THE SMALL PRINT

Boy, it's always fun getting e-mail from your friend's work address isn't it? You get that marvellous disclaimer after their message written in pseudo-legalese by someone from the accounts department. There's a lot of "nothing in this e-mail should be construed as binding" in that complimentary disclaimer, and that can sure confuse things when your pal's e-mail is "Let's meet up at 8 at the pub". I mean, can that message be construed as binding or should I start to doubt the word of my best friend for the last 20 years? He's never let me down before - now he's working for this new company has he been indoctrinated into unreliability? Is that what the company has done to him?

Sometimes that disclaimer can go on and on, can't it? Your friend sends you the cinema times for the new Superman movie, the whole message is over in two sentences. Following that, there's two paragraphs stating how this is not a cast iron guarantee that the company has any interest in you.

And it's usually a tough read, too. It's very dry, there's just no pep to the e-mail disclaimer. Whoever writes these things isn't really writing to keep their audience's attention. It's almost like they don't want you to read it at all.

And maybe that's the point. You get past that third sentence and that disclaimer is telling you all sorts of stuff you really ought to know about, my friend. "If you reply to this e-mail we will officially own your first born child, seriously", "Reply now to get more junk mail through your letterbox", "We put poison in all our products but because you've received this warning you now know about it and can’t sue, buddy", and so on.

I think the worst one I saw was from a friend who worked for one of those QUANGO advisory firms to the government. Her message to me would be "I'm moving house, here's my new phone number..." then I'd get - literally - a page and a half justifying the purpose of the company she was working at and advising me of my various rights (i.e. none) in refuting anything the company now did with me. It pretty much boiled down to this company having very much my worst interests at heart. But most people would just breeze past it, ignore the legalese spiel and completely miss what it was telling them. In short, it wasn't a disclaimer at all - it was a misclaimer.