YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED
Q. I live with a man who turns out to be maddeningly mean in lots of little ways. We share ownership of a house and (in theory) each pays half of all household costs, food, etc. We both work and earn about the same income. Each week when reckoning time comes around he manages not to pay me what he owes me, charges me a little more than I owe him, or pays me a little less than he owes me, 'rounding it up (or down)', 'not having the right change', 'forgetting' to bring his wallet when we go out, and 'forgetting' to Pay me back when I lend him some money or when I buy the drinks or the tickets. I never do the same to him. The amounts con- cerned are usually modest —between £1 and £S or so — but they add up. If I want to be paid back, I always have to ask, which makes me feel embarrassed, and he always man- ages to make me feel petty and mean for mentioning it. Am I? Perhaps I am. It is making me absolutely furious. How can I stop this? What can I do, Mary?
Name withheld, Cheltenham, Glos.
A. You should not take it personally. Some of the most popular figures on the social circuit are also among the meanest, and the degree of meanness practised bears no relation to the degree of fondness felt by the meanie towards his robbee. (One his beloved daughter to telephone from
Dear Mary.. .
hospital to say how her operation had gone: he couldn't bring himself to pay for a call from his own line.) Penny-pinching and sponging are the meanie's very raison d'être, giving him a real sense of small-time satis- faction and achievement to which he natu- rally becomes addicted. Do not rob your friend of this pleasure. Instead, secretly compute roughly how many pounds he robs you of each month and then see if you can cunningly inveigle him into performing free services — such as gardening, chauffeuring or decorating — to the tune of the figure owed. Having extracted the cash back from him in kind, the month's end reckoning should see you both experiencing a warm ripple of achievement.
Q. My wife and I recently gave a birthday party for our twins of seven. We hired a local sports hall as the venue and organised every- thing very carefully with games appropriate for seven-year-olds, prizes appropriate for seven-year-olds and named party bags for all the children who had accepted. Imagine our dismay when three of the parents and nan- nies who turned up to drop off their charges released between them a total of five younger children into the room at the same time, saying things such as, 'Mind if they stay too? Only I'm going shopping; it won't be much fun for them.' Then they disappeared. As any parent knows, toddlers are incompat- ible with seven-year-olds as far as game-play- ing is concerned and, since there was no one else to supervise them except my wife and me, their presence effectively wrecked the party. How could we politely have said 'No' to their thoughtless guardians?
RB., London SELZ A. When the parents asked 'Mind if they stay?' you could have smiled eagerly saying, `No, of course not, as long as you don't mind waiting till their minder turns up. You see, we obviously can't look after smaller children at the same time as run- ning games for seven-year-olds — it would wreck the party — so we arranged for a friend's au pair to come and supervise any other extra children that people might want to leave that we weren't prepared for. The trouble is, she's a bit unreliable and if she doesn't turn up in the next few minutes, we'll have to assume she's not coming.'
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