To set up a meeting with your broker through Calendly: More than 15,000. We say “more than” because the site designer has cleverly made some of the words, especially the ones in all capitals, inaccessible to copy and paste, so we could not get an exact count. “By proceeding, you confirm that you have read and agree to Calendly’s Terms of Use and Privacy Notice,” says the site.

The Terms of Use contain this provision in all capitals, indicating, of course, that it is not important at all and you should ignore it. They could not be copied by normal means, but optical character recognition made them accessible:

READ THESE CUSTOMER TERMS CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE SERVICES AS USE OF THE SERVICES INDICATES THAT YOU HAVE BOTH READ AND ACCEPTED THESE CUSTOMER TERMS. THESE CUSTOMER TERMS CONTAIN A DISPUTE RESOLUTION AND ARBITRATION PROVISION, INCLUDING A CLASS ACTION WAIVER THAT AFFECTS YOUR RIGHTS UNDER THESE CUSTOMER TERMS AND WITH RESPECT TO DISPUTES YOU MAY HAVE WITH CALENDLY. YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU ARE ENTERING INTO THESE CUSTOMER TERMS VOLUNTARILY AND NOT IN RELIANCE ON ANY PROMISES OR REPRESENTATIONS WHATSOEVER EXCEPT THOSE CONTAINED IN THE CUSTOMER TERMS THEMSELVES.

So, as you see, you are agreeing, by scheduling an appointment with anyone who uses this service for appointments, not only that you will not object to the terms, but that you have actually read them. You “indicate” or “confirm” that you have spent more than an hour reading legal slop that would have made your eyes roll back in their sockets to protect themselves if you had actually spent more than five minutes in it. A commonly accepted figure for the average reader’s silent-reading rate is 238 words per minute, and 15,000 words would thus take you a bit more than 63 minutes if you could read them at the normal reading rate—although, as Dr. Boli has pointed out more than once, you could not read the words at your normal reading rate, because they are words like these:

If you are an Entity purchasing licenses for your Authorized Users, you may provision or deprovision access to the Services, manage permissions, retention and export settings and transfer/assign accounts as described in the Documentation. As such, you will (a) inform Authorized Users of all Entity policies and practices relevant to their use of the Services and of any settings that may impact the processing of Customer Data; and (b) ensure the collection, transfer, and processing of Customer Data under the Customer Terms is lawful. If any terms in the Industry-Specific Supplement (“Industry-Specific Terms”) apply to you (e.g. Customer is a U.S government entity), those terms are also incorporated by reference herein and you agree to fully comply with the applicable Industry-Specific Terms. To the extent any such Industry-Specific Terms conflict with the terms below, the Industry-Specific Terms shall take precedence.

(We remind our readers and any guest attorneys present that these quotations are used for the purpose of criticism, and constitute a tiny portion of the more than 15,000 words under discussion, both of which considerations put us safely within the limits of fair use.)

Clearly you did not spend 63 minutes reading terms and conditions to make an appointment. And neither did anyone else who uses Calendly. But you all made a legal assertion that you did. With trivial exceptions, everyone who uses Calendly has committed the crime of perjury. This is not libel. It is cold fact. To live in the modern world, you must be a criminal perjuror. An American criminal lawyer could tell us whether this crime could be prosecuted under the laws of the land, but that it is a moral crime no one with any moral sense would deny.

We could solve this problem. Do we have the will to do it?

Dear Dr. Boli: I was told not to bring a knife to a gunfight, but, like, why not? —Sincerely, Gus down at Gus’s Cutlery ’n’ Things.

Dear Sir: For the same reason one does not wear a black tie to a white-tie occasion: one would feel uncomfortably out of place, even if the other participants were too polite to say anything.