A friend of mine worked for the US Census Bureau for a while. Among their myriad binders and forms, etc. was a page full of tear-off perforated wallet size cards which contained no text or information on them whatsoever other than “do not distribute this card” printed on the back. And no, I have absolutely no idea what the purpose of these things was supposed to be. Nor apparently does anyone else.

So of course he dutifully tore them all off and quite deliberately handed them out to people. He gave me one. I might still have it someplace.

its to tell you the page is not accidentally blank. laying out text for a physical document has limitations on the page count and generally needs to be in multiples of 4 due to double-sided printing and paper stock options. if you have a layout that can’t cover the entire surface of your print media but you need to include the entire physical sheet, (especially if its a technical / legal document) its best to just say “there isn’t meant to be anything here, don’t’ worry.” in so many words.

otherwise you get people calling / emailing being like “your form is missing a part! there’s a whole blank sheet when I print it out! >:(“

As silly as it looks, there’s a good reason for this. You can’t just have a blank page because the user is going to wonder if something is missing. You have to say that the page is blank on purpose, at which point it’s no longer blank. They could say “The only thing on this page is this sentence explaining that there is nothing else on this page” but that seems somehow more ridiculous.

There’s actually a purpose for this I found out after joking about similar on exam papers. Turns out if you don’t mark the page intentionally blank people freak out that they’re missing a page.

This had better not be a philosophy book.