When 4 and 5 are not the same as 9

Back in grade school, I hated that the teachers graded us on handwriting. Maybe the fact that my penmanship has never been the best had something to do with it, but even then it seemed to me a little unfair that something so contingent on natural ability warrant an official letter grade (I felt the same way about gym and art class). Try as I might I could never manage to get my right hand to make the proper loops on the capital F's, and so on. It seemed to me that handwriting would be better if it was graded pass-fail or outstanding/satisfactory/unsatisfactory rather than A-F grades- after all, an A should be something that's always attainable, and even in my best efforts, I could never manage A handwriting.

(Side note: fuck cursive in my opinion. We got cursive rammed down our throats in grades 2 through 6. Every damn paper in cursive. How much have I used cursive since I graduated? Big fat never. I think even those who aced handwriting in grade school can probably say the same. Sorry for the digression.)

But while today I still sort of question the wisdom of handwriting as an all-out class in school, I respect it more as a discipline. Sure, we type a lot more nowadays than we did back then, but most of us still write things in longhand. Longhand writing tends to be for less formal occasions, such as when we write quick notes for others or even ourselves. While the notes aren't anything fancy, the people I leave them for still have to read them. So I set about to improving my handwriting (manuscript, NOT cursive) so that I wouldn't be misunderstood. That's just good courtesy. AND good communication.

Yet it amazes me how sloppy other people's writing can get. If I find a note written to me that looks like a chimp was trying to doodle, I question why the writer of the note even bothered. What is the point of writing an urgent message for somebody when that person has to hunt you down just to decipher it?

But just like I didn't get in the habit of throwing away my trash after a movie until I toiled in a theatre, I never fully appreciated the value of legible penmanship until I started a job new a few months ago. I work at a bank, and much of my day is spent operating an electronic check processor, one that scans checks from our customers and enters them into the bank's computer system. Ideally, this job would be a piece of cake, and when I say "ideally," I mean to say, "if people took more than 2 1/2 seconds to fill out their checks." The pain in the ass part of the job isn't the scanning of the checks, but the second step of it, entering the check data the processing program can't quite read.

Seriously- if you're paying a bill with a check, don't you think it'd benefit you to write your numbers legibly? How would it benefit you if the 6 you wrote looked like a 0? You could get something shut off for not paying the minimum amount, and it'd be your own damn fault. The worst are people whose 4s, 5s, and 9s are virtually indistinguishable. You'd think it would take some effort to make those look alike, but no. All you have to do is make them all look like cartoon lightning bolts. More common than you'd expect.

There are some other troubles that come with the job (don't get me started on people who write checks in green gel ink), but this is by far the biggest and most common annoyance. I'm sure others have the same problem- consider your local pharmacist, who has made a career of deciphering doctors' scrawled prescriptions. If only the habitual chicken scratchers of the world could be sentenced to a week's worth of remedial penmanship, perhaps working a check processing machine to see what a pain in the ass their lazy, lousy writing is. I'm not asking for "A" handwriting, folks, but how much more effort does it take so that we can read it?