When a friend asked me to help untangle a subscription she had signed up for at a seminar, the hardest part was not the cancellation form. It was reconstructing what had happened: when she was first invited, what was promised verbally, when money actually moved.
Since then I keep one habit: the moment any contract starts to feel off, I open a plain-text file and write a dated timeline. Nothing clever — one line per event.
2026-05-12 invited by K to "business seminar" via LINE
2026-05-19 attended, was told "average member earns 80k/mo"
2026-05-19 paid 54,000 JPY entry kit (credit card)
2026-06-02 asked about refund, told "only within 20 days"
Why plain text? Three reasons.
It is timestamp-honest. Screenshots can be re-taken, but a text file you keep appending to encourages you to record events the day they happen, not from memory three months later.
It sorts itself. One ISO date per line means sort gives you a clean chronology, and grep pulls every line about money in one command.
It transfers cleanly. When you eventually talk to a consumer hotline or a lawyer, they do not want your emotions — they want dates, amounts, and who said what. A timeline file is exactly that. In Japan, consultation desks for multi-level-marketing and subscription trouble explicitly ask for this kind of chronology; guides like マルチ商法・ネットワークビジネスの相談窓口まとめ show what details the desks will ask for, and every one of them maps to a line in the file.
Two practical rules I follow:
- Record promises verbatim, in quotes. "You will recover the entry fee in two months" is evidence; "they hyped it up" is not.
- Never edit old lines. If something was wrong, add a correction line with today's date. An append-only log is far more credible than a polished document.
It is the cheapest insurance I know: thirty seconds per event, and if nothing goes wrong you delete the file. If something does go wrong, those thirty-second lines are the difference between "he said she said" and a case someone can actually act on.
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