G is for Great

Do you want to know why G is for Great? It is because I wrote a freaking Great poem in my last post. I put quite a bit of time into it and like it a little more every time I read it. If you haven’t read it, you should right now. If you have, you should re-read it and enjoy its awesomeness.

Why else is G for Great? Because I think it is great how ridiculous people can be sometimes. There are some out there that take everything they do so seriously that it becomes funny. Of course I have an example to back this up…

A few days a go I received a subpoena at work requesting information for a workers comp claim. I have never directly received a subpoena, so I read the whole thing over to fully understand exactly what was needed. Reading legal language can be surprising challenging. I think they write in a specific way to make people so confused that they give up on trying to understand the document and just sign.

So I start reading though the main page wish starts in Latin at the top “Subpoena Duces Tecum.” I figured the lawyers are just trying to sound smart by using other languages, but literally translated means “bring with you under penalty of punishment.” Clearly they don’t want to just write that at the top, so they use the Latin. Either way, you can tell this document is meant to intimidate you to get something done. There isn’t a lot more to the document, just names, addresses, and such followed by “YOU ARE HERBY REQUIRED” in all caps to provide some information. Here is where it gets good. Many letters have the body of the letter followed by a closing or sign-off like “sincerely, john.” The writers of this subpoena went with the closing of “fail not at your peril.”

I looked at that, was a little shocked, and then nearly fell at of my chair laughing. This is a great example of taking things a bit too seriously. Apparently they felt that this request for information was so important that it required a threat or curse of some kind. I shared this humorous line with some of my co-workers, and asked around to get the data as soon as possible since I was concerned that I would meet my peril. I don’t know if my failure meant that someone was going to come looking for me to mess me up, or the brakes of my car were going to mysteriously go out while I was on the highway. Either way I didn’t want to find out.

Admittedly, there may be some use for this statement in daily life. Perhaps if I start using it in conversation, things will get done faster. I could write an email: Mark, please send me the total sales figures for last month. Fail not at your peril. –Zack. I have a feeling I would be getting those sales figures pretty quickly. Maybe in a text: Hey Justin, do you want to hang out tonight? Fail not at your peril. Something tells me that Justin’s schedule would clear right up.

Honestly though, what are these people thinking?

Thanks for reading.