not signing screens, and not signing whatever is put in front of you
A local heating firm just came to service the boiler. This is part of the rented house, so I don't seem to have a choice in supplier. Having finished the job, they put a blank screen in front of me, and asked me to sign. The optimistic interpretation of this would be "signing a blank piece of paper means nothing; therefore signing this blank screen means nothing. My signature is not itself confidential, and by providing it here I do not commit to anything. At most, the implied meaning of signing a blank sheet for someone who's just done a job in the house is "they visited". Being conservative about what I sign, I asked, in very bad German, what am I signing here. At this point he did something on the touchscreen, and there was a picture of an invoice on a sheet of A4 paper. He continued to hold the device facing himself, and I was unable to read it upside-down and at a large angle and held by another person. But the decision was already ma...