latimes.com— Judging from the phone company's voluminous new online customer manual, if you have a problem with your bill, too bad
Sep 14, 2008View in Crawl 4
Really? I always hear people bitching about how hard contracts are to read... but I've NEVER had a problem reading a contract, and I really don't see why anyone with even a high school diploma would have trouble. Try it one day!
tomz17: You could probably make a few bucks by starting a service that reads contracts for people and interprets the legalize. I find I can understand the words, but trying to translate them into ramifications and consequences takes hours and is often guesswork on my part. Or you could start a website that takes standard contracts and disclaimers (like AT&T, Visa, major banks, etc.) and delineates the gotchas in plain english. When you add up the people time it takes for everyone to read all their contracts, terms of usage, and disclaimers that is a whole lot of people hours - especially when you get several updates on disclaimers every year without changes being annotated. You could provide a real service.
All of you who wrote that no one would read the actual article or contract appear to be 90% correct. Just out of curiosity I decided to check out the contract. This contract is an "AT&T RESIDENTIAL SERVICE AGREEMENT." The caps are not my emphasis but cut and pasted from the actual pdf document. So all of the comments about wireless service have nothing to do with this article. I'm not saying that AT&T wireless does not have a similar contract but it is not what is being discussed in the article. Maybe the L.A. Times should do a piece on AT&T wireless as well.
tomz17Sep 15, 2008
Really? I always hear people bitching about how hard contracts are to read... but I've NEVER had a problem reading a contract, and I really don't see why anyone with even a high school diploma would have trouble. Try it one day!
oldgalSep 15, 2008
tomz17: You could probably make a few bucks by starting a service that reads contracts for people and interprets the legalize. I find I can understand the words, but trying to translate them into ramifications and consequences takes hours and is often guesswork on my part. Or you could start a website that takes standard contracts and disclaimers (like AT&T, Visa, major banks, etc.) and delineates the gotchas in plain english. When you add up the people time it takes for everyone to read all their contracts, terms of usage, and disclaimers that is a whole lot of people hours - especially when you get several updates on disclaimers every year without changes being annotated. You could provide a real service.
theungodSep 15, 2008
Sort of an "I scratched your balls, you scratch mine and then we'll be good to rape the consumer" kind of deal
kdaySep 15, 2008
Punctuation is your friend.
bocajwhoSep 15, 2008
Clearly, you aren't familiar the airline industry.
bullhead2007Sep 16, 2008
It's not that you can't read the words, it's just that words in contracts have different meanings than common use. It's called legalese.
undercanineNov 7, 2008
All of you who wrote that no one would read the actual article or contract appear to be 90% correct. Just out of curiosity I decided to check out the contract. This contract is an "AT&T RESIDENTIAL SERVICE AGREEMENT." The caps are not my emphasis but cut and pasted from the actual pdf document. So all of the comments about wireless service have nothing to do with this article. I'm not saying that AT&T wireless does not have a similar contract but it is not what is being discussed in the article. Maybe the L.A. Times should do a piece on AT&T wireless as well.
fliesenJan 15, 2009
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