I’ve dealt with this type of document before. Sometimes large sections of text are deleted from a “living document” during a routine update, but a blank page is inserted to preserve the numbering scheme. Otherwise, people might believe a page was lost, or deliberately removed. You see it all the time in technical manuals that are frequently updated. Presumably, it alerts the reader that the missing page is not missing, and directions, citations and references scattered throughout the text to other parts of the document need not be updated.

I once was tasked to write a massive technical manual by using boilerplate from other, similar manuals. In the midst of all this modular verbiage, I inserted a paragraph about how a certain procedure was “not a substitute for a rigorous program of oral hygiene and regular professional care”. No one ever noticed.

I understand a lot of legislation, government regulations and legal briefs are composed this way.

“This page is intentionally blank” is the irony of all ironies.

We have Capitalism for the Customer, but Socialism for the Corporations.

Maybe its deliberate… its a psychological ploy to convince us to sign up to giving them authorization to bill our credit card automatically, or even provide them access to our bank account. Except, of course, when you try to get out of the arrangement, there’s no way to do it, no phone number, no email address, no way of contacting them directly and getting human feedback except by “getting an account”, which means all the hassle of managing that and revealing all your commercial behavior and preferences, as well.

I’m not just being facetious or trying to be humorous here, these people are so determined to squeeze every last penny out of us, or failing that, shift more and more of their management and administrative costs to us, that they are demonstrating the total disdain and contempt they have for their customers. In spite of all the pious rhetoric about “serving their clients” we’re just sheep to be fleeced as far as they are concerned.

The problem is not technology. Technology is morally neutral. The problem is the ethos of Capitalism. This nation of shopkeepers despise anyone who isn’t one of them, and they feel morally justified to sodomize us in any way possible. We deserve to be exploited. Follow any societal evil to its ultimate source, and you inevitably wind up face-to-face with a drooling business major.

Me, I like the bills where the perforation for the bill is 1/16 of an inch from the fold. I just get out the scissors. Arggg.