Reading is fundamental AND economical. I got a letter from my oil company that said my oil contract was going to expire in 250 gallons and I had to renegotiate my price. I never had a contract expire by gallons before – it was always by date. Since the price of heating oil has accelerated with the same speed as the price of gas, this would have significant financial effects. I found the oil contract that I had signed and saw that there was a date and a number of gallons specified. I had a momentary panic until I realized that I would never have signed it without reading the details, so I read it again. Under Plan Type it said Fixed Price. At the very end of the contract was a section that defined the plan types. The type I had clearly stated that it expired by date – a different type expired by gallons.

I prepared for battle, ready even to retain one of those tv lawyers – the guy with the hat, or the guy with the mustache? (Both of those guys are in serious need of a stylist.) I decided instead to take what I call the assumptive close approach. I wrote a short e-mail saying that there was an error in their records and quoted the plan description from the contract.  The next day I got back a terse reply that simply said “your plan type expires by date.” Yay me, and thank you to the nuns who taught me to read and to write simple declarative sentences.

I don’t know if the company made a simple honest mistake, or if they were hoping that people would just renegotiate to a higher price without reading their contract (or even being able to find it!). Either way, this situation reinforces Geri’s Golden Rules of Personal Business Administration:

• READ, READ, READ. I know, I know, a large segment of the population cannot read anything longer than a Twitter post without ending up staring blankly at the page wondering why there is no message flashing “your post is too long.” But every one of us has signed something without reading it and have been burned by it.

• ASK QUESTIONS. I just had to read a contract that left me with some questions. When I spoke to the person in charge she told me I asked good ones. Nice to hear, since asking questions is a big part of my job as a technical writer. At the same time I was kind of horrified that in her experience people were signing the contract without having asked questions that I thought were important to  making a decision.

• KEEP COPIES. Again, it seems fundamental, but I have several times been in situations where I was the only one with a copy of a contract in dispute, often giving me the upper hand. And if you are a paper hater and only keep things on your computer, make sure you always have offline backup AND that the document is in a format that will be able to be read long into the future, like a pdf.

And if someone becomes impatient waiting for you to finish reading, saying “it’s just a formality,” take it as a sign to read more carefully. You can also give them a contract of your own to sign – one that gives you half of their net worth – while telling them it is just a formality.

“Contract: an agreement that is binding only on the weaker party. ”  Frederick Sawyer