I worked at book store on the campus of a fairly large fairly well known state university and oooooh boy...the types of "signatures" that I saw would make your head spin. I processed hundreds if not thousands of debit/credit card transactions, so I handled a fair number of cards of students and sometimes regular adults...and each time was...shocking...you could say.

Some signatures were just a line, nothing that looked like letters, just a straight line. Other signatures were literally scribbles, swirly motions that they didn't even look at while signing. There was more than a few folks who signed with a simple X or a hash mark. One person even signed with their social security number because according to them that's "More secure" than a signature. Some credit cards weren't even signed at all and could easily have been stolen. I remember one girl signed her receipt with an actual smiley face and then when I commented about the security of it, was told "Oh I have enough money that it won't matter if someone steals it."

The foreign students I could totally understand not signing their own cards but then again, how the heck did they get into a major American State University without knowing how to at least write the language? God forbid I try explaining this to them in the nicest way possible about why they should sign their cards but each time they just stared at me like I was speaking Klingon.

I even had one guy get defensive about it when I asked him to sign for an $800 textbook transaction. He went from 0 to 100 mph of pissed off fury in about 2 seconds; from "thanks for the help bro" to "you don't have any right to tell me what to do, I will not sign over my life and freedom to you". At which point I told him if he didn't sign, then I'd have to keep his books, he yelled some more, and then was escorted out.

Some folks just don't know how to sign their signature and some don't know why they have to. It could be a cultural thing, it could be due to the declining usage of cursive, or something else entirely. But signing your name is something that uniquely identifies you. I'm not objecting to what this guy did, just pointing out that it's not as uncommon as some folks think for people to not sign in the normal fashion.

At some point I just stopped caring though, if you want to be careless with your cards and do stupid things then it's not my fault when your shit gets stolen.