Something that annoys me no end is people who make promises they don’t keep. Not people who are prevented from keeping them or due to circumstances beyond their control find they simply cannot do it. No, as aggravating as that might be, life happens. The circumstances deserve our ire, not the people—not if they’ve made an honest effort. No, what I’m talking about are people who can do something, know how, but as they make the promise know they probably won’t. Bad scheduling, bad planning, bad whatever—or just lack of real interest. Or the habit traditionally known as Biting Off More Than You Can Chew.
Many years ago—decades, really—a local youth activist tried to draft me into service by writing a comic he intended to locally produce and distributed. He knew I wrote, I was just beginning to garner a bit of a reputation, he thought it would be a good fit. I demurred.
“I don’t want to commit to something I might not have the time or inclination to do,” I said.
He understood. In fact, “I wish more people would be that honest about their limits.”
I knew what he meant, but had no idea it would become part of my own personal landscape of trials and tribulations. But I remembered that and I’ve been scrupulous about not making unfullfillable commitments.
What happens is, of course, that someone says “I’ll do that” and you then feed the information to that person, get him or her set up enough to take the ball, and you go pay attention to all the other thousand to million details demanding your attention. But all of sudden one day you turn around and discover that nothing has been done by this person. They have completely dropped the ball and you then are left scrambling to repair the damage, build the bridge, make the call, write the report, and so forth. The arrangements you’ve made based on their commitment fall apart because now you’re over-scheduled. It’s a mess.
It would have been better had that person said “I don’t think I can do that.”
I don’t have a problem either saying that or hearing it. The inability to do something, for whatever reason, honestly admitted up front before any time or resource is wasted does not offend me at all. What offends is the unwillingness or inability to state that up front and said individual makes an unkeepable promise. That promise did not happen in a vacuum. Things get built around it and based on it. So when the promise is broken, that section crumbles and everything else is put at risk.
(Yes, I have right now a particular something in mind, but I won’t air that laundry here.)
Sure, you disappoint someone by saying no. For about a minute. The disappointment that comes later when you can’t fulfill your promise lasts a bit more than a minute. It can last a lifetime.
Now, there are all manner of external reasons why promises get derailed and the person who made those promises ought not be held accountable. If they take on the responsibility and make an honest attempt at fulfilling it and Other Shit gets in their way and renders their task impossible, that’s not on them. You might get angry and argue that they should have found a way, but that doesn’t bear on the issue of whether or not they broke a promise. They showed up, ready to play, and then it rained. Or someone else didn’t bring the tools. Or they got hit by a bus. Or their best friend did, and that commitment trumps yours. You can work with that if you know it’s happening. What I’m talking about is the person who steps up and says “I can do that” and then goes off and doesn’t do it. Because.
Because they really didn’t have the time or they really didn’t know how to do it or they simply lacked interest.
So why did they make the promise to begin with? Because they didn’t want to look like a bad person. They hate saying no, they wanted to impress you, or, worse, they didn’t really think it was that important. Any number of reasons, most of them boiling down to a statement something like “Oh, you really wanted that done? Sorry, I didn’t realize you were serious.”
As a corollary to this, the next most annoying thing is to be told “I’ll get back to you” and then never, ever hear back. It’s a species of Being Ignored that drives me personally right up a telephone pole. Just exactly what is so damn difficult about picking up the phone, making a call, and saying “I really can’t/don’t want to/won’t do that?” It’s polite. Maybe there’s an aversion to saying No, as above, but this manifests as evasion rather than flat out honesty.
But plans get ruined by such inconsiderate failures of self-knowledge and integrity. Sometimes plans involving many other people. Telling me you can’t, or won’t, is infinitely better than promising me to do something and then not showing up. I can shrug off the first. The latter has a flypaper tackiness that takes years to peel off.
Granted, sometimes it’s hard to know your limits. It’s hard to know that you really don’t want to do some things until you get into them and see what they are. But as time and life hand you experience, you should get a clue. Then it’s just a matter of acting on that knowledge.
Learn your limits, Know them. Then let others know. It’s polite. And it saves a tremendous amount of clean-up later.
