I move to a new town. I look and look and look for apartments, most of which are out of my price range, and finally find one that I can afford. Turns out, I can’t stand my landlady. I have to pay her my rent in person, if I want anything in the place fixed I have to go through her, and if I have an issue with a neighbor that doesn’t warrant calling the cops, I have to deal with her. Even if I wanted to move again so soon, it’s been established that it’s damn hard to find a place in this town—it’d take months, during which I’d have to interact with the landlady several times. It would be far more convenient and pleasant if I liked her.
So what don’t I like about the landlady? Let’s say she has a strong accent from her country of origin that I find challenging to understand; she’s paranoid about people paying rent late and usually wants it early; she hires a plumber who leaves debris all over the place whenever he makes a repair; and she has an evil cat, which has bitten me. (Note that I made all these things up before coming up with stories about them.)
The accent represents the difficulty of learning a foreign language. I don’t speak a second language at all—I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in school. It is hard, and must have been very threatening for her to move here, but she did it anyway. The rent—she’s probably been stiffed a few times. It is, after all, a relatively cheap apartment—her tenants are likely to be less able to afford regular payments than some, and she’s operating on small profit margins. The plumber is probably cheaper than his competition. And maybe she picked up the evil cat as a stray (a generous act) and its aggression is a holdover from life on the streets. Maybe it bites her too but she forgives it because she loves animals.
Now I know she knows more languages than me, and have reason to suspect that she’s careful with money and kind to animals. There we have groundwork. I can ask longtime tenants to tell me (nice) stories about her and gather information about other nice traits she has—suppose I learn that she supports some relatives back in the old country, that she’s good at crochet, and that she volunteers some weekends with the Humane Society (whence, it turns out, her cat. Maybe the cat was considered unadoptable because of the biting and she saved it from being put down.)
Now I have a far more well-rounded picture of the landlady than my initial one. I can start acting in ways that are consistent with liking her: I take special care to pay my rent a bit early each month, I offer to let her use my place as the show apartment, I note her birthday and get her a skein of yarn, I donate fifteen dollars to the Humane Society (with or without telling her, as long as I’m doing it because I know she’d approve), and I don’t pick any fights with my neighbors that she’d have to deal with.
Okay, sure.
I move to a new town. I look and look and look for apartments, most of which are out of my price range, and finally find one that I can afford. Turns out, I can’t stand my landlady. I have to pay her my rent in person, if I want anything in the place fixed I have to go through her, and if I have an issue with a neighbor that doesn’t warrant calling the cops, I have to deal with her. Even if I wanted to move again so soon, it’s been established that it’s damn hard to find a place in this town—it’d take months, during which I’d have to interact with the landlady several times. It would be far more convenient and pleasant if I liked her.
So what don’t I like about the landlady? Let’s say she has a strong accent from her country of origin that I find challenging to understand; she’s paranoid about people paying rent late and usually wants it early; she hires a plumber who leaves debris all over the place whenever he makes a repair; and she has an evil cat, which has bitten me. (Note that I made all these things up before coming up with stories about them.)
The accent represents the difficulty of learning a foreign language. I don’t speak a second language at all—I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in school. It is hard, and must have been very threatening for her to move here, but she did it anyway. The rent—she’s probably been stiffed a few times. It is, after all, a relatively cheap apartment—her tenants are likely to be less able to afford regular payments than some, and she’s operating on small profit margins. The plumber is probably cheaper than his competition. And maybe she picked up the evil cat as a stray (a generous act) and its aggression is a holdover from life on the streets. Maybe it bites her too but she forgives it because she loves animals.
Now I know she knows more languages than me, and have reason to suspect that she’s careful with money and kind to animals. There we have groundwork. I can ask longtime tenants to tell me (nice) stories about her and gather information about other nice traits she has—suppose I learn that she supports some relatives back in the old country, that she’s good at crochet, and that she volunteers some weekends with the Humane Society (whence, it turns out, her cat. Maybe the cat was considered unadoptable because of the biting and she saved it from being put down.)
Now I have a far more well-rounded picture of the landlady than my initial one. I can start acting in ways that are consistent with liking her: I take special care to pay my rent a bit early each month, I offer to let her use my place as the show apartment, I note her birthday and get her a skein of yarn, I donate fifteen dollars to the Humane Society (with or without telling her, as long as I’m doing it because I know she’d approve), and I don’t pick any fights with my neighbors that she’d have to deal with.
Thanks! Okay, that’s pretty clear now, makes sense.