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Health November 2019

Unhygienic Signatures?

By Arthur Vidro

At its customer service desk, where people wait in line to return purchases, the transaction requires a signature – with the store’s stylus – on a computer screen. How many hands handle that stylus every day? I’d much rather sign on paper with an old-fashioned ink pen from my pocket. But that’s not an option.

Commerce keeps becoming more and more electronic. This has certain advantages. But one unwelcome side effect of this trend is that consumers are being made vulnerable to diseases from unhygienic conditions.

Nowadays when you go to the post office with a large envelope – not even a package, mind you, but a large envelope filled with nothing but flat sheets of paper – you get asked: “Does this package contain anything fragile, liquid, perishable, or potentially hazardous?” Or words to that effect.

You can’t answer by murmuring “Yes, ma’am” or “No, sir.” For even though the clerk behind the counter is asking the question, it’s the computer atop the counter that requires the answer.

You have to use a computer stylus – not an ordinary pen from your pocket or bag – to check the YES box or the NO box on the computer screen. (To make it more confusing, as you’re reading it, the NO appears on the left and the YES on the right, going against our ingrained habits.)

I don’t think this stylus sharing is healthy. How many people traipse through the post office every day? How many of those people – especially in winter – have colds or worse? And how many of those ailing folks end up handling that stylus?

Far too many, from the viewpoint of a customer who craves sanitary conditions.

I’ve tried to avoid handling that stylus. Last time there, I attempted to circumvent the need by first rattling off, as I handed my envelope to a clerk: “Before you ask, no, this does not contain anything fragile, perishable, liquid, or potentially hazardous.” No matter. My finesse failed. The clerk wasn’t the one who needed my answer, so I was still required to use the stylus to tell the computer the answer.

I’m not blaming the clerks. They are diligently following the rules set down by their technology-worshiping bosses.

Alas, cleaning the stylus is not part of the post office’s daily routine. I wonder how many germs it harbors.

It’s not just the post office. All around us, places of business now require customers to handle a potentially unclean stylus, solely for the efficiency of their computerized systems.
Take, for example, Walmart. At its customer service desk, where people wait in line to return purchases, the transaction requires a signature – with the store’s stylus – on a computer screen. How many hands handle that stylus every day? I’d much rather sign on paper with an old-fashioned ink pen from my pocket. But that’s not an option.

Last month I went to my doctor’s office. At least they’re constantly alert to protocols for hygiene. They don’t want their sick patients getting sicker, or their healthy patients falling ill. They have signs posted to promote good hygiene. They even have a dispenser full of masks to slip over your mouth so if the waiting room is crowded and people don the masks, then patient X won’t catch any germs from patient Y.

Imagine my surprise – nay, stupefaction – when I went to the counter to check in and had to sign my name (for insurance purposes, I was told) with a stylus that stays there all the time.
Mind you, this is the same stylus that patients Q and W, with communicable diseases, had just used ahead of me. Without gloves.

Again, I’d much rather sign on paper with an ordinary ink pen from my pocket. But the customer’s health matters less than the efficiency of the computerized system, or so it seems.
Oh, well. If you’re in the doctor’s office already, they can write you a prescription that will probably cure your stylus-induced ailment, right? Just take the prescription to the pharmacy, pay your money, and then – even if you’re paying exact change with cash, and not using insurance at all – once again you have to sign an electronic pad with a computer stylus kept there all the time. The signature is needed as proof of your having taken possession of the drug.

And the stylus there is not cleaned any more frequently than in the other places. It’s not something the pharmacists have ever thought about. And it’s not something the “experts” who ramrod these technologies down our throats ever think about.

This should be our next innovation in health – the elimination of the communal stylus. The communal stylus is just another example of a “progress” that, in the long run, isn’t good for us.