It's not just that my clients lie to me a lot, which will only hurt them --- it's that they're really, really bad at it.
[Originally posted on Singal-Minded]
My job as a public defender puts me in a weird place. I am my clients' zealous advocate, but I'm not their marionette. I don't just roll into court to parrot whatever my clients tell me --- I make sure I'm not re-shoveling bullshit. So for my sake and theirs, I do my homework. I corroborate. I investigate.
A significant portion of my job ironically mirrors that of a police detective. Every case I get requires me to deploy a microscope and retrace the cops' steps to see if they fucked up somehow (spoiler: they haven't). Sometimes I go beyond what the cops did to collect my own evidence and track down my own witnesses.
All this puts some of my clients of the guilty persuasion in a bind. Sure, they don't want me sitting on my ass doing nothing for their case, but they also can't have me snooping around on my own too much. . . because who knows what I might find? So they take steps to surreptitiously install guardrails around my scrutiny, hoping I won't notice.
You might wonder why any chicanery from my clients is warranted. After all, am I not professionally obligated to strictly maintain client confidentiality? It's true, a client can show me where they buried their dozen murder victims and I wouldn't be allowed to tell a soul, even if an innocent person is sitting in prison for their crimes. Part of my clients' clammed-up demeanors rests on a deluded notion that I won't fight as hard for their cases unless I am infatuated by their innocence. Perhaps they don't realize that representing the guilty is the overwhelmingly banal reality of my job.[1] More importantly, it's myopic to forget that judges, prosecutors, and jurors want to see proof, not just emphatic assurances on the matter.
But clients still lie to me --- exclusively to their own detriment.
Marcel was not allowed to possess a firearm. And yet mysteriously, when the police arrested him --- the details are way too complicated to explain, even by my standards --- in his sister's vehicle, they found a pistol under the passenger seat.
"The gun is not mine. I don't even like guns. I'm actually scared of guns." He told me this through the jail plexiglass as I flipped through his remarkable résumé of gun-related crimes. Marcel spent our entire first meeting proselytizing his innocence to me. Over the next half hour he went on a genealogy world tour, swearing up and down on the lives of various immediate and extended members of his family that he never ever ever touched guns.
I was confused why he perseverated so much, but I just nodded along as part of my standard early precarious effort to build rapport with a new (and likely volatile) client. What he was telling me wasn't completely implausible --- sometimes people are indeed caught with contraband that isn't theirs --- but there was nothing I could do with his information at that early stage. Maybe he thought if he could win me over as a convert, I'd then ask for the case to be dismissed on the "he says it's not his" precedent.
Weeks later, I got the first batch of discovery. I perused the photographs that documented the meticulous search of his sister's car. I saw the pistol glistening beneath the camera flash, nestled among some CDs and a layer of Cheetos crumbs. And on the pistol itself, a sight to behold: to this day the clearest, most legible, most unobstructed fingerprints I have ever seen in my legal life. If you looked closely enough, the whorls spelled out his name and Social Security number.
Public defenders are entitled to ask the court for money to pay for private investigators, digital forensic specialists, fingerprint examiners, or whatever else is needed to ensure a defendant in a criminal case is provided with his constitutionally guaranteed legal bulwark. The photographed prints here were so apparent that an examiner could easily rely on the photos alone to make a comparison.
Marcel had earned himself some trolling from me. I went back to see him at the jail, faked as much enthusiasm as I could muster, and declared, "Good news! They found fingerprints on the gun!" He stared at me stunned and confused, so I continued.
"Well, when we first met, you told me that you never touched the gun," I reminded him with an encouraging smile. "Obviously you wouldn't lie to your own lawyer, and so what I can do is get a fingerprint expert to come to the jail, take your prints, then do a comparison on the gun itself. Since you never touched the gun, the prints won't be a match! This whole case will get dismissed, and we can put all this behind you!"[2]
He was still reeling but realized I was waiting for a response. "You. . . don't need to do that," he muttered. I had the confirmation I was looking for, but I pressed him while maintaining the facade of earnest congeniality.
"But why not?" I sang in staccato, smile wide. "You told me. That. You. Never. Touch any guns."
Turned out Marcel might have accidentally touched the gun. So his prints could be on it. I had made my point, so I dropped the act. I explained to Marcel that the only thing lying to me accomplishes is to slow things down and worsen his own prospects --- how could I pursue any potentially helpful leads for his defense when I couldn't be sure I wasn't about to bumble into an incriminating revelation?
