A box which happens to be balancing a plate of homemade cookies on top-cookies you hope will convey the depth of your appreciation. The tax accountant who you visit once a year and beg to make sense out of your refrigerator-sized box of receipts. And I think we’ve all been in plenty of situations where because we didn’t read every word of the fine print, we realize something unpleasant is about to hit the fan and we immediately start scouting eBay for that ‘lobkabob lorry.’Ī few contracts are meant to make your life considerably easier. Instead, before the ink has a chance to dry, you’ve already received three offers from a few other financial institutions who announce they’ve got a slightly better deal-at least on the first page of the glossy brochure and as long as you don’t read the fine print. Now this would all work out fine and dandy if they’d all just leave you alone until you either run out of money, pay off the debt, or run away to open a lobster kabob food truck on the island of Saint Kitts. The bank has you sign a contract that states: If you want to live in this home and pretend it belongs to you, you can pay us x amount of dollars for y amount of time. Correction: you live in a home the bank owns. Other contracts will keep you awake at night with a backlit calculator under your pillow for easy access. It helps to have a clever agent who speaks contract law, or studied Latin, or can easily recall her past life when she lived in Ancient Rome and clerked for Cicero. But sometimes you discover that you’re going to have to become an extraordinarily flexible gymnast-like Cirque du Soleil Chinese acrobat flexible because of the Silly Putty stretching you’ve done to come to an agreement.Īnd most authors I know are so excited to get published they would be willing to exchange their bones for rubber bands if it would launch their books onto the other side of obscure. These pieces of paper are exactly the kind of documents that make authors realize they are actually gymnasts because of all the back flips and flying Dutchman leaps of joy that ensue.
Some contracts are wonderfully exciting-like the one I’m scanning with a fine-toothed comb right now-the one that says, We, publishers of great stories big and small, want your book, and then a second to follow the first, and quite possibly a third one to boot. Or if maybe Plato, in all his soft and flowy robed glory was sitting beside me and explaining each Latin-based line as we moseyed through them. Or if I backed up two decades and decided to go to law school. They will make sense only if we stuck to something like a common language. It is the year in which I have spent a good portion of my time, hunched over paperwork with a magnifying glass, or peering onto my monitor and growing ever closer all with the hopes that if I can move near enough to the words, they will magically make sense with the intensity of my gaze. This is not my year of the sheep or the goat, or any other cloven foot animal. Well, that’s what’s supposed to happen, right?Īlthough the Chinese Zodiac has determined that this is the year of the sheep, I, personally, would take issue with this. We both sign on the line that’s either too short, too narrow or too good to be true, promising we’ll each do our thing and come out smelling like roses on the other end of it.
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