I have a personal rule that I set for myself many years ago. The rule is this: Whenever I borrow something, I will return it as promised, when promised and somehow in better condition than when I borrowed it.
It works like this: If I borrow your lawnmower, I will clean and oil it before I bring it back. If I borrow your car, it will be filled with gas when I return it. If I borrow your hedge trimmer, I will sharpen the blades before I bring it back. You get the idea.
The exact opposite of this occurred to me when one day, many years ago, an acquaintance borrowed a pair of pliers from me. (I would refer to this gentleman as a friend, but he became just an acquaintance after the borrowing incident.) At the time, we were both relatively young, new homeowners, and I thought that since every household would need a pair of pliers sooner or later, he shouldn’t be having to borrow some from me. He should buy his own.
But I loaned him the pliers. Two weeks later, he still hadn’t returned them, and I called him about it. He said he was finished using them, but he was too busy to return them. (He lived about five miles away, and strangely, he hadn’t been too busy when he wanted to borrow them.)
Later that day, I drove to his house to get my pliers. He wasn’t home, but his wife found them in the garage where he had left them. They were broken.
My “friend” not only had failed to return my pliers, but he had broken them. I had to buy another pair of pliers.
That day, I established another personal rule: Don’t ever lend your tools. And I don’t.
That brings me to another story about how people treat property that belongs to someone else.
At one time I owned duplex rental units in Camarillo. I always prided myself on the condition of my units and kept them in clean, good condition. Whenever I changed tenants, I did an inspection walk-through using a move-in and a move-out checklist to be sure everything was clean and in working order. This was to protect both me and the tenant.
One day I was doing the move-out inspection at one of my units, and when we got to the kitchen, I discovered about 10 large, round burn marks on the floor. The tenant explained that her housekeeper had dropped a red-hot frying pan on the floor one day. I started to note this on my checklist when the tenant asked, “That won’t affect my security deposit will it?”
I said that it certainly would because I would have to have the floor repaired. She replied, “Why? It’s just a rental.”
Just a rental? That must mean that because it’s not an owner-occupied unit that it doesn’t have to be clean or in good condition? What about any prospective tenants to whom I show the property to after she is gone? Won’t they expect the floor to be in good condition? Wouldn’t she expect the same thing if she were looking at it?
Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone respected other people’s things?
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. The opinions and comments in this column are his alone and do not represent the opinions or policies of any outside organization. He can be reached at pburri@west.net.