I Can Smell Burning Pants

Without wishing to cause offence to those lovely people on Dragon’s Den, The Apprentice etc, or anyone who runs their own business, I have a question that probably will do just that: To be a successful businessman or woman do you also have to also be a successful liar?

The question arose when I was watching one of daytime BBC’s many antique trading programs. The expert picked up a piece of pottery. ‘It says on the label three hundred and fifty pounds. What’s your very best price?’

The trader sucked his last remaining tooth. ‘For you guv, three hundred quid.’

‘Really? That’s the very best that you can do? Shame, I was hoping more like one twenty.’

They bantered on like this for a while and eventually the pottery changed hands for two hundred pounds. Deal done. But hold on a minute: just a few moments ago the trader said that his ‘very best price’ was three hundred. So three hundred wasn’t his very best and he knew it. He lied. If the orange antique experts on TV are to be believed then it seems to be a common tactic.

And of course every single trader in the land must have heard (and maybe uttered) the dreaded words, ‘The cheque’s in the post’. A week later they’re unsurprised to find no cheques littering the doormat, so they call again. ‘Really? It’s not turned up? It must have got lost in the post. I’ll write you another’.

When I was a bookkeeper I was on the receiving end of this sorry story so many times that it became a bit of a joke with some customers. I always wanted to ask one question in return: ‘If my postal service is so bad, how come my gas bill never gets lost?’

My Beloved has for many years sold items on eBay, and in that time has had more than her fair share of failed transactions. After a while this has made her naturally rather suspicious of all non - and late - payers.  One of my favourites recently was when a woman claimed that she wasn’t going to pay up for something she’d bought as ‘it wasn’t me, it was my eight-year-old niece what bid on it.’ Did she now? Using your account name and password? Clever girl.

Or how about ‘I know I’ve bought these items but I cannot pay for them as I’m new to eBay and I don’t have a cheque book or a PayPal account’. I suggested that the Beloved should write back, ‘No problem! I’ll just take whatever form of payment it was that you’ve used for the 83 other items that your eBay record shows you’ve bought and paid for over the last three years’.

The least pleasant of all though are those that claim, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t paid you but my child/partner/parent has just died.’ I’ve been amazed at how many times she’s been told this as a reason for late payment. It’s absolutely incontestable. Of course she has to sympathise and allow as much time as is needed. It’s astounding though how many people recover from their grief on the first of the month.

So now I find myself in the job of sending work to magazine editors and having to trust that they will pay for all work used and that the amount they send is the going rate. Surely they wouldn’t be unscrupulous, would they?

© Shaun Finnie 2011