Does it? If someone from legal reads the contract, why would they bother dealing with this gimmicky clause? The budget has already been approved and sending someone a plant might cost another 30min of their time they rather spent on doing their job.
"I can think of a hypothetical reason why you might be wrong in very specific circumstances, so I'll suggest that could be a reason why the general case is wrong" is such a dumb argument. Obviously there might be occasions where a client reads the clause and chooses to ignore it. Very rarely, someone in legal might decide to ignore the clause because they're a bit lazy and don't care about saving their employer some money. That isn't an argument against what I said though.
Plus, if the budget has already been approved, someone didn't read the contract before signing it. That's the same as not reading it.
Fair enough. My experience is limited to large corporations with bloated, slow procurement processes. So I would be really surprised if legal would get back to me about something like this. That said, I don't think I've ever encoutered these type of jokes.
If they decide to actually send a plant and this is in the US, dealing with actually selecting and sending it won't take much time. You can order a plant online for delivery [1]. Plants at that site start at $35 for the plant and pot, and shipping is a flat $7 on orders under $75.
If legal reads it you're at least gonna get an email to the tune of "hey WTF is this? did someone sneak a joke into the draft?" which is sufficient for proving they read it.
