by Serguey Shinder
He asked me on a Friday afternoon to look over a branch before the weekend, and I said no. I had a reason ready and the reason was true, and I delivered it pleasantly. What was actually happening was that I was collecting on a debt.
The debt was real to me and precise. I had covered his on-call twice, once over a bank holiday. I had stayed until nine on a release in spring so that he could get to something. I could have given you the dates. As far as he was concerned none of this existed. He had asked for exactly one of those things, and the other two I had volunteered without ever mentioning that they cost me anything.
That is the whole mechanism and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see it. I was running an accounts book that only I could read, recording entries against a person who had never agreed to the terms, and then quietly downgrading my behaviour towards him when the balance did not come right. He experienced a colleague who had become a bit less helpful. He had no way to connect that to anything, because the ledger had never been shown to anybody.
It was also crooked in a way that guaranteed the result. Every favour I gave went in at full value, because I had felt the cost of it. Almost nothing I received went in at all. When someone covered for me I registered it as a pleasant thing that had happened, not as an entry, because accepting help costs you nothing at the moment you accept it. An account kept honestly on one side and carelessly on the other will always show you as the creditor, no matter how the year actually went.
What I try to do now is pick one of two options at the moment the favour is asked for, and never the middle one. Either I say what it costs, out loud, at the time, which is much less awkward than I spent years assuming. Or I give it away properly and stop counting, which means genuinely stop, not stop out loud.
The middle option is helping while silently issuing an invoice, and it is the only one of the three that makes everybody worse off. He does not get to decline a price he was never quoted. I do not get repaid. And the relationship slowly cools for reasons that are entirely legible to me and completely invisible to him.
I also started writing down what other people do for me, deliberately, because I know by now which direction that ledger keeps itself in.
Resentment is nearly always a bill somebody never sent.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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