In my very first posting I told you that I had been screwed over by my insurance company.
Nobody's interested to know exactly what happened, but let's just say that I was switching from company X to company Y, and because of an error made by company Y I ended up paying for both insurances.
Now obviously I went to talk about this with company Y in order to cancel the contract seeing that they had made an error. For the first week or so they told me on the phone "don't worry, everything's ok, don't pay company X, and you'll see that they won't take legal action against you". WTF???!!!! I'm supposed to put my ass on the line for you morons?
Anyway, in the end I did pay company X because they were right. The response I got from company Y was that even though the mistake was theirs, they can't cancel my contract. They offered to help me get out of company X's contract (not possible btw), but since I had already paid X, there wasn't much they could do. They had me understand that in fact the mistake was mine because I had paid company X, and in the end I can blame myself for having two insurances.
"Your problem is that you're too honest". Their words. True story.
These days honesty seems to be considered more like a weakness than a strength. Being able to trick people and being dishonest is seen as something an intelligent person does. If you're honest, well, that's just stupidity.
I've been brought up with the idea that you always ALWAYS tell the truth. You always do what's right, and you always take responsibility for your mistakes and try to make them right. Obviously it's almost impossible to always be this correct, but I still believe that honesty is the way to go. I'm not good at telling lies either, you can see it in my face immediately. I'm not a saint, but trying to do the right thing and telling the truth is something that's valued and considered an honorable thing in my family. I still believe that in the end it pays off to be honest.
They did this wallet-test in various cities world wide.
see the article of dailymail UK
12 wallets were placed in various places where there were people passing by, with the owners contact details inside. I wouldn't want to toot my own horn here, but damned this time we did good. In Helsinki, 11 out of the 12 wallets were returned. Next was Mumbai with 9 wallets, then Budapest and New York with 8. In Lisbon, only one of the 12 wallets found their owner again.
Finns may be quiet and nerdy, they drink too much and have a tendency to commit suicides more than other nationalities, but damned at least we're honest. I'm super proud of this result, and by no means do I take it as a sign of weakness or stupidity. More than a couple of times I myself have found money on the street and tried to find the owner, and only when there was absolutely no way of doing it did I keep the money (there was no wallet, just the money lying around). One time, seeing that it was a fairly large sum of money, again without a wallet attached, I took it to the nearest police station, where they kept it for a month or so. Since nobody came to claim it, in the end they send the money to me.
Did I feel stupid? No.
Did I feel good about having done the right thing? Yes.
Did I buy myself something that I had wanted for a long long time but didn't have the money? Yes.
Did I feel like my honesty had paid off? Yes.
When I came to Italy someone once said to me that it was weird that I had this trust in people. That I wasn't worried about people screwing me over. To me that was a silly question at the time, but sadly I've noticed that here, you can't really trust anyone (apart from your friends and loved ones). You can't trust a professional at an insurance company to know how to do his job. You can't trust that the person who just scratched your car is going to leave a note on your windshield so you can contact him/her for the damages if necessary. At work we tell more lies to our clients than we tell the truth, and they do the same with us. It makes me a little sad to think that I'm getting used to this kind of an environment.
I don't want to get used to dishonesty. I don't want to learn how to be a good liar.
I want to learn how to paint and sing and speak German and be more generous, but learning how to lie.... useless. Would you put it in your CV? "I speak 4 languages, can use Microsoft Office and oh, I also lie very well".
Hope to have given you something to think about over the weekend.
And if not, have a good one anyway.
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| photo: Macs Da Rodda, all rights reserved |
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