Fact or fiction?

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. — Mark Twain

My kids have broken things over the years and then tried to blame it on someone else. I question them and they give me their story. I do a little bit of investigating to see if their story would match the circumstance involved. Sometimes they don’t, so I go back to the kid and ask for their story again. This time it changes a little bit because they can’t quite remember what they told me the first time. Once I ask them questions about things that don't match, they then concoct a different version of what happened. At this point I call them out on the fact that they are lying and after I give them those evil “You better tell me the truth or else” eyes, I get the truth.

Why lie in the first place? You’re going to get caught eventually unless you can remember all of the lies you told. I’ve seen it time and time again. Either in the news where someone murders someone and by the time they go down the story has changed a dozen times or when a guy gets caught cheating because he couldn’t remember what he told all of the girls.

If you run a shady business, your lies will catch up to you and you could lose everything. I just dealt with someone whose lies caught up with her yesterday. My ECSU™ business partners and I had hired a woman to create some marketing materials for us. She had asked for the full amount up front, which I felt funny about doing, but because she was friends with one of my partners and I had seen her work before, we went ahead and paid her all of the money that would have been owed.

First, we had asked for three proofs and never received them. Then she gave us one thing to look at and it was not our vision. We kept going back to her for adjustments and corrections. We had given her a deadline to have the items completed by. That deadline came and went with no products ready. We finally gave up and decided to ask for our money back. We filed a claim and waited to hear word on the outcome of the situation. After almost 30 days, I had heard on Saturday that we had lost because the review team had believed that the items were intangible because the lady had stated that the items were a service.

To say I was flabbergasted was an understatement. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I had called my partners to give them the news and had one of them get on the phone with me so that we could ask these people how this could happen. The items were clearly stated in the invoice sent to us as being tangible items. After talking with a supervisor, the situation was finally taken care of in our favor. He had to dig deep to find out that she herself had stated that the items were supposed to be printed in one of her first emails to them.

He had told us that after that email she had tried to get out of it by stating that the items were a service when they asked for a tracking number. She had tried to find some type of loophole or way to work around the system so that the case was found in her favor. In the end her lies caught up to her and she lost, not only the money she had received, which was refunded back to us, but her friendship with my partner and any new business that we would have passed her way if she had done a good job in the first place.

If you are truthful in your actions you don’t have to try and remember what your lies are.