Strange Accounting

If I load the Starbucks app with 30 dollars, I have spent money on Starbucks. But when I scan my barcode in the Starbucks app the next day when buying a coffee, I have not spent a single dollar. In the second scenario, the coffee is free, paid for, so I might as well stop in today and order one. And then another one tomorrow. That works for the three to five trips to Starbucks after that, until I have to load up the app with funds again.

If Brooke buys something at Target, and takes it back, she gets a refund. If during the same trip to Target, after obtaining the refund, she buys a new item with the refund money, the new item didn’t cost a cent. The refund money covered it. You follow? This is the strange accounting they did not teach you in school. You learned this on your own. You weren't taught accounting in school, so what were you supposed to do?

I have heard that companies love gift cards. Why? Because they know there’s a chance, however slight, that when you receive a gift card, you’ll forget to use it. It’ll get buried in your sock drawer with your five-dollar sunglasses. I am sure that 99% of the time, gift cards get used. But that 1% that stay in the sock drawer? Target Corporation’s annual revenue last year was $109 billion. You do the math. I could buy a professional soccer club with that windfall.

I have also heard the quote from the late David Foster Wallace that successful ads are ones that “create an anxiety relievable by purchase.” Even though the world is abundant with treasures and plentiful with resources, what’s marketed is scarcity and urgency. Act now, while supplies last!

Lately Brooke and I have tried to go on “spending fasts.” From everything other than the grocery store and gasoline. No takeout food, no restaurants. No Amazon orders of more newborn onesies. Yes, Dean could use a couple more since he’s growing so fast, but we can make do for now with the three that fit. Not one person is going to judge my two-month-old for wearing the same outfit two days in a row. I have seen grown-ups do this all my life, and I never judged them for it. I just hoped they at least had on a new pair of underwear.

I like buying books. But I don’t need that book. Books take up space and they are a bitch to move. They’re like the ugly dog you wish would run out the door forever but you couldn’t live with yourself if it did. Book-purchasing fast it is.

I can find something wonderful to read at the library, enough for several lifetimes. I may not be able to buy the newest novel by Philipp Meyer, or the latest nonfiction by Michael Lewis, but I still haven’t finished reading Liar’s Poker, currently sitting high on my shelf. So who do I think I am to pay $30 for his newest work when my baby needs a bigger onesie? Do I really need a Barnes & Noble membership?

You know I want that $7 Starbucks latte with olive oil in it because what in the hell is that? but my K-Cup and the pot at my office will do for this week. Don’t get me started on all the streaming services I subscribe to and watch once a quarter. With this writer and actor strike, it’ll now take me only 10,000 years to watch all the content on these platforms, instead of the 100,000 it would take if they didn't stop working.

I don’t know of any moderation technique that has worked for me, for any vice. It is all or nothing. Food, drinks, shopping. Moderation takes willpower, it is exhausting. How much brain power do we really have that we can reserve some for stopping ourselves from our impulsions that hit us every second of every day? The cleanest thing and, paradoxically, the easiest thing, once you get over the hump, is to completely fast from it.

Then you look up and after a week you’ve spent not a single dollar. Do you know how incredible of an accomplishment that is for this household? It is the Spartans winning the Battle of Thermopylae. It is remembering the Alamo as if Davy Crockett survived the Spanish forces. It is independence, without San Jacinto.

But a final note—beware! What can this restraint lead to? Overspending the next week. You know what I mean. Moderating your calories all week only to order, in a Saturday-night stupor after consuming a box of wine and three helpings of lasagna, a modest $500 worth of Hearth & Hand decoratives. An entire week’s worth of discipline, gone!

What then? Forget about it. Beat yourself up for five minutes, then get back in the saddle tomorrow.

Amortize the depreciation of the calories, and the dollars.

Cancel a subscription to something and put those future monthly savings under Accounts Receivable.

