Here at Minds Melding, we like to think that we’re a reasonably intelligent pair. At the very least, it’s a safe assumption on your part that we’re literate, and don’t have some poor scribe taking dictation as we “write” these entries, an assumption made safer based on the fact that we could never afford to pay someone to do that, nor pay for software that does it (I’m looking at you, Dragon Dictation!). We’re able to check the vast majority of the boxes on this pretty offensive compilation of signs of intelligence, we graduated from high school and college with ease, we have avoided ruining our lives thus far. We’re (well, Anya is) also sticklers for honesty. Call me old fashioned, but I hate almost nothing more than being lied to for any reason (things I hate more: people being shitty to animals and the thought of bearing children. Well, that one might be a tie. Do I have to keep the baby?)
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| Lying is NOT the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. Poor Nat. |
Lying can be permissible when you’re lying to yourself or to your parents (Or terrifying strangers that want to use your cell phone/car/organs). Let’s get real, everyone lies to themselves. They may think they’re taking gold in the Honesty Olympics, but being a sassy brat to the public doesn’t mean that you’re not holding pretty tightly onto some inner delusions. And your parents? They may say they want to know what you’re doing/about your relationship/how the job search is going but they don’t, at least not the unvarnished truth you’re forced to live with every day. These conditions aside, lying to other people is fucking rude and annoying. At best, it’s an inconvenience, at worst, it’s soul shattering betrayal.
Roll all of that baggage together, and you’ll understand why there are few things more insulting to us than people trying to get away with something right in front of us. We are not charmed or amused by toddlers and their “I didn’t do it” after you SAW them do it, we are most certainly not amused when an adult tries the same shit.
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| Free pass for adorable guilty dogs though! |
As anyone who has interacted with other humans in any way, shape, or form can tell you, people. are. liars. Whether it’s “I just bought this last week and I need to return it because it broke already” as they bring in a bedraggled item you haven’t carried for the last year, or “I have mono so I can’t help with that group project” and you see them at the bar later, or “I swear, we’re just friends!”, in every setting, in every type of relationship, people lie. So we’re at a disadvantage going into this, we get it.
At our job, we deal with the public a lot. And we have policies. And we want people to follow them. So simple! see how we broke that down into three very short, simple sentences that any person should be able to understand? THEN WHY DON’T THEY?! We have limits on the number of people we can allow in at any given time, we don’t allow food or drink, we don’t allow people to just go running around unsupervised touching every goddamn thing in the office. Some people (decent people) would recognize that we shouldn’t even have to explain these policies.
That grinding your Cool Ranch fucking Doritos into the carpet is actually super rude and disgusting, no matter where you are, but ESPECIALLY in someone else’s space. That just because you apparently have *never, ever* spilled *anything*, that you should be the special snowflake that gets to bring your giant Starbucks cup around our organization’s valuable objects. That everyone in this goddamn building can count to six, and if you are over the limit, we will notice immediately and we will ask you to leave. And yet. Upon hearing the rules, people will honest to god start stuffing bags of Cheetos into their coat pockets and bottles of Coke Zero into their purses. Now the official policy has become “No food or drink, that includes gum and water, as well as things that are put away in your coats, backpacks, or purses.”
For some reason, it’s not even the fact that they’re breaking the rules that makes us really upset. Or the fact that they’re being inconsiderate, or bad listeners, or bad citizens, or disrespectful of our space. It’s that they apparently think we’re so *incredibly* stupid, that when they bring in ten people, and we ask them how many are in their party, they tell us six. And we say “are all of these people with you?” and they say “Yes, well sort of, but we really only have six” and, stretching the limits of credulity, don’t stop there. They often continue to insist that somehow, some of these people that we clearly see before us aren’t there. It’s like they’re trying to convince us that four of their group members are a mirage conjured up by our work addled brains, people we wish were there, like an oasis in the desert. As if that’s the thing we would dream of, under ANY circumstances.
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| Not a mirage unless they look like this. |
We’ve wasted untold minutes of our lives trying to understand the thought process behind this, and can’t really see beyond the rage inducing “You really think I’m THAT stupid? Because you’re saying either that I can’t count to six by myself, or I’m literally blind. And you know I’m not blind.” (Also you would be a huge dick for lying to a blind person about that).
You might think that since all of our coworkers experience and understand this phenomenon, they would avoid imitating it, at least in the workplace. You would be wrong. In a situation anyone who has worked anywhere has experienced, we had a love triangle between coworkers on our hands. Somewhat stickier than usual, an ex was now a boss, and directly supervising her failed relationship and the new girl he was chasing. He had a bad habit of “fishing in the office pool”, as he put it, so everyone knew the signs when the new relationship started. Strangely timed breaks, furtive whispering, actually completing the tasks he was assigned, all very suspicious.
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| This was his typical work style, literally doing his nails at the desk. |
His boss, while somewhat oblivious in general, could not miss the goings on, especially having once been half of that dynamic duo herself. We cannot even count the number of times she said “I don’t even care what he’s doing! It’s just so insulting that they think I’m so stupid that I don’t have any idea what’s going on, like it’s some big secret!” If I had a nickel for every time I said “It’s not even so much what you did, it’s that you LIED ABOUT IT”, I would have like $67, which is a LOT of nickels. Of course, we were also forced to sit through their weekend editing and the daily game of leaving for lunch at the same time, but walking to the parking lot 10 feet apart from each other to avoid suspicion.
We know it’s infuriating when it happens to us, and we know that we’re not really getting away with it when we do it to other people. So why do people in general persist in lying about or trying to hide things that everyone around them knows to be true?
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