at a bank, does not remotely look like the digital signature on my passport.
This is too stressful. Let’s go back to using the thumb.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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