See subject. It was for a gym membership “amenity” at my housing complex, Stuyvesant Town, which is notorious even among NYC landlords as having a crazy hard-core legal department.
I have never seen that–just “accept,” with the small print you are invited to read. Here, as usual I skipped the small print, once the gym director went over it. But it occurs to me that I just signed off on an action–insisted upon by the lawyers, according to the director–the verb “resolve” (the big button after the “agree” button on the same page), whose meaning in this context is meaningless to me.
The key to most “electronic signature” procedures is (or seems to be) two overlapping actions that can be taken as a reasonably absolute precaution against claiming that agreement or signature was done accidentally or casually (or fraudulently). Sort of like those lockboxes that require two widely-spaced buttons to be pressed to open. The process might vary by state, jurisdiction, program, site or whatever but it has to have two or three very deliberate steps to confirm a ‘signature.’
So it means simply “if you’re sure you’re sure click this?” Or the simple word “confirm?”
Come to think of it, I think when you buy an Apple app the procedure changed a year or two ago for a double sign off on the purchase. Am I misremembering that?
In any event, my landlord and no one else I’ve seen used that magic word, and except for Apple I’ve never seen any double agreement on line.
Is “Resolve” is a technical term of art in law, used in paper and pen contracts?
Or a technical term of art for an action, used in interface design, and they didn’t want to use the word “execute?”
Also a possibility that they bought their software off-the-shelf and modified it to fit their needs, but couldn’t rename the button. The original software may have involved problem tickets or something like that, which would need to be resolved.
That’s a good point. Some helpdesk software that I’ve worked with have separate concepts of “closing” and “resolving” a ticket. The exact difference can vary from system to system and especially from organization to organization, but it can be used to represent the idea of stopping current, active work on a ticket (“closing”) and marking the ticket as utterly past-tense (“resolving”). If a case is closed but not resolved, it could be “reopened” based on new information. If a case is both closed and resolved, policy might dictate that a brand new case be filed if new information arises (e.g. that the problem didn’t actually get fixed). This could have an impact on how customers are billed. This could be used to give customers an incentive to take extra effort to verify that their problems were solved before their closed case turns into a resolved case after e.g. the expiration of three weeks.