Marcel nodded sagely and claimed to understand, but he went on to lie to me many more times over the next two years that I remained his attorney. Marcel has and will spend the majority of his adult life in prison --- not necessarily because he lied to me but that certainly didn't help.
My first meeting with Kyle was useless. He insisted throughout that it wasn't him, that he wasn't even there. Now, personally speaking, if several witnesses claimed to have seen someone who looks like me, in my car, with my girlfriend in the front seat, commit a drive-by shooting in broad daylight, I would summon slightly more curiosity about who this apparent doppelganger might be. But Kyle gave me no leads, pantomiming an internal agony about not wanting to be a snitch, clutching at his stomach as if the mere thought was physically unbearable.
His tune eventually changed. "I need you to tell the prosecutor who was driving my car," he said."His name is Richie Bottoms." If the name hadn't given it away, I already knew where this was going,[3] and I was excited for the coming entertainment. I pretended to be enthused by his revelation, and let Kyle know that I had a "really great" investigator who's phenomenal at tracking "anyone" down --- even the elusive Dick Bottoms.
Based on his reaction, that wasn't the response Kyle expected; another illustration of a myopic theory of mind (not uncommon among the interpersonally inept) incapable of simulating anything but affirmation. He tensed up momentarily, but realized that he'd already committed himself to acting out a demeanor congruent with the "innocent client responds to helpful attorney" fantasy. Yet the only excuse he could muster up in the moment was that Richie wouldn't be found because he fled to Los Angeles.
I maintained what must have been an obnoxious level of optimism, explaining how "perfect" that was because my investigator "knew lots of people" there. My job affords me few if any moments of joy, and so forgive me if I overindulged in Kyle's vexation. I'll spare you a full accounting of the myriad reasons he gave why tracking down Sir Bottoms was a lost cause. Suffice to say that in addition to being out of state, Richie had maybe fled the country; also, Richie happens to look almost identical to Kyle, but also we might not even know his real name since he went by "Arby," and no one had his phone number, et cetera. . .
Even when we moved on to other topics, Kyle couldn't let it go, interrupting whatever we were talking about to repeat warnings about how tracking down Richie was going to be a total waste of time for my investigator and me. He was palpably angry, but had no viable outlet for his frustration, and so he just stewed, stuck with his lie. I kept my poker face. It's a stark contrast to my factually innocent clients, who cannot help but drown me with leads to pursue in the hopes that any are helpful.
The whole thing reminded me of Carl Sagan's parable of the dragon in his garage as a critique of certain unprovable religious beliefs. Can I see the dragon? No, it's invisible. Can I detect its fire's thermal image? No, the fire is heatless. Can I find Dick in Los Angeles? No, because now he fled the country.
There's always some excuse --- there's always some eject button allowing my defendants to evade specific evidence demands. No matter how ridiculous.
It's banal for my clients to deny the accusations, but a special breed takes denial to the next level by waging total jihad against their accusers. It's a sort of a reverse counterpart to the Narcissist's Prayer:
If they claim I was driving during the hit-and-run, they're lying. And if they're liars, then they exaggerated their injuries. And they're exaggerating because they're after an insurance payday. And we know they're after a payday because they sued their dry cleaners in 1993. And they're framing me to get money, which is how we know they're lying.
In these clients' telling, nothing is their fault. The random bystanders who randomly drew the unlucky witness card become a convenient scapegoat. Yet these clients are so myopically overwhelmed by the desire to bounce the rubble on a witness's credibility, they don't notice how implausible their story becomes with each new clause they tape onto their fabulist's scrapbook.[4]
Sometimes clients are self-aware enough to couch their denials in innuendo. Ivan, who was accused of [redacted], was waging the same Total War approach against Cindy, a social worker at the homeless shelter where Ivan regularly stayed. Cindy was a dangerous witness --- an uninvolved, respected professional who severely undercut Ivan's alibi defense about having never left the shelter to go on his [redacted] spree.
