Let's be honest, most of us don't read the Terms and Conditions before we click that little "I Agree" button. Most of you probably aren't even going to read this intro.
A huge chunk of you are going to open this article and immediately scroll to "the meat" because we're all about getting to the good stuff. But that rush can sometimes mean missing out on some seriously important tidbits of info.
For me, not reading the terms and conditions before signing up for an image site meant I wasn't aware my images could just end up anywhere... and that's how a whole group of people in Nigeria think I'm in the illuminati and was punished by God.
It's a long story, and I'm not going to go into it again in this article, but if you're interested I promise it's not hard to find with a little Google-fu.
For others, not reading the terms and conditions ends up as the mother of all cautionary tales played out in the courts.
One Reddit user asked:
Some responses were horrifying in a way. Not catching these could have had some pretty ugly repercussions.
The Catch Was...
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I financed some furniture when I was young and getting established in my first professional job. It was interest-free financing for the first 12 months.
The catch was that if you paid late, they would charge you a fee, back-interest from the beginning of the loan period, and you would lose the interest free status for the rest of the loan. The APR was 29.9%, compounded monthly!
I couldn't imagine getting to the 11th payment and having something go wrong so a payment is late, then pay basically double what I had financed on the furniture.
I paid it off in 6 months, and I never did in-store financing again.
This is most interest free gimmicks. Educate your friends. Usually the young ones fall victim to this.
- Chimmiii
I sold furniture and we had financing like this and I made sure to always tells my customers this so they couldn't come at me later on down the road. Others didn't and it just seemed so shady and f*cked up to me.
Get It From The Next Owner
I almost signed a contract that granted 50% of profits to the previous owner of the business for 3 years. It was a restaurant that used a conventional microwave instead of an actual oven.
This was back in the early 2000's and this place had a wonderful 50's vibe. From the bar, to the stools to booths - but it was empty because the food was SO bad and there was fast food up the road.
We were going to get a pizza oven in there and turn it into a Pizza/Shake place with soup in the winter.
When the law STUDENT we paid $500 to look over everything (DO THIS!) asked the seller about it for us, they said that they had sunk so much money into the business, the only way to make the money back was to get it from the next owner somehow.
Good luck with that.
We could not get them to remove that clause, the owner was hellbent on making the next person be the one to make the business successful and pay them.
So I never pulled the trigger and didn't really bother looking into other restaurants. I'm not sure I'd do it now, honestly. With the capital and the same opportunity...that's still a tough sale. My life is very different. I didn't have children.
I had never started a business, so I didn't know how much work it is. I also learned SO much more about food since then. Food was NEVER my dream though.
I was going to be in charge though, this time without corporate crap.
I just don't know.
Still what a dream SPOT! I didn't do it justice, there were 4 video games in a room and a balcony up top. There was a lot next to it and it's freeway adjacent I mean COME ON!
The only problem was the crappy food. Someone, no joke, built a 50's style restaurant next to a highway, forgot to equip it with an oven, and just did nothing about it for years.
You give me that same contract today without the clause and the backing I had...
50/50 shot on me dropping everything for it still.
If I got rich one day I promise to check up on it. If it's in bad hands at all I'll buy it and make it better. Name it after my grandpa who was a restaurant owner.
- Laethin7
18 Months
A realtor once gave me a contract that said she would be the only person allowed to represent the property for 18 months.
That means that they were the only person that could try to sell the house. For a year and a half. We could not work with a different agent if we felt that this one wasn't doing enough, not responding, if we weren't happy, etc.
If we did, this agent would still get commission from the sale that that other agent actually made.
Nope. No way was I going to agree to being attached to someone for a year and a half like that. We found a different realtor with a 3 month term (which is much closer to standard), told the first one that her terms were ridiculous, and was under contract within 10 days.
Idol Entitlement
Canadian Idol auditions when the first show was announced. Read the contract to the very end after signing it.
"you agree to being filmed 24/7. We can enter your room at any time and record personal phone calls and interactions with anyone."
That received a hard no for me. Ripped up the contract and never looked back. Thank god I read that before submitting it.
- jenskal
Tell the camera crew to get out or get weird.
Fine want to record me 24/7? Congrats, I have IBS.
Phone Privileges
To be able to link my phone's outlook reader to my university account, I would had to give the IT-department permission to wipe my phone clean "if needed."
No thanks, I'll just use browser instead.
I saw an employment contract where, if you did any company business on your cell phone, they could go through your phone and delete/restrict basically whatever they wanted.
I advised my friend to make a company-provided phone part of her contract.
Yeah. Someone at my old company had a commonish name, and someone lost their phone... and the company wiped the wrong phone.
The Good Ol' US of A
Season 3 America GIF by Broad City
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Any health and safety terms and conditions in USA.
I was working on adapting a US one for a charity event in the UK run by the same people and oh boy you cannot get away with that here. One line said if an employee harmed you in any way (even intentionally), you could not sue...
What!?
- lt52-
Keep It
Free ceiling insulation.
The catch? You allowed a company to install temperature sensors around the inside of your house, and they can do that at any time. And you have to allow access for them to check the sensors and get readings, adjust things, and remove the sensors. Everything belongs to the company.
This means letting randos into your house potentially over and over to get their readings from the electrical crap they put in your house.
Nah I'm good, keep your insulation.
Airlines
Was going to post this as a response on another thread, but I want people to actually see it.
When you book a flight, in the terms and conditions (especially for basic and econo fares) you agree that in the event of your flight getting canceled due to an act outside of the airlines control they don't have to refund you unless they offer you a travel credit.
That includes a world spanning virus.
Don't be cheap, get travelers insurance or pay for the higher fare that has a refund clause.
