The dramatic red streak on this receipt indicates that the roll of receipt paper is almost empty, and should be replaced soon.
Streaks like this, which sometimes line both sides of a receipt, remind me of “cigarette burns” from moviedom, in which reels of film being shown at movie theaters are violated ever so slightly with tiny holes, holes which appear as splotches in the corner of the screen. These spots usually appear at the end of a scene. This signal tells the projector operator that the end of the reel is nigh, and to start up the next projector with the next reel of film for to seamlessly continue the movie experience.
This red rash, then, is the cashier’s equivalent of the cigarette burn. These streaks of color tell the cashier that the receipt paper is nearly run out, and that a new roll of paper should be prepared for to seamlessly continue the money-making transaction whilst providing receipts to customers. The stakes can be high: in some situations a customer pays nothing if the cashier fails to issue a receipt, so these signals are not simply cosmetic.
This warning point of a roll of cash register tape can produce dramatic effects, I think, sometimes approaching the level of art. I do not kow if these streaks have a name as elegantly colloquial as “cigarette burns.” I think they may simply be known as warning stripes, or similarly perfunctory verbiage.
I rarely go to movies these days, but when I did I remember seeing that high-stakes switch at the cigarette burns fail miserably at times, and the audience groaned.
As a kid I felt like I was the only one who knew about the cigarette burns. I pointed them out and explained their purpose. No one believed me. As far as I can remember, everyone to whom I pointed out the secret signals dismissed my harmless little anecdote as bullshit. Becoming annoyed I was thus inspired to just make stuff up, since no one believed me when I told them truthful things. This might have inspired my brief interest in hoaxes and in planting false historical documents and “evidence” in old library books and research volumes. I imagined crafting a one-page piece of piano music allegedly by Stravinsky, writing it on already-aged paper found at a thrift shop with an antique pen purchased from an appropriate seller of such things. I would skillfully insert Stravinsky-isms in ways that would pique scholars and pianists. I never did this, and I doubt I would ever have had the wherewithal to even try when I had access to the types of research archives into which I might slip such a document. I did not want to just stuff it into any old library book at the open shelves of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. I wanted to stuff it into the Horowitz papers or the Ives papers, or even the Richard Nixon papers at Whittier College. I had vague plans for all this and more, but the spark dimmed. It seemed like a long way to go when I had no real point to make, no statement. Quality hoaxes should have purpose, I think, and mine had none. Today these tiny hoaxes are easily perpetuated through online encyclopedias and bogus Internet products from which thousands of blips of erroneous information seep into the whirlwind of human thought every single second.
I don’t remember anything about this store called Everyone’s, but it looks like I went there once in a while whilst living at the Parc Lincoln.
