Item — HN Reader

Never assume that a company pushing a contract at you has bothered to read it. Let alone checked any facts.

- Last time I renewed a lease with $Huge_Property_Management_Co, I noticed that our security deposit was being held by a bank which had gone out of business. Several years early. Said bank's address, as listed in the lease, was an office building which $Huge_Property_Management_Co had purchased when the bank folded. Media coverage from that purchase featured a Senior V.P. of $Huge_Property_Management_Co, who was talking up all the great things which they would do with the former bank HQ building. (The leasing agent I was dealing with reacted as if such screw-ups were dull routine.)

- Some years back, we signed up for web hosting with $Major_Hosting_Provider. (~9-digit annual revenue and 4-digit headcount back then.) Part way through their T&C, their lawyer forgot that each bullet point in the list of unforgivable offenses was supposed to begin with "Not...". So their T&C's required their customers to host content advocating violence, and to host content infringing copyrights, and to host child pornography... (I called their bottom-tier Customer Service, and pointed that out. Pause...within seconds I was transferred direct to the head of their Legal Dept.)

3 comments

Years ago when I was working at a different company, all employees were given an agreement that we were required to sign, regarding (non-)disclosure of confidential information. I carefully read the document, and noticed a section that basically said we were not allowed to disclose any information about our products to anyone outside of the company. It obviously should have specified not to disclose confidential information, but taken literally, we were not allowed to tell customers about our products at all, such as by publishing advertising/marketing materials.

I emailed the president about this, who forwarded my concern to the lawyer who created the agreement. The president then forwarded the lawyer's reply back to me, which more or less said that I was an idiot. Deciding this wasn't a battle worth fighting, I replied "well, since I'm not a lawyer, I'll have to take his word for it that a judge in court would interpret this clause the way he claims it is intended", and signed it.

The agreement also said that the president was supposed to co-sign each signed agreement and return a copy back to the employee, and since I never actually received my co-signed copy, I have to assume it never became binding for me anyway.

When I was about to sign my mortgage I noticed that one condition was mostly duplicated word for word in two nearby paragraphs. Looked like a botched copy-paste while rearranging the document.

It wasn't a huge problem because it didn't add any new requirement and second occurence didn't even make sense in context it was in.

But when I brought this to attention of employee that gave me the agreement to sign, even though she read those fragments, she didn't acknowledged that they are duplicates and instead insisted that agreement is flawless because it came from the central

Similarly when we closed on our last house I noticed they messed up the math on the closing paperwork and my final mortgage payment wasn’t updated to current.

I mentioned this multiple times and they got nasty with me and told me I’m wasting my and everyone’s time reading the paperwork and it’s all boilerplate. And it’s never wrong. Especially the math. It’s what they do for a living, yadda yadda.

I just shut up and signed the closing agreement. Escrow closed and they paid me an extra couple thousand.

A few months later they called me…at 7:30 am to ask for the money. I told them they had title insurance and file a claim. Then came the sob stories. I told them my time isn’t free and I’m gonna have to spend some time to pull the paperwork, rerun the math etc.

In the end I gave them half back. Told them I deducted my hourly rate I 1099 others. That if they really wanted it they could take me to small claims. Never heard from them again.

And now I tell every person that mentions buying a house not to use that title company.

I wish you hadn’t given anything back. Let them fry.

Should have started with the small claims argument, if they had not respected their contract.

Genuine opportunities to skewer arrogant fucks are so rare I don’t know why people would bother being so diplomatic, I would have thrown the contract in their face and reminded them repeatedly of what he told them before. He owes them nothing. Let them sob and fight as hard as possible while wasting time and effort to correct their own mistake.

I could have and would be a lie if I said I hadn’t considered it. But realistically it wasn’t my money, incompetence or not. Regardless of the sim it was a mora issue more than monetary.

'insisted that agreement is flawless because it came from the central'

Those drones are the best, it's like dealing with a machine, but more impressive

> drones

Flesh and bones automaton?! Marvelous!

Also use 'Avatar - For The Swarm' as a soundtrack when interacting with them.

Related to your second example, I’ve heard a case of a job contract, pre-singed by the management, requiring the employee to take every effort to harm the company and its interests at its expense.

I’m not sure if it was the same company, but the person with this anecdote also told me about an EULA that was copied verbatim from an unrelated product by a different business, including the name of both.