In yet another of our jail rendezvous, Ivan expounded at length about how Cindy's testimony was invalid because, as a social worker, she would be violating HIPAA.[5] The glaze over my eyes must have gotten too obvious for me to hide, so he switched tack, shuffled through his jail-sanctioned filing system (read: pile), and slid a flyer across the table about trash cleanup day at the shelter, with a smiling cartoon trash can picking up a baby garbage bag while announcing "Pick up a little trash, talk a little trash." It's cute, but what the fuck was I supposed to be looking at? Ivan stared at me grinning and expectant, but his demeanor quickly turned into disappointment at my ongoing silence. He snatched the flyer out of my hand and jammed his finger at the "talk a little trash" clause. "This!" he shouted, and then just stared at me again. I looked at the words that meant so much to him and nothing to me and just said, "Huh?"
His disappointment transmogrified into astonished anger. "Do I have to fucking spell it out for you?" he screamed. "I thought you were the lawyer here!" We had been ping-ponging across various aspects of his case for the last hour or so and I gave up on any posturing and reiterated my ignorance at the significance of the cartoon flyer. Ivan snapped, "Cindy is encouraging people to trash talk!" For, you see, she wrote the flyer. "I'm trying to show you that she's a fucking punk! And a liar!"
I immediately understood why Ivan was so attached to remaining within the realm of innuendo. Because as soon as he gave his claim some body ("We should infer lack of credibility from individuals when they author flyers that include garbage-related puns"), he knew how much of a dumbass he would sound like out loud.
Ivan moved on from the flyer, and instead asked how to disqualify a witness "for being a liar." I tell him that's not a thing,[6] which sent him into a further rage. "I need you to be on my side here but all I hear from you is 'NO.' Why are you working for the prosecutors?"
The manipulation attempts we just cataloged were comically inept, and fell apart with far less effort than it took to create them. Slightly more polished versions of these charades are regularly deployed within the Discourse™ but they're equally hollow and just as pathetic. So those are some of my clients --- individuals who cannot rise to the level of your average internet troll.
[1] There is a kernel of an exception that is almost not worth mentioning. The Rules of Professional Conduct 3.3 obligates me with the duty of candor. I am not allowed to present evidence that I "know" is false, which encompasses witness testimony. Some jurisdictions make exceptions to this rule for defendants testifying in their criminal trial (correctly, IMO) but not all. So assuming that a client truthfully confesses to me, assuming we go to trial, assuming they decide to testify, and assuming I "know" they're going to lie, then yes, this could indeed spawn a very awkward situation where I'm forced to withdraw in the middle of proceedings.
[2] I'm told I put on a good poker face.
[3] There was no Richie Bottoms.
[4] For example, Kyle asked if it was possible to present self-defense evidence on behalf of "Richie Bottoms," just in case.
[5] Does this sound familiar to anyone?
[6] During the editing process, Jesse was skeptical of this. "Wait," he asked me in a Google Doc comment, "there's NO way for one side to prove to a judge that a witness is so untrustworthy the jurors/judge shouldn't consider their testimony?" Correct. The closest rule is disqualifying a witness as incompetent, either for being too young, severely mentally ill or mentally retarded, or too intoxicated (on the witness stand!). Credibility is up to the judge/jury to decide, and if a witness has a history of lying, then it makes for a very easy credibility impeachment. Theoretically, in extremely rare circumstances, a judge could strike the testimony of a witness or find them in contempt, but they'd have to be seriously flagrant about their lying under oath. I have never heard of this happening.
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Notes -
What's your job by the way? I've dealt with similar scenarios when I volunteered as a low-income tax preparer. I remember one guy who came in with his sister or whatever and who wanted to claim three kids as dependents even though he earned $500 the whole year. His sister earned way more and could plausibly claim all three kids, and we sort of gently and patiently tried to explain to them that there was no net profit to be gained from spreading the kid deductions/credits around. Of course they didn't believe us and concluded we were a barrier to their scheme and left in a puff.
Last night, I saw some signs that caused me to reflect back on this OP and think about distinctions between making fun of stupid people and trying to think about how to live life and what to expect from society while at least not mentally denying the existence of a wide range of folks. I wasn't sure I'd share it here, but you mentioned low-income tax preparation, so I feel like I must.
