I blame my wife for the fact that the two of us sat in a car dealership for close to three hours the other day. If it had just been me buying a used sedan, everything would have moved along swimmingly. Page after page of contractual gobbledygook would have slid across the desk in front of me, each explained by the salesman at a tempo usually reserved for stockyard auctioneers. Faced with this torrent of talk, I suspect I would have dutifully signed each page at whatever spot had been marked with yellow highlighter just to make it stop. The paperwork would have been all done in about 15 minutes.

But as I mentioned, my wife was with me, and adopting the principle of all deliberate speed, she slowed the salesman down. She inspected each and every sheet with care. Using the calculator app on her phone, she crunched every last one of the vaguely legible numbers. And each time she found an error, she tore that sheet in half to make sure it didn’t accidentally find its way back into the paperwork. It didn’t add up to much, just the difference of a few thousand dollars. That is, if one doesn’t count the few pages from someone else’s contract — papers that seem to have gotten mixed up with ours at the printer.