Prejudice Revisited
There was a time when people had memory and machines didn’t. That’s now pretty well reversed. There was a time when making changes in documents, or photographs, was laborious and not for the faint of heart. Today, changing history is trivial– just a couple of buttons. And just wait until AI really gets going.
What hasn’t changed, though, is the human tendency to stick with a story which you’ve bought into, even when it’s clearly bogus.
When I was a young lawyer there was a story going around, probably apocryphal, which went something like this: In the days before word processing, a legal team from Toronto and a legal team from New York had spent months hammering out a complex transaction on behalf of their clients. Finally, the New York team arrived in Toronto, ready to put pen to paper.
The boardroom tables were stacked high with paper and signing was about to begin. At the last moment, one side questioned a particular paragraph, and the other side agreed that it should be removed. However, because it was cross-referenced within multiple documents, it could not simply be crossed out. It had to go, but short of revising all the documents, re-typing and re-copying, there seemed to be no simple way around. But nobody wanted to spend a day in limbo while the “typing pool” revised all the work.
Suddenly, a young lawyer had a brilliant idea. He suggested that they compose a nonsense paragraph of exactly the same length, paste it over the original, and make sufficient photocopies of the page. In that way, all the cross-references would still work, but innocuously.
Shortly thereafter the young lawyer and his collaborators came back with exactly twelve lines of pure piffle, circuitous and meaningless latinesque phrases, with the title “Prejudice Revisited”. Pasted and copied, the dummy paragraph added nothing and subtracted nothing, but it did replace the offending words. It did the trick, everybody signed, and went home, rather pleased with themselves.
Ten years later, after the advent of word processing and easy “on the fly” change, the clients re-negotiated the agreement, using different law firms. And then they came to “Prejudice Revisited”.
Neither team had a clue what it meant, nor why it was there. What they did believe, though, is that it must have been important, and that removing it would give the other side some advantage. Neither team would budge on this essential matter, and the paragraph stayed.
Good for a laugh, but on a bit of reflection, my life is full of “Prejudice Revisited” paragraphs – stuff that I insist on keeping, long after I have any idea why it was ever allowed in.
And you?