The signs were offering tax return services. I think at least one of them mentioned something about an advance being available; that's a service that I understand being available. Might not be the best rates, but offers of short-term credit to low-income folks has been beaten to death as a topic, so I wasn't at all impacted by that. What caught my eye is that these signs just threw out completely random ass numbers. One said something like $4995, which was portrayed as like, "This is how much money we will get you," and then sort of portrayed as the "fine print" being that the number was only good if you had one child. Nearby, there was another sign that just boldly declared a slightly different figure, but this one had it in a series of figures. This much if you have one child, about a grand more if you have two, and about another grand more if you have three. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it wasn't "about a grand more"; they gave specific numbers, as if those were just straightforwardly the number of dollars that you'd receive on your tax return if you were in the appropriate category and used their services. As if you could just find the company that advertised the highest number, and that's how you could get the most dollars.
Maybe I just didn't pay close enough attention to the signs while driving by and they had detailed fine print in little letters, but man, first off, that just sounds like false advertising. Most of all, it struck me just how much of a fundamental misunderstanding of how any of this works1 it would take for this sort of advertising to be effective. But then I feel like, surely, this sort of advertising must have some level of effectiveness within the community in which it is being used, otherwise people likely wouldn't do it, right? Thus, back to reflecting on the need to always remember how wide of a range of people there are in this world.
1 - In fact, I may have some fundamental misunderstandings about how these sorts of advertisements work. If it really was "higher number wins", then you'd think it would get even more obscene. Yet, being completely out of whack too often may just piss customers off and drive them away. Do they just pick some X percentile estimate for likely returns in the local area? ...what friggin' percentile of returns would ~$5k be?! Has EIC gotten that insane, or are there really that many people who randomly ended up with wildly off W9s?
It seems to me any advertised specificity of four digits is a claim of competency and confidence, not a true advertisement of a dollar amount. Put $3695.19 on there, and Normalman will think, “Man, six digits, that guy really knows his shit!”
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For people under (or not reporting above) 14k USD/income, the standard deduction will usually set them to zero or near-zero AGI, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (3995 USD for the first child) and Child Tax credit (1600 USD) are refundable after that point, which gives a reasonable amount of head room for under-withholding.
I'd expect there's still a bunch of exceptions and fine print hidden somewhere, but it's not obviously nutty, especially if the number was framed as about 'finding tax credits' rather than about the actual check number.
I think it's even more morbid than that; these advertisements are set up and promoting the high numbers that won't apply to many of the client base, because otherwise quite a lot of people won't file at all, and will still be 'happy' (or at least unable and unwilling to make a false advertising complaint in any way that works) if they're just getting back a few hundred to a single thousand. There's still some ethical ick -- >80%+ of users would be better served using a free online filing option, but that'd wipe out the pragmatics of the business for the remainder that are either unable or incapable of using online filing or have no way to get the cash back through ACH/mail'd check -- but their practitioners and business practices are ethical in the sense that they're probably even licensed tax providers who honestly believe they're helping their average client, and in some ways, are.
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Yes, my stint as a tax preparer was absolutely shocking to me. One guy's income was around $23,000 but he made sure to bring receipts to establish the $3500 he spent on lottery tickets because gambling losses are deductible. He proudly declared how he made $200 over the year, and he seemed genuinely surprised when I asked if it was worth it because he apparently hadn't thought about it before?
My family was well off in Morocco. After coming to America, we were "poor" only in the sense that my parents cut insane corners over spending (80% of our furniture, including my mattress, was from dumpster diving). So my best guess is there is a specific mentality that combines the desperation of being poor (hence why you buy lotto tickets) with the lack of foresight from being poor (hence why you buy lotto tickets).
Not everybody is as charming about treatos as the businesslord!
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I've bounced around different clerical roles in local government, from education to social housing to where I am now, working in a specialist service for children with additional needs.
I've often joked about "I worked in education and thought I was cynical after that, then I went into social housing and realised I wasn't half cynical enough". I come out of a rural/lower middle class background and remained pretty much in that milieu all my life. I haven't personally been in contact with the really hardcore of petty criminals etc. but with job experience have encountered the types who are products of broken homes etc.
And for some, from even an early age you can see the trajectory to ending up in jail, which can be heart-breaking (it's terrible to be able to forecast that a fifteen year old is going down that path) or grimly satisfying (at least one kid on an early school leaver programme who was sly and nasty about using others as catspaws, and I have no idea what happened him afterwards but I thought to myself that one day he was going to play his games on someone who didn't give a shit and end up stabbed or something).
