The Borrowers

Many years ago I was a smoker. Every so often one of my acquaintances would claim to give up smoking (what they gave up was buying) and would approach me with the request to “borrowâ€� a cigarette. Clearly they never intended to repay that loan. It was just a way of salving their guilty beggar’s conscience.  

Children of all ages use this same technique to put the bite on their parents for money. “We’ll make this a loan, Dad. I will pay interest and everything.� Don’t hold your breath waiting for the first payment. In all fairness I have to say that although my kids never did this to me, I do have firsthand experience with this type of situation.

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Book borrowers can be extremely careless about returning your property. I have learned over the years that there are three rules to loaning books: never loan out a book that you are afraid of losing, try to get one of their books to hold hostage if yours does not come back and put your name on the fly leaf in ink.

I knew a guy that loaned a really rare book to someone and wound up having to camp on his doorstep one morning until the borrower arose, then had to help him search for the book. He found it on the floor helping to level a table with a short leg.

The worst is the borrower who loans your book to a third party. Now that the book has passed from his hands, he tends to forget about it. The third party borrower may not feel the need to return your property anytime soon. The more steps removed, the less urgency.

Tools are an area I have never been bothered with as I do not own anything sophisticated. I am what you would call mechanically reclined. Power tools just help me to make my mistakes faster, so I tend to work with hand tools. This is why I still have all of my appendages.

The funny thing about borrowers is that the worst offenders are often people that could easily afford to buy their own stuff.  Here I am trying to decide whether to buy lunch or a book while the borrower flips my/his latest acquisition into the back of his Lamborghini on the way to Starbucks for a $5 cup of coffee.

I find that loaning stuff out, including money, has become less and less of a problem as the years go by. The reason is that I am just about out of stuff to loan, especially money.

Say, you wouldn’t happen to have an extra few bucks? You know, just until payday?

Bill Abrams resides (and tries to avoid the practice of lending anything) in Pine Plains.