- bpanio
Sad Story Time:
Wednesday afternoon, a handicapped woman with crutches, let's call her Sara, boards our plane for Kansas City. It's the midst of a Hurricane Down South. We taxi out, and get held there.
We sat on the tarmac 2.5 hours. We go back to the gate, and we are pressured to not let anyone off, but eventually some people do.
We then taxi back out to the runway and the hurricane is like directly over us, with lightning all 360 around our aircraft. It was pitch black at like 4 in the afternoon with roaring thunder and lightning. Sara is getting nervous and starts to panic and wants to get off the plane now.
Problem is, there are planes in front of us, and planes behind us, and we can't move. I explain the only way is if she goes out on a Rescue truck. So we sit there almost 3 hours, and the Pilots time out.
So by then the planes have spaced out enough that we can turn around and go back to the gate. This lady is super stressed out.
Anyway, the flight gets cancelled due to the weather - all flights are cancelled.
The next flight on our airline is Sunday, 4 days from now. Plus it's 'next available' which means that if there is 70 people on this flight and 60 on the Sunday flight, only 10 more of this flight are going to get on, and if they paid for First Class, they probably won't get first class on the next available.
At this point, the poor lady is devastated. She is not allowed to sleep in the airport. All the hotels in NYC are booked solid with stranded crew members, and NO airlines offer free hotels when it's weather related.
She probably could get a hotel for $1,000/night but all the lesser expensive ones are sold out by the 1,000 crew stranded in New York from all the airlines.
This poor lady was stranded with no money, no help, and nowhere she could go. I felt awful for her. She couldn't stay at the airport as passengers are not allowed to be at the airport from 12:01 am to 4:00 am. Luckily, you can go to one of the nearby hotels and rest until your next flight... unless it's booked solid because of a hurricane.
I don't know if she would have been more prepared had she read the terms, but she was definitely NOT prepared for us to tell her what her contract stated in the event of a flight canceled due to weather.
Crepes
I worked for a meat pie company that moved over from Australia that made me sign a contract that I would never work for another meat pie company or open an establishment that sells similar food. I didn't read the fine print.
They also sold a few other things ... like crepes. Sure enough, I wanted to open a food truck and my partner had her sights on crepes as she made them in her previous food truck and it just happened a truck we were buying was set up to make similar things.
I gave 1 month notice because they were busy and I didn't want to leave them stranded in high season. I told the owner we were working on a food truck we bought, it was a dream coming true, and that it happens we are doing crepes as my partner is French and had done them before.
Even though he barely sold any crepes, he was super pissed. The owner was a d!ck. He reminded me of the contract and made me feel like he would sue me if I did this.
I ended up tape recording him yelling at an employee like he does every morning, he would yell at the stoner/maybe slightly special needs dishwasher for little things. My last paycheck was "in the mail" for several weeks until I went in one day and said I wouldn't leave without it.
He cut the cheque when I showed him the video. We didn't end up doing crepes anyways. Looking back I probably lost my desire and momentum with the negativity, but ya.
F*ck that. For minimum wage giving up your ability to do a thing of your own? Crazy.
I sort of wished I let the video public as he was all about face and looking good, but I felt for his kids and wife. They do make good meat pies those Australians.
But others just seemed kind of ... "interesting."
Like, did you know Amazon has zombie apocalypse procedure written into their terms and conditions? Should we be concerned?
Citibanks contract might make you a murderer.
and some companies are willing to pay you just to read the terms, but you won't know that unless you read the terms.
It's bananas out there in contract land.
This Sparks Joy
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I'm pretty sure I gave google the rights to all of my Spotify data when they gave me a free google home.
On one hand, RIP privacy.
On the other hand, knowing some poor algorithm has to figure out some possible way to advertise things to me based on listening to Knock On Wood 57 times in a row and the soundtrack to Starship Troopers on repeat gives me great joy.
- OakNogg
Claim $100
Back when the internet really started being a thing, some company/website put something in their terms and conditions about the first person who reads it, can contact them to claim a $100 prize.
Took five years for somebody to claim the prize.
I wonder how much of that is people not reading it and how much is people reading it and thinking "surely somebody's already claimed this by now, why bother?"
Amazon ... Should We Be Worried?Â
Not really an example of the worst thing, but you're not allowed to use Amazon's game engine (Lumberyard) for military/nuclear applications normally, but that restriction is suspended specifically if there's a zombie apocalypse
https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ Clause 47.10: "this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization
Most Ridiculous
I recall a major airline in the pioneer days won an award for most ridiculous TOS to simply look up a flight arrival time on their web site.
If I recall, it was a 22,000 word document that an analysis said was written at a post graduate reading level. It states that you would, in perpetuity, never use that computer to connect to any other airline's website.
- NightMGR
What were they planning on doing about it if you broke the contract? Send a hitman after you or something?
Citibank Is Serious Business
When I started work for Citibank, they asked me to sign two documents;
- promising I would never use encryption for any purpose other than Citibank's for as long as I live.
- promising to obey the laws of all 196 countries on earth that Citibank operates in.
So obviously I looked at my cubicle mate and stoned her to death for exposing her wrists, and I can no longer use HTTPS.
So look, I'm not going to be a judgy mcjudgerson about you not reading the terms and conditions. This isn't even the first "weird contract stuff" article I've written, I've already dealt with the consequences of not reading these things and Oops now my face is everywhere, and I still don't fully read them!
Why?
I'll be completely honest - they're written in a way that discourages it. Studies have shown that in order to even understand most terms and conditions, you'd need a post graduate education ... and that's IF you had the nearly-endless hours it would take to actually read them.
In short, you know you're not reading them. I know you're not reading them. Companies know you're not reading them... and it's that last part that gets us all in trouble. If they know you're not reading, they know they can put in pretty much anything they want.