RECORD STORE TALES Part 309: Penmanship

Penmanship: something we all learned in school, forgot, and don’t think about anymore due to the advent of the computer. Very few jobs today require good penmanship. What might surprise you is how important penmanship was in the CD store days.

In the early days, buying and selling used CDs, we maintained a manual log. Every CD we bought was logged, along with the seller’s name and identification. Every CD had to be named. We couldn’t just write down “15 CDs”. You had to write down each title. “Puff Daddy – No Way Out”, “Dance Mix ‘96”, “Titanic OST” (original soundtrack), and so on.

One of my staff had very, very “girly” writing. You know what I mean – each letter looks like a balloon animal. It was mostly readable, but apparently not to the police detective who used to collect our log books.

“Can you read this?” he would ask me, trying to make a point. “Can you please tell this person to print legibly?”

“Well, I did speak to her about this a few times. That’s her handwriting, that’s about as neat as it will get. She really is trying.” The detective was not happy.

One afternoon, he called me, really pissed off. He had absolutely had it with the bubbly balloon writing. He asked me to read off every single title that this person had written down in the log. Admittedly there were a couple that I could not make out. He went through this exercise largely just to make his point.  He did it again the following week. He picked the longest page from the log book that he could find, and I painstakingly read every title to him, one by one.

“Are you sure about that last title?” he would interrupt. “You say it says ‘Metallica’? That’s an M?”

Then a week later, we went through the same exercise again. He made his point. Eventually we switched to a computerized log system, which they had been pushing us to do for a while. That at least ended the long phone calls with the detective, trying to read the girly balloon letters.

My own handwriting is pretty shit, but according to him it was better than big balloon letters!