Four pages on a clipboard

A woman arrives at a clinic in Muscat with her father and is handed a clipboard, four pages long.

Name, date of birth, address. Then every question the clinic decided, at some point, that everybody should answer. Is the patient pregnant. Does the patient smoke. Previous operations, list all. Then name and date of birth again on page three.

Her father is seventy-eight. Half of it does not apply to him, and she works through it anyway, because a blank box looks like a mistake.

The form is cheap for the clinic. It moves the work of asking onto the visitor, and adding another question costs the clinic nothing, so the questions only ever grow. Whoever wrote it had to imagine, once, every person who would ever hold it, and then it was printed and fixed.

Because so much of it is irrelevant, people skim. The line that mattered, a fall in the bathroom last month, written small in the margin of page two, sits there among the ticks and is not read until much later, if at all.

A nurse asking the same questions out loud would do it differently. She would not ask a seventy-eight-year-old man whether he is pregnant. She would not ask his name twice. And when she heard the word fall, she would stop and ask more. Which side did he land on. Did he feel dizzy first. Has it happened before.

That is the difference between collecting answers and finding out. Software is arriving that may soon hold that kind of conversation patiently, but the point does not wait for it.

If a question is important enough to print, it is important enough to be asked by someone who is listening to the answer.