There's also the cycle of "this is the third generation and I see no reason it won't continue"; grandmother had broken marriage, family life problems, wasn't able to really raise her kids; daughter ended up like mother with single parenthood; baby is probably going to grow up and end up the same way because environment, environment, environment. No positive role models. All the limited supports and help from outsiders not going to make up for the raising the kid will get at home. There's a real tension between the rights and freedoms of the individual, and the right/capacity of the state to intervene. Err too much on one side, you get the horrible stories of abuse. Err too much on the other side, you get the state being little tin god and grabbing kids out of homes in order to indoctrinate them in whatever the current orthodoxy is.
Many people are not that capable, because of understandable reasons in their lives, and best that can be done is support and help them. Of course, there's never enough capacity for that, because money money money. But then you have the actively malicious, selfish, and vicious types.
Your story of the guy and trying to claim for dependents sounds all too familiar. Sometimes it is just stupidity and ignorance, sometimes it is someone trying to pull a fast one. The real problem is that some idiot friend or acquaintance tells them "Dude, you do this thing, it's free money! The government owes it to you!" I wouldn't be at all surprised if some 'friend' or family member convinced them that if he claimed instead of his sister, because he was so low income, he would end up with more money because the government would pay him some sort of rebate. That the tax credits for the three kids would be paid over to him since he wasn't making enough money to be taxed.
Once those ideas get lodged into people's heads ("I know Mickey Murphy and he told me he's getting this money!") you cannot get them out. So yeah, they do believe when you don't go along with the brilliant scheme that you are trying to cheat them out of it. Of course you are, you're there in an office with an official form so that means you work for the government and everybody knows The Man wants to keep you down and cheat you out of your rightful due.
No disrespect to the profession of lawyers, but there's one ambulance chaser firm in town who make a speciality out of taking cases for clients like this (sue the council, get €€€€€) and the poor boobs have no idea that even if they get awarded €10 grand or whatever, the lawyer is making sure to eat most of that in fees and what they'll come away with is a couple of grand, at most. Which then gets blown on partying, treating their friends, and their local supplier of fun substances.
EDIT: I complain about social workers, but in the social housing job my boss's boss was a former social worker, and a genuinely lovely woman. Knew enough not to be taken in, but still compassionate enough not to be burned out. Much nicer and less black-hearted view of the world than I had 😀 That was heart-breaking at times too, because we administered grants for elderly and disabled people to get help maintaining/doing up their houses so they could continue to live at home, and every month (because we were in the post-crash austerity period) it was "okay do we refuse the very elderly woman or the liver cancer patient?" because not enough money to award to everyone who qualified. The boss's boss was brilliant at begging and wheedling more money out of the government department funding us, but of course everyone in the country was begging for money and you just could not get enough. Get the budget up to €2 million? Okay, that takes care of the three year backlog, but now what for the new applications?
That's also why I think our banks should have been goddamn left to fail. They got bailed out by huge government contributions and support, they continue to make profits, and the ordinary taxpayers of Ireland can just twist in the wind for all the repayment they got. But I suppose the economists would say that that would have been a bad thing.
I've seen a little bit of a few things like this. Not really enough to have much to add to this thread. But I do think that one of the major issues in the way our larger culture discusses political issues is that a large segment of the "activist class" doesn't have the slightest idea of how these people are, how they really think, and how they actually respond to the "helpful" programs that they constantly dream up. They just listen to a few of these fake sob story tales or videos and go off entirely on believing that, never even pausing to consider that it might not be an accurate description of the situation.
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I see a lot of overlap with what you describe.
I think that a lot of people in public-facing jobs have these kinds of war stories.
The joke, when I was in social housing, was that in about fifteen years there was going to be a lot of unwitting incest in the town, once all the kids grew up to be old enough to start dating. Because of social liberalisation and the explosion in A and B get together, B may already have a kid by another guy; they have a baby; break up and go on to new partners; A has baby with new partner, B has baby with new partner; rinse and repeat. If the kids take the mother's name, they may have little to no idea who the father is and subsequently who their half-siblings are. Then there's the "mom has one surname, the three kids all have different surnames" from when she does acknowledge the father, and again - if you know Dad is Murphy that doesn't much help if your half-sibling is named after their mother and you meet up.
EDIT: Actually a lot more hopeful to be working in the service for kids with additional needs. Everything from Down's to autism spectrum to mild learning disabilities to behavioural problems to wheelchair users. People on here often like to prognosticate doom for the Down's kids if they are permitted to be born and grow up, but my dude, I tell you: parents much more likely to be committed to doing best for the kid, much more likely to be two parents, and way less chance kid is going to grow up to be involved in drugs, petty crime, and a string of kids by different partners, not-so-optional extra includes jail time (not no chance but way less chance).
