For some reason, there are tools out there who think that just because something is written down, it is true. This is especially prevalent when it comes to things written on paper. It’s even stranger when some folks act as if electronic records are unreliable, but paper records cannot possibly lie. The truth is, not all written records are checked for accuracy by Jesus. If someone will lie verbally, they will lie on paper too.

I’ve found that in my office, there’s an irrational tendency to believe that anything written down on paper is automatically undeniably true, just because it is written down.

For example, one clever monkey wrote an email, making it look like it contained an email forwarded from a high-ranking executive, authorising something which the executive would never have actually authorised. But the people who saw the “authorisation notice” just looked at the time stamp and the fact that it looked like a forwarded email, and accepted it.

What a ridiculous belief to hold. Because of tools who think like this, we live in a world where you can print off a letter on your home PC, make it look like government letterhead, and successfully ask a bank to mail you a cheque from someone else’s account.