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cosmolinguistThis is a fun read. And a good point!
Lucky you, reading this on a screen, in a warm and well-lit room, somewhere in the unparalleled comfort of the twenty-first century. But imagine instead that it’s 800 C.E., and you’re a monk at one of the great pre-modern monasteries — Clonard Abbey in Ireland, perhaps. There’s a silver lining: unlike most people, you can read. On the other hand, you’re looking at another long day in a bitterly cold scriptorium. Your cassock is a city of fleas. You’re reading this on parchment, which stinks because it’s a piece of crudely scraped animal skin, by the light of a candle, which stinks because it’s a fountain of burnt animal fat particles. And your morning mug of joe won’t appear at your elbow for a thousand years.
What could be worse than the cold, the fleas, the stink, and no coffee? Well. The script you are reading is minuscule, to save ink and space, and it’s written in scriptio continua. That’s right: you are plagued by headaches because spacesbetweenthewordsaremodernconveniencesthathavelikepunctuationandcoffeeandreadingglassesanddeodorantforthatmatternotyetbeeninvented. This is a constant source of difficultyambiguityfrustrationeyestrainanderrer.
Thank goodness for modernity, eh? Except for one strange fact. In our smugly “digital” age, our numbers are still waiting for modernity to happen.
My passport number is printed in a font three millimeters high in the middle of a cool white bath of space that would easily accommodate text four times larger. And, like all these numbers, it could have been printed in groups of three digits — but instead we get 210006647. Scriptio continua.
Would grouped passport digits, in a bigger font, make life easier for tens of millions of travelers? You can test this arcane theory yourself by acquiring a half-eaten sandwich, four shoulder bags, a sticky toddler with earache, a TSA security line with a broken scanner, skull-crushing jet lag, a small crumpled Customs Declaration, and a borrowed ballpoint that leaks. Now lean way forward until your head is upside down, balance your passport on one thigh, and decide which format your overtaxed human cognitive equipment prefers:
210006647
210 006 647
What could be worse than the cold, the fleas, the stink, and no coffee? Well. The script you are reading is minuscule, to save ink and space, and it’s written in scriptio continua. That’s right: you are plagued by headaches because spacesbetweenthewordsaremodernconveniencesthathavelikepunctuationandcoffeeandreadingglassesanddeodorantforthatmatternotyetbeeninvented. This is a constant source of difficultyambiguityfrustrationeyestrainanderrer.
Thank goodness for modernity, eh? Except for one strange fact. In our smugly “digital” age, our numbers are still waiting for modernity to happen.
My passport number is printed in a font three millimeters high in the middle of a cool white bath of space that would easily accommodate text four times larger. And, like all these numbers, it could have been printed in groups of three digits — but instead we get 210006647. Scriptio continua.
Would grouped passport digits, in a bigger font, make life easier for tens of millions of travelers? You can test this arcane theory yourself by acquiring a half-eaten sandwich, four shoulder bags, a sticky toddler with earache, a TSA security line with a broken scanner, skull-crushing jet lag, a small crumpled Customs Declaration, and a borrowed ballpoint that leaks. Now lean way forward until your head is upside down, balance your passport on one thigh, and decide which format your overtaxed human cognitive equipment prefers:
210006647
210 006 647
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-29 04:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-29 08:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-29 04:05 pm (UTC)That said, even though we have barcodes and the like, I have found a not-insignificant number of people who will, if the spaces are present, try to use them when logging into our computer systems, and then getting frustrated when the system doesn't work. I absolutely love that we have bigger numerals than we used to, but we got rid of the spaces because the computers couldn't be arsed to do anything with them.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-29 07:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-18 05:05 pm (UTC)I use a finger/pen/edge of piece of paper in a similar way. I cannot deal with phone numbers with no spaces in them!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-30 10:17 am (UTC)The advice is similar, break numbers up, give lots of space, use word-numbers two, four etc and allow people to make errors.
One thing that WINDS me up is when you get the bank code off the wee calculator thing and it's split into two blocks of 4 but you have to enter it as a single block of 8. I think the banks' programmers should be able to strip out spaces and handle that. You can tell badly programmed shit when it doesn't handle spaces well and is badly laid out.
A lot of government numbers are stupid and too long:
* National Insurance is 9 digits, 2 letters + 7 numbers albeit spaced into pairs + 1 traditionally on the card (who still has that? I've lost mine but know it by heart anyway).
* Student Loans - 11 digit number 'customer reference number'. I have to handle about 20 of those a day for my two jobs and I split them into batches of 3-6 depending on the pattern I can spot but nightmare for students. I never trust any number provided by a student including their own date of birth!
Apparently driving licence numbers are 16 sodding digits long. What's that about? Again, could be split evenly into 4s but probably isn't. Same for credit and debit card numbers.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-09-11 09:14 pm (UTC)What a great post!
My lack of short-term memory makes reading numbers almost impossible. I use a pencil to make groups of three.