Yes, I've noticed a similar pattern regarding my verifiably low-IQ clients. They're so chill and easy to work with and overall have their shit together. I get whiplash when I see low-IQ reflexively correlated with criminality because while that may certainly be a component (from the standpoint of making it more likely to be caught criming) the far bigger problem is horrendously poor impulse control and sociopathic tendencies.
The problem with low IQ and criminality is that they're often used as catspaws and patsies by those just smarter enough than them to rope them in as disposable labour. When I worked as a school secretary, in a school catering for the lower rung of pupils in a designated area of deprivation (there was a pecking order of schools in the town and we were the lowest of the mainstream, below us were the special schools for the intellectually disabled), there was one kid there who fell into this.
Only child of elderly parents, he was in his mid-teens and tall and strong, they couldn't control him (and were a little afraid of him), he had developmental and behavioural issues. He suddenly was going around with all this money from unexplained sources, he didn't have a job and the parents were not giving money to him, so where was he getting it? It was plain that he was involved in some shady business, but he wouldn't tell what was going on and since he was inclined to throw hissy fits and was big and strong enough now to be violent, the parents didn't want to and couldn't press him on this. They were respectable people too, so this wasn't a case of neglect or 'third generation of misfits'. But somebody or other had seen the way to get him into doing shady stuff and using him as low-level criminal activity. I left the school before I found out the resolution of this, but I think the cops got involved.
So you get someone who flatters and treats them well, tells them they're better than the dumb old school that treats them as stupid, gives them money and new 'friends' and there you go - another patsy for the gang who will dump him with all the blame the second anything goes wrong.
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This (the impulse control, not sociopathic tendencies) reminds me a lot of when I used to work at a call center. The place paid minimum wage, which isn't much to live on even in northeast Wisconsin, and as you might expect they got correspondingly poor employees. I would on a regular basis hear people lamenting how they weren't going to be able to pay for $important_thing... right after they were talking about how they bought a new iPhone, or took lots of unpaid time off work. They seemed to truly not have any idea that the two things were related, or that the solution was to have more discipline about their actions.
The fact that I wasn't truly interacting with the full spectrum of humanity at this job (cause after all these were people who could at least function well enough to get a job) is something I have thought about over the years. Hearing your stories (you and @FarNearEverywhere ), I have no idea how you guys manage to do it. It sounds so frustrating.
I tell you: lawyers, cops, social workers, and low-level government minions in public-facing roles, we can swap the stories about "so this happened" "I got a better one than that" 😁
Back in my local government days, before I was poached into the big leagues of the Civil Service, I routinely had to kick out addicts shooting up in the toilets of our advice centres. I was responsible for a few centres in one of the most deprived cities in the most deprived areas of England and I had everything from drunk women headbutting the security class (who turned out to be perfectly sweet after, her husband had literally just died in front of her), to communicating through a 9 year old girl who could speak English but her mother could not, and trying to coach them through the complexities of applying for council housing, housing benefit.and so on, to dealing with families of people who were declared financially incompetent, and i had to authorize any spending. No, a QVC grill does not count as something your elderly mother needs, even if i weren't sure you were going to end up "looking after" it.
Oh yeah, see what I mean about taking advantage of the vulnerable and those dependent on them? You get to see a side of human nature that is less than edifying when you're dealing with these clients.
The ones who really need help, and can't access it, are the ones that are really painful to deal with, because you can see they need help and you want to give it to them, but it's not there. Be that budget cuts, they don't fit the regulations, or there just isn't something in place for their particular need.
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I once had a coworker whose solution to avoid driving drunk was having his underage girlfriend drive him home. Except she only had a learner's permit.
As it turns out, you can get a dui for being drunk as a driving instructor.
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One of my favourite things about working in the funeral industry was that you got a really good cross-section of the community, because everyone dies. Really helps open your eyes to the bubbles that we all live in.
My wife is a funeral director and we definitely bonded over our shared perspective of society's less glamorous underbelly.
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Sooooooooooooooooooo.......
Can we get another one?
Well, let's see. Trying to think of a funny one, rather than a sad one.
