At the cinema tonight I paid for the tickets with a card that was issued very soon after Chip & Pin came out, as such I had never used the card in a situation where I needed to sign - it has only been used with Chip & Pin (progress, woo!). Until tonight, where the cinema haven’t upgraded their point of sale systems yet still require a signature for verification.
So, I handed over the card. The clerk looked at it, flipped it over, looked at it some more and then said falteringly, “It’s not, urm, signed…” He handed it back. He was right, it wasn’t - I’d obviously never got round to signing the strip on the back and having only ever paid with Chip & Pin no one else had ever noticed. Oops. What happened next was brilliant, and I thought only the stuff of urban legend… he handed me a pen. Then he watched me sign the back of the card. Then he handed me the payment slip and watched me sign that too. Then, and this is what really made me laugh: he checked them!
I asked him “Do they match?” at which point he realised how dumb the whole process had been. I then showed him other cards in my wallet that proved my signature was mine. A saluatory lesson in what happens when you train people to blindly follow a process without actually thinking about the security requirement behind it…
Oh and Alien Autopsy is a fun little film which gets away with the trick of making you forget that Ant & Dec are, well, Ant & Dec. Also worth it for Jimmy Carr and Omid Djalilli’s appearances.
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