Please Read Carefully | Maine Antique Digest

Beneath the Surface

Life gets incrementally easier with kids. It is like the reverse of that apocryphal boiling frog story: things getting ever-so-slowly better—instead of worse—until one day you suddenly notice that they are better. (Yeah, yeah, don’t write to tell us how it’s going to start getting worse again now that the teen years are upon us. Let us enjoy the delusion a little longer.) You spend so long in the grind of tying shoes and wiping noses and getting snacks and making people take their vitamins (instead of putting them behind the piano when no one is looking), and all of a sudden, it seems that these no-so-tiny people can get up, dress themselves, fix lunch, tidy up, do their schoolwork, and generally not beat each other bloody or set fire to anything, all without being admonished a dozen times.

This is timely, because auction work is keeping Andrew on the road more and more often, and sometimes he likes to have Hollie along to help. (She maintains a strict “no one-piece cupboards” rule.) Just a couple of weeks ago, he needed to pick up some things an hour or so away, and he thought it would be a good opportunity for her to get out of the house for a bit and tag along. Two people packing boxes are faster than one! They got up early, and while Andrew fed the animals, Hollie wrote the kids a one-page note on a legal pad. Just the usual mom stuff: don’t forget there are two day-old doughnuts for your breakfast in the oven; be sure to take the dog out before lunch; do your violin practice; maybe read a little more of that book; don’t spend the whole day playing chess online; message if you need anything, etc. She left it in the middle of an otherwise empty kitchen table where they both sit for every meal.

We left at about 7:30, stopped for the rare treat of breakfast on the road, loaded up everything in time to head home shortly after noon, stopped to unload at the gallery, returned the rental van, got home just in time to start supper, and were catching up with the children when Hollie said, “Oh, you didn’t eat your doughnuts!” “Oh,” they both said, “We didn’t know they were there.” “But,” Hollie said, “I told you in the note I left.” Blank faces. “The note in the middle of the kitchen table?” Is it possible for faces to go from blank to more blank? They hadn’t read the note, not a word, not all day. (They had managed just fine, and we got to eat their stale doughnuts after they went to bed. In parenting, you take the wins where you can get them.)

We should have expected this. At least once a month, one of us groans like a dying accordion, wheezing out what will probably be our last words in the hospital when someone gives us something lethal because of not checking paperwork, “No one reads anythiiiiiiiinnnnng.” We would be depressed if we calculated the hours we spend answering questions or correcting situations that come up because people (and yes, sometimes the “people” in question are us) do not read.

Of course, it does not help that so many of us are awash in text. Some estimates say, depending on how and where you spend your day, you’ll see about half a million words every day. (For reference, War and Peace is less than half a million words.) Maybe this is part of why nature is so soothing—we are in a place where our brains can finally stop looking for and identifying patterns in text. If we’re being honest, because of course we are, since we aren’t the kind of people who hide our vitamins behind the piano, we have been conditioned by this point to know that the vast quantity of those words are not saying anything we actually need to know. We are given reams of print instructions daily that we can just ignore. Yes, of course this app collects my data! That’s why it’s free. No, I have no intention of photocopying this entire 400-page book on economics to distribute copies to all my friends, if only because I would still like to have friends. Yes, I guess I will try my best not to use this hairdryer while sleeping. No one really needs to be told these things.

We as a society admit that we do not read, perhaps most obviously with that regular Facebook post that bubbles up to go viral about how blah, blah, blah, as of midnight on some recent random date, you do not give Facebook permission to use your pictures, information, or posts, both past and future. But you do give Facebook all kinds of permissions, because you entered a privacy agreement with Facebook when you signed up. Facebook can and does change it periodically, which is part of the agreement too. Clearly, we have become numb when it comes to reading fine print.

