The Form With the Box

The form had been in use for six years, and in all that time the third box had been filled in wrongly by almost everybody who used it. Nobody had complained, because filling it in wrongly had never had a consequence.

The box asked for the date on which the work had been agreed. What people wrote there was the date on which they had signed. These are usually the same day and, in the cases that matter, never are.

Ottilie noticed it because she had been given eleven forms to check in one week and had seen the same difference three times. She wrote a short note and sent it to the office that owned the form.

The answer said that the wording was correct. That was true and it was not the point, and Baumgart, who wrote the answer, understood this when he was asked to fill the box in himself for a case he knew well.

What changed in the end was not the wording but the order of two lines: the box now sits under the question about the agreement and no longer under the signature. Nothing else was done, and the error stopped.

Ottilie kept the eleven forms for a while and then threw them away. The useful part of the story, she said later, was not that she had been right about the box. It was that the wrong answer had been right about the wording, and that being right about the wording is a way of not answering.