Blabjuration

Legal disclaimers, long, hard to read documents in which lawyers say, with too many words, something like Ich Habe Es Nicht Gewußt, have no legal status in The Netherlands. In the United States they do, I guess, even though they are meaningless: most disclaimers contain a sentence which states that “we are allowed to change this disclaimer at any time”, which means that tomorrow it can say the exact opposite of what it says today.

I created just a few disclaimers in my professional career as a web developer. I made one for the Dutch McDonalds website a long, long time ago which contained a lot of ridiculous bullshit about copyright, liability and security. I copied that disclaimer word for word for a disclaimer on a site of mine – even though the original disclaimer clearly stated that all forms of reproduction are strictly prohibited.

Of course I replaced all occurrences of the word McDonalds with the name of my own site, Trash Chique. But I did another thing, a thing that nobody ever saw (until now): I replaced every word in the disclaimer with the word bla, but only when you print that page.

I believe the quality of that joke lies mostly in the fact that nobody ever saw it. So by writing about it I probably managed to get some readers to giggle a bit but at the same time I spoiled the joke, forever. I have been in doubt about publishing this post, as you can understand, but keeping a joke a secret and not publishing this text, which I already wrote, is just too nonsensical, even for me.