It is even more confusing in the antiques business where there is not a great deal of uniformity because so often we are small businesses doing our own thing. There can be significant variations in approaches to third-party shipping, requiring wire transfers, and charging cards on file, and these rules often cease to be rules when we know them well. No one reads the terms of sale for an auction. We get it—too many websites and apps with long terms of service or privacy policies have trained so many people to hastily scroll to the bottom and click “I Agree” and “Continue.” But there is useful stuff in there—what types of payments are accepted, if shipping is in house, if there is a fee for using credit cards, etc. We regularly have people jump through a variety of hoops that exist only in their minds to avoid fees that we don’t charge! Of course, we cannot blame it all on the Internet. Reading contracts or terms of service has not been a common thing in our working lives. Just ask Andrew how many consignors over the past 25 years have actually read their consignment contracts (and the absolute worst culprits—attorneys!). The Internet has made it worse with those crazy long sections in heavy “legalese,” and even if you are required to initial indicating you read it, chances are that you really didn’t.

This is all the more important these days when auctions themselves vary widely. Twenty years ago, the operation of an auction was a fairly standard thing for estate sales auctions, where you usually had to be there that day to pick up on site, and auction companies, which had your goods in their warehouse but odds were that you had come equipped to take home whatever you purchased. Now there are online-only estate sales with narrow pickup windows or online-only auctions from brick-and-mortar auction houses that expect most things to be picked up by a third-party shipper.

When the children were younger and Hollie found out they were not consistently reading small summaries of their schoolwork that she wanted them to read, she started hiding small pieces of candy in the house and inserting hints in the emails she sent. “Chemistry underwent a significant change in the 19th century as changes in technology enabled more precise check the slip-glazed crock on the back of the piano measurements to be taken.” That got bonus points as ideas go, because it meant you could tell who did the reading and who did not without even asking, and then you could threaten to eat their mini Snickers in front of them! We have contemplated offering something similar in the terms of service. Maybe somewhere buried in the fine print of our auction terms is a line that says if you appear in front of us and say a special code phrase, we will give you a mini Snickers too!

Auction descriptions vary widely. They can tell you a good bit about the auction house before you even bid, if you read them with a critical eye. Some auction houses will write a paragraph about an object, while some write entries that are practically so short as to be haiku. These are hints about who you are buying from, how much you should rely on their descriptions, how engaged they are in getting the best results for their consignors, and how likely they are to accept returns. When someone writes only “19th-century stoneware crock,” is it because they rely heavily on a large local crowd on the auction floor, or because they do not have someone on staff knowledgeable enough to say more, or because they are not guaranteeing anything else? There is nothing wrong necessarily with any one of those situations, but you should know what you are getting into when you bid. If most of the items in the sale include dates, but lot 134 has no date, that may signal that the auctioneer is uncertain of the age. Phrases like “appears to” also indicate a lack of clarity; maybe they were uncertain, maybe they are certain but didn’t want to argue with a consignor, or maybe they did not fully assess the object. “Feet appear to be original” might indicate a difference of opinion, while “does not appear to be laid down” might indicate that it has never left the frame for confirmation.

Here is a confession: sometimes we don’t read everything either. More than once Andrew has gotten excited enough to bid on something and then had to rearrange his plans because he didn’t read closely enough to see that it was on site only and has to be moved out of someone’s garage between the hours of 1 and 3 two hours away on a Tuesday afternoon. We have never, in more than 20 years, had an auction where at least one person at some point did not say, “Oh, wow! It’s bigger than I thought!” despite the fact that full dimensions were included for the item in question. The trick is remembering who is responsible for the situation you find yourself in.

In some ways, it is a little like getting a speeding ticket. It always surprises us when people get angry about speeding tickets. We have gotten our share over the years! But in most cases, what is there to get mad about? The expectations were clearly conveyed, and you or we chose to ignore them. A speeding ticket is the natural consequence of that. You can think the limit is stupid, that police ought to be doing other things, or that the local municipality gets enough in taxes from other sources. Sure, fine, you’re right! But you still knew the speed limit and the consequences of breaking it. Are we annoyed when we don’t read closely and have to pay more (sometimes much more) than we expected to have our latest auction purchase shipped to us? Of course. On the other hand, most of what we don’t read can be summed up simply enough: read the small print, or pay the big price.