To book an optometrist appointment on line: 25,419 words—roughly the same length as The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Did you read all those words when you booked the appointment? Perhaps you did. Perhaps you are a retired legal scholar with a monomaniacal devotion to the craft of legal language, and a sincere delight in well-crafted terms of service. If you are not that sort of person, however, you simply checked the box saying you had read the agreement, because you could not go on with your life until you did. We shall occasionally point out these word counts, which no one can possibly read in a reasonable time, as a public service, reminding our readers that we could solve the problem with mutual benefit to both parties in the transaction.