Commit fraud on yourself for God’s sake if that’s what it takes. Trick yourself into thinking you’re not the glut you believe yourself to be, and after enough trickery, it becomes the truth.

As I said, this is strange accounting. It may have gotten you into this mess, but go easy on yourself—strange accounting can get you out of it, too.

What Even Is a Deposition?

Leading up to a trial, there are these things called depositions. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. Perhaps you’ve seen a clip of Trump as the subject of one lately.

What are they? They are recordings of a series of questions and answers between the lawyer asking the questions, and the witness, or party to a lawsuit, providing the answers. They happen before the trial. Usually they are video recorded.

If you are being “deposed”, then you are the “deponent”—this word having Latin roots meaning “to put down” on paper—and your words are being memorialized, sworn to under oath.

It appears the act of deposing someone goes as far back as the 15th century, and “officers” of the court would take a person’s statement and write down a summary for the court’s benefit. No one, especially not the lawyers (if there were even any available), would participate.

Today you will not find a deposition without at least two attorneys in the room. Over the centuries, depositions grew into the verbatim question and answer video recordings that they are today, often lasting all day, if not longer, with lawyers ever-present.

OK: Isn’t a recorded question and answer dialogue between a lawyer and a witness the same thing as testimony in court? Why yes, yes it is.

Why do we have depositions? You might think that because I am a lawyer that I can quickly and wholly justify the use of depositions, but I assure you, I am coming to this from a place of ignorance, as I do a lot of things, and you are coming along with me.

My first question would be, why do I need to record what someone will say at a trial? Isn’t that what the trial is for? I think a lawyer who likes doing extra work would argue that by having depositions, we can save time and money. We save time and money, the argument goes, because by conducting a deposition before the trial, we learn what a person will say at trial, so we have an idea where this case will end up. And then from there we can convince ourselves that the only variable remaining during the trial will be convincing the judge or jury to hate us slightly less than the other side.

A better argument for allowing depositions is that there might be an elderly witness, or a witness in failing health, or both, and she might not live long enough to see the trial. We need to get her testimony recorded in case she dies and never gets a chance to testify in court. Her recorded testimony might be crucial to the outcome of the case, and by preserving it, there’s a chance we can play it for the jury at the trial.

To me, this is the best cost-efficiency argument for allowing depositions, as I can assure you, just going straight to trial will be a lot cheaper for a client than conducting 20 all-day depositions before the trial itself.

One or two of those depositions might divulge a piece of information before trial that entices a settlement, saving a client from getting punted by a jury. See: Tucker Carlson’s text messages about the January 6 insurrection on the eve of the trial between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems—Fox News settled for the tidy sum of $787.5 million, rather than proceed to trial and allow a jury to read those messages.

Still, though, ordinary or specific disclosures (read: give me all your text messages) are probably what divulged that Tucker message in particular, though I don’t know that for sure. And even so, a client can settle mid-trial before the jury has a chance to render a verdict, if the trial isn’t going well.

The data that might show whether it is better to conduct numerous depositions or, surprises be damned, simply go straight to trial without them, will forever be hard to come by, if at all. You will never be able to split-test a real trial, i.e., try the trial twice to a jury verdict, with depositions and without (to say nothing of the nuances of each and every trial). No two trials are ever the same, even if it’s the “same” dispute being litigated all over again.

So what is the real reason we lawyers like depositions? We like them because they let us see the future. A deposition, at its core, is a pretrial tool that allows a lawyer to get down on paper what a relevant witness has to say about the case, ahead of the trial. It allows the lawyer to pin the witness down, marry them to their words, so they can’t later try to squirm out of what they said (though they will often do that anyway). Further, maybe something that witness says during their deposition will open up a new avenue of questions, a new line of inquiry, a hole to rabbit down that might divulge other relevant matters.

