Another irritation

As befits the older person, there are lots of things about the world which annoy me. Lots of evidence that the world is falling apart and is generally not up to the scratch that it was in my golden days. I have noticed several such things in recent posts.

Now it is the turn of fake personalisation, for example emails which are dressed up as if they were communications from people that I know, people who have every right to say 'dear Jim' at the beginning and 'love and kisses, Lucy' at the end. Where the Lucy in question might actually be the director of customer relations at the people from whom I buy gas or perhaps potatoes. Somebody of whom I have never previously heard. She might, of course, be non-existent, a simple fabrication put together by the marketing people in the gas or potato company concerned.

A further layer of fakery is introduced when such emails include facsimile signatures of the apparent originators.

A further layer still when one has a communication assembled by computer but delivered on paper and where the words have been faked up as handwriting. Or, more cunning still, the 'dear Jim' bit has been faked up as if someone had got their fountain pen out to write the salutation. With the hint here of a sender who important enough to have their letters written for them, but with you being so important too that the sender got their pen out for you. Rather in the way of letters going out over ministerial signatures from ministries. To which was added all the flummery of grades of writing paper and grades of envelopes.

With such hints only doing anything for someone old enough to have written letters by hand themselves, before the dark days of communication by tweet set in.

And then there are the people who go to all the bother of having fake handwriting in the bodies of their emails. Which is a bit silly really, since everybody knows that the thing has been tapped in on a telephone, with never a pen in sight.

So all in all, plenty of annoyance.

But then we happened to make a donation to a charity, Mencap, noticed at reference 1. In fairly short order we got a thank you card and letter back through the post. And on the card we had what appeared to be a hand written message in felt tip, a ten line message occupying a fair amount of space, which appeared to have actually been written by one of Mencap's customers. Possibly someone in sheltered employment with them. I should be disappointed to learn that this was a fake too.

While Dignity-in-Dying, an organisation which has my full support, sent me a whole lot of stuff about a chap presently going through the courts. The package included what, at first sight, appeared to be a handwritten letter of several pages, to me. Closer inspection revealed that the salutation was slightly different from the body of the letter, so probably additional. The whole being very neat, far neater than I could manage - so who or what did that? With the address on the envelope in which it all came being in the same handwriting as the letter. Which last I found particularly annoying. With the complication that I might have been still more annoyed had it turned out that they were paying people to address the envelopes by hand, rather than letting the computer do the addressing and the money do something more useful.

And then there is the point that we spent centuries devising printing machinery to make the printed word legible - and that now we are chucking all that machinery away, reverting to the handwritten stuff that had once been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Complicated old world.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/metro-bank.html.