The Fine Print

Recently I read a story about a teacher in Georgia who won $10,000.00 by reading the fine print in her insurance contract.  Buried in the wherefores and theretos was a small line that said the first customer who emailed their name to a specific email address would be awarded $10,000.00!  She emailed the very day she signed the contract and was the first person (likely the only one!) and indeed, received her 10K!

               It was a heartwarming story, though it did make me consider fine print.  Usually, fine print buries the rather mundane and sometimes alarming facts about the contract or product.  Case in point, are the many fine advertisements on television these days for pharmaceuticals that are designed to cure everything from itchy skin to heart conditions.  The ads always show happy, peppy, engaged people doing happy, peppy, engaged activities – gardening, painting, dancing, enjoying amusement parks, and (my personal favorite) taking baths in bathtubs in fields with no discernible source of water.

               But watch carefully and tiny little words appear for a nanosecond across the bottom of the screen.  If you happen to be able to pause your television, you can find out (if you get up, walk across the room, and squint) that this medication might cause dizziness, headaches, confusion, boils, hemorrhoids, suicidal thoughts, sudden bursts of anger, diarrhea, constipation, nausea, and infections, sometimes, fatal.            

               Seriously?  I believe I’ll just itch, thank you very much.

               You have to read coupons and print ads pretty carefully, too.  I love those ads that proclaim in big, bold lettering – big enough for me to read without glasses – that ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING IN THE STORE IS 40% OFF!  But at the bottom, in print I need my jigsaw puzzle magnifying glass to read, is the

 information about how this doesn’t cover perfumes, jewelry, housewares, or name brand clothing.  So it’s not absolutely everything, but other than that, the ad is completely accurate!

               There’s a commercial for a quick loan company that shows happy people getting thousands of dollars on the same day they applied!  Big letters say you can get up to $5000!  What a deal.  The fine print that flashes quickly on the screen does mention that this load comes with an incredible 99.25% interest rate.  In other words, you’ll have to pay back about twice what you get within a year.  Wow, that’s some fine print!

               My own fine print problem came in a box of pasta.  I was looking for an alternative to pasta that might have less wheat or processed flour.  We had tried chickpea macaroni and it was pretty good.  So I found a box of black bean spaghetti and was pretty tickled.  We like black beans.  The wording on the box seemed crystal clear.

               I cooked the pasta and made some meatballs and we sat down to a wonderful dinner.  Well, the meatballs were wonderful.  The pasta – not so much.  I powered through and ate my serving, but my husband pushed his to the side and proclaimed them “worms.”  They were, in fact, pretty nasty, and tasted nothing like either spaghetti or black beans.

               Plucking the box out of the trash, I turned it over to read the ingredients.  Not a black bean in the list (the tiny list).  However, it was comprised of primarily black SOYbean!  Fine print got me, because I didn’t read it. 
               Please, please, read the fine print!