Lawyers hate surprises. You may have heard the lawyer adage of “don’t ever ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.” Well, this is bullshit. We ask hundreds of those very questions—we just do them before trial. And that’s probably why depositions have stuck around, damn the pretrial cost, so that at trial we appear all-knowing and omniscient, minimizing surprises.

In other words, because my client is paying me a lot of money, if you, witness, are going to screw me at trial with your testimony, I want to know now. I want to know before we go to court. A deposition is a tool for anal-retentive lawyers, which is to say most of us, to have the ability to know the “future” and eliminate as many variables as possible. I’d rather air out your dirty laundry now, just you and me, before it’s you, me, and the jury.

Thank You for What?

We were at a gathering recently, Brooke and I and Dean, and someone said, pointing to Dean, “Aw, he is so cute!” to which I responded “Aw, thank you.”

Thank you for what, exactly?

Maybe I’m thinking because Dean, being a month old, won’t say it for himself, my ‘thank you’ is on his behalf.

No, no…I am taking the comment as a compliment to me. And why am I doing that?

The person nods at my “thank you” in response to her compliment of my son and continues to smile and we talk about how the lack of sleep sucks but well, you manage.

But what if she responded to my “thank you” with “Noooo no no… he’s cute in spite of you.” I would without a doubt laugh out loud, just for her having the balls to say such a thing. Realistically she would never say that. But she might be thinking it.

Which brings me to the deeper question. What does my saying “thank you” in this situation—someone complimenting my child’s attributes—say about me?

One of the base issues here, I believe, is that we are generally not very good at taking compliments. You might know what I mean. Someone compliments our hair, our tan after a vacation, our thinner waistline—anything having to do with appearance—and we deflect.

We might respond with a quick “aw shucks thanks” or worse, “oh thank you…you look good too!” Like oh yeah I’m sure the complimentor really felt that one from your heart, when you shot a generic compliment right back at them in response to theirs. But we do it involuntarily. It is hard to say a simple ‘thank you.’

Why? Maybe we haven’t noticed the change in ourselves (questionable), or maybe we were expecting the compliment (yikes), or maybe we think we don’t deserve it (worst of all).

That said, this situation here—thanking someone for a compliment of my baby—is different. It’s like we don’t know what to say. If someone compliments my child’s cuteness and I just shrug my shoulders and say “yeah”, while that’s kind of funny, it might come off as rude. And we hate coming off as rude, especially here in the south. So we might come up with something like “That’s nice of you to say” or “I appreciate you saying that” (odd).

More than likely, what is going on in my brain circuit in that split-second, is I’m taking the compliment as a compliment of myself, if an indirect one, and I’m saying thank you for it. Why am I taking it as a compliment to me? Well, because I helped make him. And I’m thinking by way of complimenting my child’s appearance, the complimentor might be complimenting my own to some degree. This is of course horseshit if not conceited, but when I say “thank you” to this compliment, I feel that is exactly what my thank you back to them implies.

Why is my instinctive reaction to say thank you? Am I alone in this? Surely not. But it is a strange position.

Do people say thank you when someone compliments how cute their dog is? And if so, is it because they believe it’s an indirect compliment to the dog owner, i.e., “hey man you can really pick ‘em out of a brood!” or “wow you have great taste in breed selection”. I think dog owners do say thank you in response to someone complimenting their dog. But why. I suppose same as above—they view the statement of the compliment as a reflection of their good qualities, of something they did—I picked this puppy out, me.

We are not good at direct compliments, so what makes you think we’ll be able to handle a supposed indirect compliment very well, either?

About a week later I was at the gym and one of our friends said, “Brooke looks so good already after having the baby.” Guess what I said back? That’s right. You know it. I said: “thank you”. What? I suppose the silence needed to be filled with words.

I only hoped she didn’t hear my thanks before I followed it up with “yeah, I’m just glad my kids have her genetics.”

She laughed, I laughed, we ended the conversation and went about our day. And while I sat down to write a blog inspired by the conversation, she, without a doubt, never once thought of it again.