Okay, so as the new person, I get the job of overhauling the physical files with all the housing applications and weeding out the outdated, cancelled, and duplicate ones.
So we have Eastern European people (I won't get more specific about the country than that) still living in the country in the immediate post-Celtic Tiger era.
A and B are a couple, put in for social housing. C and D are a couple, put in for social housing.
Later on, turns out A and B have broken up, and C and D have broken up. It happens! So A goes back home to the old country, D remains here with her kid - and B and C take up as a new couple. And put in a new application this time as the new couple.
Well, okay, fine. None of our business to judge people's romantic entanglements.
Then B and C break up. Okay, scrap that application.
But wait! C now has a third bite at the cherry for True Love, as he takes up with yet another woman (this time an Irish woman) and moves to her home town which is still in our area to deal with, so - you've guessed it - another new application for housing with the new snookums.
Only it turns out this is his fourth bite at the cherry, because before he came here, he was married with a kid and then divorced back home. So, counting to date that I know of, Romeo has two ex-wives, one ex-partner, and one new partner.
Who may or may not be still his new partner, because they later allege they've broken up (and yes, that he's maybe taken up with yet another new woman). Only it may be the same woman, and they're trying to fool us, because they think they have a better chance applying as separate applicants or something?
Anyway, eventually all the applications are dropped, I have no idea if Romeo is now shacked up with Number Five (who may be Number Four), but like I said - none of our business unless and until they're looking for social housing 😁
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It is frustrating at times. It's not (despite all the commentary on here about IQ 90 types, sorry gang but there's a bit too much self-satisfaction about being Really Smart at times) the obviously less intelligent who are the trouble; quite often they know they can't cope with the likes of government forms so are willing to do what you tell them.
It's the types who have imbibed from school (sometimes) but more often social media and media in general that they have Rights. Nothing about responsibilities, mind you, but they're sure they have rights. Often they've picked it up from British/Australian/American TV shows, which makes it even dumber when they're protesting about 'you should be doing this for me' and you can tell they've picked it up off an American cop show or the likes.
(This is where I pause for the ritual teeth-baring at the 'only a few crazy kids on college campuses' notions; it's all very well for the child of middle to upper middle class parents, attending a good college, to protest about their right to sixteen piercings and three abortions; they're going to end up okay and go on to a career in activism from student activism which ends up with them in nice, PMC professional positions. It's the lower middle-class to working class kids who imbibe these notions, end up with sixteen piercings and three pregnancies, and are most definitely not going to go on to the PMC salaried position who are the ones ending up in trouble).
My go-to example of this once again comes from social housing; a couple of sisters who were Anglo-Irish (that is, born in London of Irish immigrant parents) and hopping back and forth between London and their parents' hometown (where I was working) according as they thought they'd do better off social welfare and love-lifes (breaking up with boyfriend, heading back to England or Ireland as the case may be, taking up with new guy). Anyway, they lob in an application for social housing. Given that we are not a borough of London they didn't immediately get placed in accommodation, and they turned up to argue in their English accents that this was racism, we were being racist, it was discrimination.
They were every bit as white as the rest of us. But they'd learned that "Racism!" is one of the magic words to force government offices to give you what you want. Well, they could yell "racist" all they liked, but the fact that (1) white, as I said (2) Ireland during a recession and (3) none of the rest of us were young enough to have gone through the "-isms and -phobes" conditioning at school meant we were not impressed and that yelling did not, in this instance, get them what they wanted.
I would much rather deal with the honestly stupid but trying their best, than the likes of the ignorant who know just enough to try and game the system.
Ah well, it's a great life if you don't weaken!
That's the definition of a luxury belief.
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I don't think one more anecdote will add anything to this, but this reminded me of a very similar experience I had in my 20s with a roommate (literally named Bob, funnily enough) who could never be counted on to pay rent or bills on time. He was a waiter and constantly used the inconsistent pay as an excuse, while also regularly drinking at least a six pack (usually two) of Pabst Blue Ribbons every single day, along with being almost constantly high from weed which he bought. When I pointed out to him that maybe he could cut back on beer to only a single six pack a day or maybe even just half a six pack a day and even did the math for him in how much money that would save each month, the very idea seemed like a revelation to him and also a complete absurdity, because obviously he wasn't going to cut back on beer, what was I, crazy?
As someone who had grown up in a very privileged bubble with very privileged and intelligent people, this was a learning experience for me.
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