A greeting is a signature

Three greetings get written this month. One for the day that has just passed, one for the founding day on the twenty-second, and one for the month expected to begin around the start of March, depending on the sighting.

All three will be written last, by whoever has the time, and all three will say the same four things.

A greeting is the hardest copy in the calendar and it is treated as the easiest, because it has no job. It cannot inform, since everybody knows what day it is. It cannot persuade, since there is nothing to buy. It cannot teach. Take away information, offer and instruction and what is left is a line whose whole content is who it is from.

Which is why the generic version is never neutral: a signature that could belong to anybody, on the eleventh identical card the reader has seen before breakfast.

The test takes ten seconds. Cover the logo and read the line. If a bank, an airline and a burger chain could all have sent it, you have written a stamp.

The way through is never more words. It is one detail nobody outside your trade would have thought of. A coffee roaster knows what happens to a morning trade when a city stops drinking coffee in daylight for a month. A hardware shop knows which shelves empty in the week before a holiday. Small, specific, faintly amused at itself, unmistakably from a particular set of people who do a particular thing.

Voice is not the document in the folder. It is the evidence that somebody was actually in the room.

If the signature could come off the greeting and nothing would be lost, the greeting could come off too.