During my childhood living in the US in the early 90’s, I developed a fascination with bumper stickers. This arose partly out of being longsighted and spending a lot of time in cars, and partly because I didn’t yet have a GameBoy. In stark contrast to the UK, where cars were fairly dull boxy things which revealed little about their owner, in the US you could usually tell the owner’s religion, college affiliation, favourite sports team and pets owned by looking at the back of their car.
Looking back on it now, there are several categories of bumper sticker. There’s the ones that you’re proud of (e.g. “My kid went to Harvard”), the silly ones (“If the van’s a rockin’ don’t come a knockin’”) and then there’s my least favourite: the holier than thou ones. “Save the whales”, “A dog is for life not just for christmas”, etc. Now it should be clear to all and sundry that attaching these little messages to your car is not really going to change public opinion, the intention is to transmit a positive message about you, the driver, “I’m a nice guy”, to all that read it.
A similar thing seems to be happening with email signatures. Mine consists of my contact details, and that’s it. More recently though, I’ve noticed email signatures getting more and more filled up with what I call “bumper sticker” messages, which say one thing but are meant to convey another.
For instance, there’s the whole issue of e-dislaimers, you know the ones that read “The contents of this email are confidential and protected by ninjas with crossbows. If you are not the intended recipient please remove your own brain and send it to the BBC forthwith” or some such legalistic drivel. To me this sends a clear message: “I work in a bureaucracy with its head up its collective arse. Some pencil pusher genuinely believes that by adding a couple of mealy-mouthed lines to the end of every email, they will never be embarrassed by colleagues accidentally sending around naughty emails, leaks of confidential information to the media, or spurious personal communications during the working day. Clearly, nobody I work for has a clue how the real, or virtual world works.”
Then there are the environmentally friendly ones: “Do you really need to print out this email?”. Hang on a sec; WTF said I was going to print it out? Do you really think the message you just sent me was so important that I’m going to print it out and frame it? Whenever I see messages like that my immediate response is “Do you really need to be telling me this?”.
Finally, there are the people adding quotes from memorable historical figures. This is not Usenet people, this is my primary communications method. And just because you put MLK’s “I have a dream” speech into your .sig file it doesn’t mean you’re all groovy and zen. It means you’re trying too hard to impress.
Feel free to drop me a line about this subject, but note that I am out of the office until October 16th as I will be on a paragliding holiday in Tibet with the Dalai Llama, helping blind children to learn English.
Thank you.
In the good old days of the BBSs there was a message-reading program (not strictly internet e-mail, but BBS messages) called BlueWave that had the infamous “taglines”. It was a little one-liner quote that the program appended to your message right ater the proper signature. It was taken randomly from a huge file, and you could pick up a tagline from someone else’s message if you liked it, just pressing a button while reading it. It was VERY fun!!!...
Some years later I decided I wanted to have taglines in my e-mail, so I created a cute small script to pick the up randomly fom a file and append it after writing my mail in emacs.. I use mutt. It works allright, but it lacks that fun part of picking up taglines from other people.
Other fun things from signatures those days were ascii art, ruined by the cute fonts we use nowdays (not me, I use mutt!...), and something that came up PGP. When you create your encription key you can generate the so-called “fingerprints” so someone can check out if a public key belons to you. It’s just a bunch of pointless hexa-decimal digits. it’s WAY OUT COOL!!!... So the folks started putting this hexa-decimal garbage in their sigs, and it’s useless, but tells people “boo, be scared, I’m a hacker, I use encryption, it’s supposedly usefu to me to send out strange hexadecimal digits in my mail”...
I still put that in my sigs sometimes… :]
Nicolau Werneck
http://cefala.org/~nwerneck
9F99 25AB E47E 8724 2F71
EA40 DC23 42CE 6B76 B07F
I am smiling at this post. As someone who tries to put marginally useful things in her signature, I often wonder if any ever reads them: Well, at least Paul Wicks does.
I have also been puzzled by the “think before you print” signatures. The little graphics are quite cute, but it would very seldom occur to me to print out an email if I didn’t receive a reminder not to do it. Perhaps there are people who print out everything, though…
I read the signatures too. I like the pretty green one with a tree graphic and ”please consider the environment before printing this e-mail” but I get the point by Bronwen about printing out emails. And this one (from a hyperactive friend) really amuses me:
Feel more
Do longer
Live better!
It may even be possible to create a geeky (sorry, scientific) signature e.g. molecule structure using ASCII text…?
I have just received an email from someone with a signature that I quite like:
“High volume, filtered email is not always an effective medium for rapid communication.
If you need to contact me urgently then feel free to use telephone or facsimile.”
cough USENET cough
Yeah, I have a large .sig file that tin picks things up from. But for email? Naw.
I have my own disclaimer though:
http://www.rg-d.com/disclaimer.html
Richard – I really like your disclaimer. A genuinely DID laugh out loud!
I am slightly embarrassed to say that this is the first time that I have heard of USENET. I look at this website and on wikipedia, but cannot work out whether this is something that would be useful to me or not. Is it something that you need a reason to go onto or do I try it out and see if a “reason” becomes obvious?
If you have a moment, would you please let me know what it is all about or point me to a good website?
[sorry to hijack your blog, Paul]
Bronwen,
take a look at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/what-is/part1/ .
groups.google.com is a travesty of usenet, but useful for looking up old articles. I used to spend a lot of time at uk.comp.sys.mac .
Richard,
Thanks for the info. I have joined sci.bio.botany and sci.chem to experiment… :)
What am I thinking? There is an entire bionet.* hierarchy, too.
My favourite ever Usenet group was alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb
It’s a bit like Haiku.