Lying, Part Two
Don't lie. Don't lie. Don't lie.
For those of you needing remedial instruction, let me elaborate. If your close female friend with a somewhat fragile ego walks up to you with a tremulous smile on her face and asks if the hideous orange dress with lime green trim and bell sleeves looks all right, you tell her, yes, it's a great color or the sleeves are interesting or it's a very flattering cut. If your company earned a billion dollars less than you reported, if you used insider information and got caught, if you helped purge voters from the rolls who shouldn't have been purged, then stand the hell up and say so!
Don't lie before (the company is doing fine). And don't lie after (I didn't do anything wrong. And those records are secret, secret, secret).
We accept regulation because it's needed, but we accept less of it when we trust the businesses we do business with. We don't trust people who lie. We don't trust companies who lie.
Once on New Year's Eve day, I was running errands with my dog. I turned into the credit union parking lot, a steep up-bump, and the left front axle on my car broke. Just broke. Gone. I managed to limp home, thanks to four wheel drive and the lucky fact that I live about a mile away, and put the car in the garage until after the holidays.
Monday morning, I called my car dealer, which is located some 45 miles to the south of where I live. We'll send someone with a flatbed, they said. I'd already cleaned out my car. It was ten years old; I'd had work done on the axles two or three times before and I figured that the current, pretty extensive damage wouldn't be worth fixing.
Shortly after noon, they called me. 'It was totally and completely our fault,' the service manager said. And then went on to tell me how it was, indeed, all their fault. 'Thank you,' I said, 'Thank you for telling me.'
They could have told me nothing. They could have said, 'we feel bad, we don't know what happened, we worked on your car just a couple of weeks ago and everything looked fine, but we feel bad so we'll split the cost with you.'
What they said was, 'It was totally and completely our fault. We're sorry. We'll do everything we can to make it up to you.' That's what not lying means. That's how you hold your head up and show respect for your customers. That's what ought to happen by choice and example and is even more important on the large scale than the small.
Well, yeah, you say, but if companies lie, you just take your business elsewhere. Sticking point here--you don't always know they're lying. If my car dealer had given me the 'we'll pay half' line, I wouldn't have known. But they would have been lying all the same. When Big International Corp says we made this much money this quarter, that's what we know--what they tell us.
We have to say it's not all right. We have to mean it. And we have to write new values into the system that rewards small businesses, creative businesses, and honest businesses.