We’re told — I forget where, offhand — that the present generation receives the word “lie” as unforgivably rude. So, to spare any Millennial blushes, let us discuss the Art of Prevarication.
Isn’t it amazing, what people get away with? They get away with it so frequently and so sublimely that they regard it as part of life, their natural privilege.
Ms. Neighbor — the one who was prevented from boarding my ship because my son had the cojones to go across the street and tell her “no!” — called the day before yesterday to wish me luck in the surgery and mumbled some sort of apology that I didn’t hear fully because I didn’t want to listen to her voice and so hung up on the answering machine. However, my son, a born diplomat, had told me that I should go over there and tell her how sorry I was that he ordered me not to take her in and extend my sympathies on her predicament.
He’s so polite.
So this morning I returned her call and reached her at her house, soon to be her former house. Said she, “Oh, dear, oh dear, I would never have suggested it if I had known you were going to have surgery yesterday!”
Say what? REALLY?
Does she think I don’t recall saying, “But I’m going to the hospital tomorrow for a second round of breast cancer surgery”?
Does she think I don’t recall her saying, “Oh, but I can be of help to you! Now my refrigerator can fit right here…”
Well, of course she does. Or she thinks she can make me think I don’t recall it, not quite like that anyway.
One of the things that accomplished liars prevaricators understand is that most people tend to believe the most recent thing they’ve heard. You can kind of “overwrite” a previous conversation or fact by saying something different with enough confidence, especially if your listener is elderly or not too bright.
I guess she thinks I’m a little bit of both. 😉
She must be an accomplished manipulator. That’s prob’ly why her relatives don’t want her moving in with them.
It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I became aware of the number of people who lie as easily as breathing. So repressed was I as a child that even to this day I find it uncomfortable to fill in a fake name, phone number, and email address on a form to get another nuisance “member card” for some retailer. So it seems to me that an awful lot of people are very, very good at lying, and they do it as a matter of routine.
When I was about 45, I met and befriended a young couple who practiced insurance fraud. The ways they collected would beggar your imagination. They awed me. I’d never met anyone like that. Interestingly — or, hell: maybe “not surprisingly” — their professional prevarication slipped over into their personal lives. You really couldn’t know for sure when some story one of them told — whether it was an episode of ordinary daily life or some High Drama — was true or not.
There’s an art to prevarication. It’s like acting: you have to practice at it. Method prevarication, as it were.
The result of coming to know people like Ms. Neighbor and the Insurance Fraudsters is unfortunate: most of the time I don’t believe anyone. When a student comes up with some excuse for why she can’t turn in thus-and-such a paper, I assume she’s lying. When a salesman claims he’s required to tack on thus-and-such a chargeable service, I assume he’s lying. Today I question the truth of just about anything anyone says. And about a quarter of the time, I’d estimate, that’s justified.
Maybe that’s just Life in the Big City?
Image: Pinocchio. . Public domain.
Totally with you on the character assessment. I feel that I’m fairly good at spotting people who can twist reality to match their current outlook on life.
But it has taken me decades to get this skill under my belt. Only living through many life experiences, and being occasionally taken in by these kind of people, teaches you to recognize unlikely “stories.”
Hope your surgery went well.
I’ll second on hoping the surgery went well. What disturbs me most is how accepted not telling the truth has become. A day in the life of a Landlord is filled with …well….liars…When I get an app and turn it over to the gal that does my background checks and she calls me back…many times it’s more entertaining than anything on TV. Her funniest line…”well they are consistent….nothing is truthful” OR another favorite “Well they are extremely consistent they pay no one on time or without a court order”. And when you confront the folks with the untruths….no remorse.Sad just very, very sad…
I think your neighbor was embarrassed and trying to save face.
A lot different from insurance fraud.
Yes, I think that’s probably so.
Also, it appears she’s having some serious financial problems. At this point she’s basically homeless. She did find someone who’s letting her house-sit and care for her dogs while they’re on vacation. So it’s got to be pretty damn distressing.
Meanwhile, AFTER she got moved into the house-sitting gig, I learned a friend of mine, who does rent out rooms in her house to keep body and soul together, had evicted another of the alcoholics and was looking for someone sane to move in. Ms. Neighbor would be perfect! She does not drink, she does not do drugs, and she is not any weirder than most of us. So I’m trying to get the two of them in touch.
Fortunately, she managed to get Arizona’s system that provides nursing care to the indigent to back down on the $45,000 lien against the house — she says they forgave the entire amount. So, even though IMHO she got the short end of the stick in the sale of her house, she at least came away with what was left of the sale price after the buyers persuaded her to cover the cost of reroofing, pool repairs, and other upgrades.
I don’t understand why Ms. Neighbor got so “taken” on the sale of her house. You mentioned you thought it was underpriced by $30,000 and now it seems she is footing the bill for a number of upgrades for the buyers.
Did she have no one to advise her on this? Where the heck was her agent?
She listed the house with a Realty Executives agent. For reasons I don’t understand, she asked $233,000; two houses with identical floorplans, within a block of us, are on the market for $280,000 — one of them just sold, days after the seller dropped the price to $265,000. A house cattycorner up the street from her sold for $319,000 in 2012; Zillow estimates the value of her house at $281, 145 and puts the average range of values in the ‘hood at $$276,000 to $295,000.
So yes, I think the Realtor she hired persuaded her to lowball the asking price, for reasons I don’t know, and then persuaded her to accept a lowball offer (they offered less than the asking price), and then persuaded her to foot the bill for reroofing and pool equipment. Cost to reroof one of these houses? My insurance company paid just under $10,000 to reroof mine after the hailstorm of a few years ago; I have the same floorplan, same square footage.
When I asked why she listed it so low, she said well, it was because the pool equipment needed repairs and the roof needs to be replaced.
Evidently she either was desperate to sell (which appears to be a real possibility) or she hired a bad Realtor. Or both.
If she had asked $250,000, she still would have been under market and so probably would have sold quickly, but after the roofing job and the pool repair she would have walked away with around $240,000, not $233,000 less this, less that, less the other.
IMHO this lady got taken to the cleaners.