short takes

I moderate a mailing list and reject a lot of posts for being off-topic in various ways. Every now and then I'm tempted to have "open the flood-gates day", just to show subscribers what I'm up against, but I never do it. :-)

Dani's '99 Saturn has failed him once too often (and most recently -- and most frequently -- with a Heisenbug), so he's now car shopping. He's at the "read everything Consumer Reports and Edmunds has to say about cars I've heard of" stage. Well, maybe not everything he's heard of, but you know how it works. I wonder what he'll end up with. He knows to stay away from VW :-), and it would be hard to find a new car that'll treat him as badly as his current one has.

Erik gets daily medicine, which I mix up in canned food. He's absolutely loving this, especially when the canned food is fish. A consequence of this is that while he's eating this, I let Baldur and Embla share the bits that remain on the spoon. So, more evidence that Baldur is not one of the brighter cats around: he will push Embla aside so that he can get better access to the spoon, and then lick such that he pushes most of the food bits off onto the floor. Embla, observing this, doesn't even try to maintain a claim on the spoon; she gobbles up the dropped bits while Baldur gets the smaller bits that don't drop. Since Baldur is overweight, I see no need to interfere with this dynamic.

Quote of the day: "I bought an axe for Valentine's Day. The checkout clerk at Canadian Tire, and the guy in line behind me, were quite amused at the implications... (Hey, a girl's gotta right to keep herself warm, right?)" -- aliza250

Random thought while browsing the news: Michael Jackson has got to be one of the ugliest white girls I've seen in a while.

"will you do me a favor?": blank checks, trust, and expectations

siderea recently posted about an exchange where someone said "do me a favor?" and she said "yes". This prompted a discussion about the usual responses to that question.

There are a very few people to whom I will respond "yes". There is a much larger set of people to whom my response is typically "probably!" (i.e. tell me more), with a smile. Farther out, there is the "that depends -- what is it?" response.

Another commenter challenged me on this, suggesting that it may be better to say "yes" by default and filter out the people who turn out to try to abuse your good nature. I can see that point, but I have trouble taking that approach. I find it difficult to disappoint people, and saying "yes" and then finding out the favor is something I can't do for whatever reason forces me to recant. Ok, not really -- a request for a favor always carries an implicit "if you can" -- but that's how it feels to me. If I say I'll do something, I feel obligated to do it. And thus, I am reluctant to hand out blank checks.

While there is certainly a trust issue, this is not just about trusting (or not trusting) the other person. Friends whom I trust have at times made what seemed to them to be perfectly reasonable requests for favors. But, sometimes, there's something about me that makes it difficult for me to grant the favor. People might observe that I drive at night but not know that I am very particular about the circumstances under which I do it, so they don't know that picking someone up at the airport at 9pm poses a real difficulty for me. People might see my writing and conclude that I'm articulate (well, maybe not based on this entry :-) ), but not know that I'm somewhat terrified of most public speaking and would really rather not give a speech to their community group. Stuff like that. Sure, trusting the person is a factor, but so are all these other things.

There are, as I said, a few people to whom I'll say "yes". These are certainly people I trust to not take advantage, but they are also people I know well enough that they probably know all the relevant limitations. I could be wrong about that, and if so we'd discuss it and the asker -- being someone close to me -- would probably withdraw the request on the spot. But for the most part, it doesn't seem to come up.

(Who's on the list? Not telling. I also don't always know precisely myself until I find the "yes" coming out automatically.)

For everyone else, I guess I just prefer to build toward "automatic yes" through the "probably" path, rather than defaulting to "yes" and having to disappoint more people. Maybe it's all about setting expectations; if I say "probably" or "maybe" the asker doesn't expect an automatic "yes", so he's less disappointed if I say "no".