YES, BUT...

God do I hate this. You ask a person for help and they say yes. Then you say to yourself, “Great this is going to work.”

However the person spoils it all by adding “but.” And you know whatever follows is going to be totally lame. Some absolutely stupid excuse they made up because they didn’t have the guts to say no in the first place.

What gripes me is sitting there and listening to that crap and having to put up with smiling and pretending to believe such baloney. I would otherwise be inclined to call them a jerk that they are. However I resist because well there are other times when the person will actually say yes and mean it.

So it comes down to a deal of giving the person a break now and then later they will out of guilt agree to help with something else. It is like they are saying, “okay, please just let me wimp out this time and next time I’ll be there for you.” Yeah it works too.

The great thing is that the person actually will remember when they did wimp out. Guilt is something that just seems to be easy for people to remember. A lot more than if they honestly said no. That they don’t seem to remember as easy.

It becomes a matter of me keeping score for myself I guess. I do have to maintain and “log” of such events. One of those, “okay who is guilty so they’ll do what I ask this time” records.

Shoot I’ve gone state of the art on this deal too. I managed to get a buddy to write me a computer program so I could input all the data in my computer. Then I just go in after each “yes, but” session and input the data.

Later when I call it up to search for people I can abuse it is easy to run a “sort” option. After I managed to get the person sucked into some other project out of guilt then I just go back and hit one little button that updates the data and removes the person from the file of options yet to abuse.

Oh you might say that is a lot or work. I call it being prepared. And in my line of work that kind of preparation often makes a whole lot of difference in terms of whether I find some slob to do the dirty work on a project or have to pay somebody to do it. If it involves saving a buck then it works for me.

All and all it is a real joy to have the kinds of options where I can deal with the “yes, but” issues in an efficient and profitable manner. My only regret is that I can’t boast to the voters over my success.

Sometimes I guess the important things in life are left as secrets. In some cases it is because they would be misunderstood. In others it is because the people who would misunderstand them wear badges and that is definitely not good!