masterwordsmith-unplugged

For a change, here's something light and easy to bring a smile or two to your face. May your Wednesday be bright and cheery and may today bring more hope to our country. Enjoy this list of disclaimers which I picked up from here and there. Have a lovely day!

The Best Disclaimer Ever

The following is an ACTUAL copy of the first two pages inside a manual for a product called EASYFLOW. This is more like the manual disclaimers I'd like to write!

Bloodthirsty License Agreement

This is where the bloodthirsty license agreement is supposed to go, explaining that EasyFlow is a copyrighted package, sternly warning you not to pirate copies of it and explaining, in detail, the gory consequences if you do.

We know that you are an honest person, and are not going to go around pirating copies of EasyFlow; this is just as well with us since we worked hard to perfect it and selling copies of it is our only method of making anything out of all the hard work. For your convenience EasyFlow Is distributed on a non copy-protected diskette and you are free to do what you want with it (make backups, move from machine to machine, etc.) provided that it is never in use by more than one person at a time.

If, on the other hand, you are one of those few people who do go around pirating copies of software, you probably aren't going to pay much attention to a license agreement, bloodthirsty or not. Just keep your doors locked and look out for the HavenTree attack shark.

Honest Disclaimer

We don't claim EasyFlow is good for anything - if you think it is, great, but it's up to you to decide. If EasyFlow doesn't work: tough. if you lose a million because EasyFlow messes up, It's you that's out the million, not us. If you don't like this disclaimer, tough. We reserve the right to do the absolute minimum provided by law, up to and including nothing.

This is basically the same disclaimer that comes with all software package but ours is in plain English and theirs is in legalese.

We didn't really want to include any disclaimer at all, but our lawyers insisted. We tried to ignore them but they threatened us with the attack shark (see license agreement above) at which point we relented.

DON'T LOSE THE MANUAL

That's right; don't lose this manual. Especially don't lose it before you have read this page. Why are we telling you this? Isn't it obvious that you shouldn't lose the manual?

That's what we thought. Then we started getting all these calls from people saying "Hi! I'm Joe Blow and you've never heard of me, but I bought a copy of EasyFlow from FlyByNite Software and now I can't find the manual... will you send me a new one free?".

At first we were nice guys and went along with this. Then we started getting a bit more hard nosed about it; after all it is trivial to copy the disk but the manual involves somewhat more work. Now we had to agonize over each request and try to distinguish between the genuine unfortunate ("the dog chewed it up") and the merely unscrupulous looking for free software.

So what does everybody else do? We phoned the local Chevy dealer and told them we had misplaced the engine out of our new Camaro; that call didn't get us much useful information. Well ... cars aren't software. We called Borland and gave them a song and dance about losing our Turbo Pascal manual; they said to mail a letter to their "Lost Manual Review Committee". Wow! What a good idea. So we immediately rushed out and set up our Lost Manual Review Committee. The Committee meets once a month. They don't send out many replacement manuals, but they seem to do a lot of howling, rolling around on the floor and saying things like, "Oh wow - listen to this one".

Don't lose the manual.

Replacement manuals are available without going through the Committee for US$147.95 each.