
formalities
"to sign on as a condition of his bail relating to a separate matter"
Surely a gentleman's agreement would suffice.
An Irish judge has expressed concerns that a police biro shortage may pose a serious threat to public order in Limerick. According to the Irish Independent, several miscreants have been dragged before the beak for "engaging in a threatening and abusive manner" in the public office at Henry Street gardaí station as a result of …
Delivery guys ask me to 'sign' electronic pads. I would be worried that the words on the thing I am signing could change with the wind, but the device cannot record variations in pressure, and cannot keep up at all. The result is a random spiky mess that bears no relation to my signature.
The problem here is that occasionally, a few policemen do not like that their victims have been granted bail, so they make it difficult for the victims to keep their bail conditions. Electronic pads are not going to prevent that. The judge has the right idea - if some policemen are using bail conditions to cause trouble, the solution is to make bail unconditional. The same thing used to happen in the UK. (I have no idea if it still does.)
I disagree, the quality of the signature is not important in this day and age: the fact you have a 'mark' is all anyone is concerned about. If that wasn't so then devices which took signatures would be refreshed periodically so they worked. I use to support finger print taking machines (Livescan) for the UK Police. They used electronic signature pads and were only ever replaced at the customers (custody suites) request, often when they'd totally failed rather than not providing a good signature 'picture'.
Do British custody suits use electronic pads and a stylus? Saves the pen issue straight away!
Why use an electronic pad? That's a bit like the Americans trying to develop a fancy pen to go into space, while the Soviets used pencils...
The biro works - although the cops in this station obviously needed to tie it down with a bit of string.
And it's custody suite, not custody suit BTW...
The reason an electronic pad is used, is so that the custody record can be sent straight to NICHE rather than scanned into the computer, and then added laboriously as a scanned document, with the details typed into the computer. The pads are usually embedded in the custody desk, which means all the crims can do is rip away the stylus
Not the "pencils in space" nonsense again. They are made of wood and graphite, both flammable, especially in a pure oxygen atmosphere. And bits of broken leads floating about in zero G isn't good either. NASA only buys Space Pens and did not pay the development costs.
I speculate that there are ridiculous bureaucratic hurdles to getting new stationary. For example, if an officer loses a pen, he has to type a report detailing what he thinks happened to it before he can get a new one. Or, there was a blanket cut back on stationary 'to save money'. Something stupid like that.
It appears Muphry's Law caught that you were being pedantic about use of homonyms while using less when you should have used fewer.
Your humble correspondent was once a sentenced to a period of light labor in a large bureaucratic organisation*. During a spending clampdown in the mid '70s**, us (very) junior clerks were required to show our worn out ball point pens to the senior clerk in order to be issued with a new pen. It was said at the time that this was to deter us from taking pens home and next morning asking for a new pen.
wonder the the garda are (suspected of) running the same scam?
* as an employee,for the sake of clarity.
** 1970s. Not 1870s.
Some people are "chewers". OTOH, is a pen a potential stabbing instrument?.
"Sorry yer lordship. The defendant became entangled by his flares alighting from a chair, fell down a flight of stairs equipped with a perfectly sturdy handrail, suffering the much visible bruising and abrasions currently demonstrable in the process, until he finally came to rest, impaling his nether regions on a writing implement. A most unfortunate state of affairs."
I once had my car nicked, apparently by someone who just wanted it to drive home in as it was left abandoned in a less-than-salubrious housing estate in the city. The Gardaí called me and told me that they'd recovered the car and that it was in the lock-up. When I arrived at the station, the car was pointed out to me and once I'd identified it as mine, I was left to my own devices. The driver-side window frame was bent out of shape and the ignition ripped out. After bending the frame back into a more reasonable shape I had to figure out how to start the thing. I managed to find the right pair of wires to hot-wire it and drove it home.
This story has nothing to do with pens or bureaucracy or Garda ineptness or anything, really. It's just that I always chuckle when I remember that I had to learn how to hotwire my car in the lock-up of a Garda station, of all places.
Why not just have an ink pad and take fingerprints. They do this in other parts of the world in which literacy keeps being bombed to very low levels.
This would solve a couple of problems, such as sending your mate to sign the bail book. It can then be made electronic much easier - just need a fingerprint scanner.
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After all Ryanair have been expanding in Shannon of late haven't they? The customer service agents probably need extra pens to drum on the counter while ignoring complaints:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/weird-wide-world/7866327/Ryanair-boss-Michael-OLearys-funniest-quotes-part-two.html?image=9