Who ever thought putting menus in an 8-point font was a good idea?
As a woman with reading glasses, who often forgets said glasses, I take it personally. It says: go away old lady. It feels like a restaurant or cafe for people with perfect vision. There may be a disabled toilet but I’m just not feeling the inclusion.
I’m squinting. I’m holding it away from my face as far as my arms will allow, like magically my far away arms will deliver clarity. But all that does is provide the fuzzy at a distance. I’m seeing shapes and doing the Rorschach test, I’m clearly anxious. Perhaps I have some repressed anger. Actually I’m in my 50s – emotions leak out of me. I haven’t repressed anything for years.
My brain tells me I could order a ‘pooch dog with hallowed days’. Which I assume is poached egg with hollandaise, but I’m nervous so I just order a coffee and sneak off to photograph said menu so I can zoom in. Like a creepy spy decoding some sort of top-secret message.
I know it is nice to have it all on one page, but what’s the point if half the customers can’t read it? Isn’t the point of printing a menu so we can actually order from it? Am I missing the point here? Literally? Clearly I have 8-point font trauma. Let’s not even talk about 6-point. I don’t want to tell you how to run your business, but unless you’re Specsavers, your menu shouldn’t read like the bottom line of an eye test. Please choose the 14-point.
Same with cooking instructions on the back of packets, or dosage on medications. Print shouldn’t look like an ant has walked across paper. It happened recently when I returned a blood test low in vitamin D. The doctor said, ‘do you take vitamin D?’ I said, ‘Yes, one a day’. Then he said, ‘Are you the size of a normal woman?’ I thought this was rude, but I agreed I was probably larger. He said, ‘You could take three times the dose.’ Wow. I know at 6-foot tall and almost 90 kilos I’m probably bigger, but I wouldn’t have thought three times bigger. That makes the average woman 3-foot tall and 30 kilos. That sounds less like a woman and more like a 5-year-old. So I went home and tripled my dose. I couldn’t read the back of the bottle, but surely a doctor’s recommendation is as good as any small print.
A few weeks later I’m feeling weird. I can’t tolerate dairy products at all. I tell my husband I’m not just gluten free, I’m now going off dairy. He wonders what happened to the bread-and-cheese-eating booze hound he married. Now a sad sober woman eating her grief with salad. My brain feels fuzzy. My muscles feel weak. I feel nauseous. This strange sickness has settled on me. I feel poisoned. Then a thought pops into my failing brain. Maybe I’m taking too much vitamin D? I google it, and yes, I have vitamin D toxicity. Turns out you can’t just triple your dose. I would have known that if I had read the small print. Instead now I sit in the sun. Best way to get your D. Except for the cancer bit. I’m three times the size of a normal woman apparently, so do I sit in the sun three times as long?
Small print is sneaky. Terms and conditions are in small print so small there isn’t a human alive who could read it. So you don’t read it. If you did, you wouldn’t buy the product. You wouldn’t sign on the dotted line. How is that even legal? I’d make a complaint, but I don’t actually know what I’m complaining about.
In my perfect world – the one that facilitates transparency – 8-point font no longer exists. The smallest you can select is 14-point.
That’s the world I want to live in. Big text for a big woman. Three times the size.
Mandy Nolan’s column has appeared in The Echo for almost 25 years. She is a writer, comedian and artist, is the preselected Greens candidate for Ballina and was the Greens candidate at the past two federal elections.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
