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Telling Lies

Someone I know (we will call her L) has been telling little lies about work she is doing for almost a year now. At first it appeared that she sincerely wished to do the things she was representing she would or already was. There was every appearance that such was indeed the case - there was a lot of action that an outsider could genuinely mistake for work. Then at some point, it started to appear as if the volume of work was greatly exaggerated. In order to cover for the foundational lie on top of which the whole edifice of lies was built, L had to manufacture things do to that tangentially connected to work that needed to be done. It hardly matters what the work was because the way this unfolded over time is pretty universal. 

Say a person was tasked with cleaning my yard and they came in with the full set of tools and represented to me that the work would take 8-10 hours. If I have never done any yardwork myself, chances are I don't know how far off the mark that estimate is. In reality that is already a 5x of the real number of hours. Now say this person tells me that it is not possible to progress until the tree line is considerably thinned because the equipment would not be able to move around properly until that was done. After the tree issue is done, the person tells me that they need to level the ground in one portion of the yard because it is a trip hazard. Then they discover some buried sprinkler system that needs to be taken care of and so on. We arrive at the 10th hour and the yard clean is yet to begin. That would be in the style of L. 

Reading this essay about the average number of lies people tell each day brought L to mind. She tells her lies for a reason and I almost certain she is not a horrible, ill-intentioned person at her core. There is a reason why she does what she does as is the case with the person failing to complete yardwork - their driver may not be greed or incompetence. Maybe they see a target state vision and a path to getting there that simply flies in the face of commonsense. Seen in that light L is not lying at all and neither is the person who 10 hours into the yard cleanup job leaves the homeowner with a bigger mess than they started out with. 

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