Being a Commissioner for Oaths and a Notary Public
When I was young, I was greatly impressed by my father signing things. There was a sense of importance and gravity to what he put his signature to. He always looked serious when he signed something. And I saw him sign a great many things: documents, forms of various colours, shapes and sizes, cheques, credit card slips (*sheck shack*), registers, all sorts. After he signed something, something happened. I got a new computer, or new furniture arrives at the house, or there is a new car in the driveway, or someone comes to visit. People wanted his signature. He seemed quite important because his personal handwritten mark was required. Back then to me, that whole signing thing was a kind of magic. There was power in his signature. As a child, I hoped one day I would get the opportunity to sign some things or have my signature important enough to be on a piece of paper. It’s funny how life works out. I started signing things on a regular basis after I started working. Despite the delight and pleasure in signing off letters for the firm on my own, imprinting my unique signature on documents, the novelty wore off quickly. By then I had to sign letters, vouchers, court lists and slips, my own affidavits, and the like, for work. I’d have to sign things a few times a day. I first got into heavy-duty signing when I was for a time the secretary of the Bar Council Legal Aid Centre (Kuala Lumpur) (‘LACKL’). Back then it was located at the now-demolished Wisma Kraftangan near the Masjid Jamek LRT station on Jalan Tun Perak. I was elected as a result of actively contributing at the LACKL at the time. My first encounter with this was when one day in my first month as secretary I was led into a small room next to the head of the LACKL’s room. Inside was a table with two chairs. On the table were two neat thick stacks of papers. They looked intimidating. They seemed like twin pillars standing together in defiance against chaos. In front of the table were two chairs. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “These are the thank you letters to the LAC volunteers,” replied the staff or officer who drew me there. “That’s a lot.” “Yeah. We have a backlog. Thank you for signing them.” I sat and signed for the next ten minutes or so. One letter after the other. I signed them all earnestly. Making sure that it didn’t look casual or careless. I wanted the signature to impress not just upon the paper but upon the volunteer that its contents were deliberate, mindful, and above all, heartfelt from the LACKL to them. If you were a volunteer that received one of those letters and felt the back of it where my signature was you could trace the imprint of it – that’s the LACKL love I was trying to transmit right there. But that is expecting a little too much from the volunteer recipient. One day I happened to ask myself, while signing, of course, what I would do if I received one of these letters. An image of me glancing at the letter and then binning it and filing it immediately came as a response. It was entirely true, of course. Both are the same to me because even though I file things, I may as well bin them because eventually, I don’t know where I put them. With that realization, the ‘signing in earnest’ phase of my life drew to a close. From then on, I was a signature machine. I could blaze through a pile of thank yous, how do you do’s and whatchacallits quicker and quicker until we cleared the backlog and were on top of our correspondence. If there were an international legal aid letter signing competition back then, I feel sure I would be in the top ten. Okaylah, top five. That’s how fast I thought I was. When I was signing intensely, I had flow. After establishing a rhythm in the first few letters I merged with the moment and everything segued into a flurry of paper and movement of the hand. It was only after I finished the last piece that I felt the weariness in my right hand and wrist. In a civilized society, we have to sign for stuff. The older I grew the more I had to sign professionally and personally. And regularly, too. If I wanted things done I had to sign something. If I didn’t want it done I had to sign something. If I wanted in, I had to sign. If I wanted out, I had to sign. I couldn’t get out of it even if I wanted to. I no longer had a choice in the matter. But that is changing. In a way. PINs, passwords, patterns, facial IDs, fingerprints are now the most common ways we verify ourselves. We now use computers and phones more to transact than we do paper. I expect signatures to be extinct in the future. Another quirk of human behaviour ironed out by the relentless efficiency of assigned code. As more legal transactions are done through computers and online, the less need there will be for a physical signature. There will be some digital token of verification (‘DTV’) that would be unique to us. There will no longer be any biological feature of us in that DTV. Once technologies that facilitate forgeries and fakery are low cost and prevalent (as I feel they are now) and biometric verification (or whatever technology) becomes cheap, accessible, and can practically substitute signatures, that would be the end of signatures. That power I thought my father wielded when he signed something when I was a child now seemed more like a shackle instead of a spear. I was chained to signing for things. That shackle may now be digitized but it is no less real
