:) - I liked this column today, too ~
Heavy reading
May 13, 2005
A PERSON can go a little crazy thinking about the legalese one has put a signature to but barely understands. The mortgage documents, for instance, signed with numbing precision in a lawyer's office, were explained at the time, but they almost immediately lost their connection with English.
Occasionally a person picks up that forest of verbiage controlling the next 25 or 30 years of one's financial life and chews on such phrases as ''modification of amortization," or ''execution of confirmatory instruments." A tightening brain cramp usually discourages further exploration, and the bundle is returned to its drawer or box or closet shelf with the sense that one has unfinished business amid the covenants.
Other forests of tiny type laying out the rules governing the individual retirement account, employee stock purchase plan, or life and homeowner's insurance policies have taken root near the mortgage verbiage. They are just as dense -- and make the person staring at them feel even more dense.
One gets the general idea, and understands the importance of these things, but on a sentence-by-sentence basis they can be impenetrable, particularly if they include ''disclosure statements," which would be better titled ''Our lawyer wrote this for your lawyer."
The credit card -- so easy to get and use -- comes with ''terms and conditions" that were written not only for the lawyer but for the accountant and require a magnifying glass to read. By the time a person has found the footnote to the annual percentage rate -- not to be confused with the balance-transfer APR -- and discovered that it is based on ''the rate published in The Wall Street Journal on the 10th day of the prior month," one is ready to join a society that trades in beads and shells.
The wording of warranties has the same effect and can make the consumer feel that if something goes wrong it's going to be his or her fault. The coffee pot warranty ''does not cover finishes, normal wear," or ''unreasonable use." What's normal and what's unreasonable, and who decides? Pondering that could drive one to tea.
Privacy statements can also raise fears one hadn't considered before the ''We value your privacy as if it were our own" brochures started arriving in the mail. Vagaries about how information will be revealed to ''nonaffiliated third parties" in ''certain circumstances," and how ''general information" will be shared ''during the normal course of doing business" do not inspire a Fort Knox gestalt.
But one simply puts the statement in the burgeoning file and lives with confusion -- and way too much paper, which is often kept for years and does not improve with age. And we keep signing up for more.
boston.com |
