Feb 26, 2009

This Makes No Sense


This picture to the left is the back of a warranty manual for my cellular phone. In all absurdity and complete irrelevance to the blog and it's purpose, I decided I would share this with you. On this page there is nothing. Absolutely blank. At least, that's what the text printed on it says it's supposed to be. Actually, it's intentionally left blank. The page number, coding, and actual text are only an illusion. The text is an instruction to your brain to consider the page you are looking at as completely blank.

Oh well, I thought it was funny.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"This Page Intentionally left blank" is very commonly used in documents of a government or regulatory listing agency (UL, CSA, NRC, TUV) nature.

It is for legal implications, to ensure people do not write in their own additional rules to standards, and also to ensure the person reading the document that there were no printing errors (a blank page where text should have been) in the printing process.

Please see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentionally_blank_page

In fact, in government and/or regulatory standards documentation, if a document is revised and it causes the removal of a page, you will not see the page removed and entire document get renumbered pagewise. You will see a blank page with text stating something to the extent of "This page was removed as of xx/yy/20zz" in order to keep the original page number sequencing intact.

Also, if a document is revised and statements are added causing the text to shift from one page to the next (some text on page 7 will now be on page 8 and causes shifting throughout the entire document), you will not see the entire document get renumbered pagewise. You will see where page 7 is intact, but a page 7A is added to compensate for the adjustment in text (I've seen regularatory documents where the "A" page is three words because of the shifting in text), and the beginning text on page 8 remains the same as the beginning text was from the previous revision.

It is also very common to have a page at the very end of a document where the only text on the page is "This Page Is The Last Page Of This Document" and is numbered as the very last page in the numbering sequence.

This is especially true in documents where data is being submitted for regulatory agency listing approval because the first page of most regulatory submittal documents usually have a fill in the blank statement asking for the total number of pages to be filled in that blank in order to account for all the pages within the document and when the regulatory agency received the document, every page is accounted for before the project is internally forwarded to the senior engineering/regulatory review staff responsible for determining approval/disapproval of the data to the applicable standard necessary to receive an authorization to place the regulatory agency markings on a product.

I can see your point of where this looks 'stupid' and many sites talk about how the statement contradicts itself. However, there is a genuine legal and regulatory purpose behind it all.

James said...

Thank you for the clarification. I can no longer say, as the former post stated, that this makes no sense. Anonymous, you have made it clear and understandable. Now it makes perfect sense.

But it is indeed silly when one first sees it.

Just goes to show you that we must always remember CONTEXT CONTEXT CONTEXT

Post a Comment

Please keep your posting clean. Comments, free-thought, and otherwise contradictory remarks are definitely welcome, just be considerate with your language. Oh yeah, I also reserve the right to completely eradicate your comments from any of my posts, but seldom do. Just so you know...