When people sign their names on the point-of-sale tablet at the bar, at least half of those signatures are "wavy horizontal line". Most of the rest are an attempt at an actual signature, but probably only about 1 in 1000 of those have anything in them that you would perceive as letters, or in fact, writing.
And about 1 time in 100, the customer draws a little picture for us instead. So I thought I should share some of those.
If you're thinking, "they're all dicks, aren't they"...
...you are a smart person.
Of the drawings, I'd say that it's 90% dongs; the rest are a mixture of smilies, pentagrams and cats, in about that order.
(I especially like the ones that just wrote out the word "PENIS", which is like, the Philip K. Dick of dicks.)
To generate this gallery, I had to place eyeballs on hundreds of thousands of signatures, going back to 2021. That's right, I just white-knuckled it, you're welcome. (If you're about to start replying with "Why Didn't You Just", I am begging you to Not.)
Now, if you're thinking, "Wait, why do you even still have that 5-year-old data"... you are, again, a smart person.
Even though the payment processors won't let you issue a refund or a chargeback on a transaction older than 6 months, our point-of-sale saves every bit of information it has about every transaction forever. "Oh geez, you should delete that" you might be thinking. There literally is not a delete button.
After a year, one might want to look at daily graphs, but there's no way you'd care about individual transactions, or anything of higher aggregate resolution than "hourly". Maybe "10 minutes" if you're a complete maniac. But nope, we still have the full PDF of the receipt, including name, last-four, scrawled signature and exactly what products were purchased.
(Though, the customer name isn't included most of the time, only sometimes. I'm not sure what the difference is.)
Anyway that means that when -- not if, when -- this vendor gets popped, all of that data will be stolen, sold, laundered, mixed, and purchased by a data broker who will annotate their profile about you with how much you drink and what, how many nights a week, and whether you attend gay parties. Some of it might even be true! That profile will then be purchased by your car insurance company, your health insurance company, the recruiters used by every future employer, Google, Amazon, Instagram, ICE, TSA, FBI, CIA, all of the "AI" companies, and Deputy Dewey of the East Cowfuck, Texas Police Department.
Oh no, what started off as a juvenile story about poorly-drawn dicks turned into a dystopian nightmare. Welp.
