Congratulations on working for us or leasing from us or whatever else we’re doing for you at great expense and inconvenience to ourselves. We want to say right off the bat that this contract is not negotiable.
You are probably under the mistaken impression that a contract represents an agreement between two parties, and agreements involve some kind of back-and-forth. We get that a lot, and we wish the schools would stop teaching that childish lie.
The truth is that we have something you want, and you probably don’t have much choice. Even if you do, you’re likely to get the same treatment everywhere you go. We all got smart and stopped writing negotiable contracts a while back.
By reading or touching this contract, you agree that you have signed it and wish to be bound by its terms until you die. If you ever become successful and wealthy, which we believe to be extremely unlikely, the terms of this contract will help us recover the expenses associated with doing business with people like you.
This is for your own good. A well-ordered commonwealth requires limits on individual prosperity for ordinary people, and we consider it our patriotic duty to make sure that you have to work until you die and have nothing to pass on to your heirs.
Rest assured that we’re not going to let abstract concerns such as fairness, generosity, or compassion deter us from doing our part to place a hard cap on your success. Just imagine what it would be like to live in a country full of idle rich people who thought it was beneath them to perform labor or serve others. Those slots are already taken.
We tried to write this contract so that it applied to your children, your children’s children, etc., but not even our friends in court were willing to let that slide. So just know that if this contract looks bad to you, it’s not as bad as we wanted it to be.
You are insignificant to us. You don’t have anything we want that we can’t get from a thousand other people. If you don’t want to be bound by our terms, there are ten other people we could contact today who will agree enthusiastically without even reading the contract.
We want you to fear us. We want you to want to be us even though you will never be us, not in a million years. We get the golden end of the stick, and you get the shit end. And that’s always how it’s going to be. This isn’t really part of the agreement. We just wanted to let you know where you stand.
We will let you know if we ever wish to release you from your obligations under this agreement. Just know that it’s not very likely. We just wanted to give you some hope that our relationship could end at some point. Our relationship will never end.
This is normally the place where you’d see an arbitration clause, but we’re not big fans of arbitration. We like to spice up conflict resolution, so here’s what we’re going to do. You can complain any time you don’t like something we do, but for every complaint you communicate to us through speech, writing, or squinty glares, we’re going to knock a hundred points off your credit score. We will then promptly disregard your complaint and continue doing whatever it was that got you so shirty.
Since you’ve touched the contract, your signature isn’t strictly required, but we like to leave a little space for a signature and ask you to sign anyway. We like how it tends to put the fear of God into people, and it’s a lot easier to sue you for breach if we can produce a signature. Signing in your own blood is encouraged but not required.
Your Name:
Date:
* By reading this humorous article, you agree to defend the author, Matthew Thiele, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. You testify before God and your great granny (the nice one, not the stingy rich one with the plastic covers on her couch) that you take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.
Reading this humorous article does not indicate your complete agreement with and submission to the ideas contained herein, but they will gradually attach themselves to your consciousness until you start to take a real hard look at your landlord, your employer, and your government.