The Slack in the Rope
Most refusals are manufactured by the request that precedes them. Ask, and you hand a stranger a decision; decisions have owners, and owners are cautious. The person you approach gains nothing whatever by saying yes, and stands to lose a small amount of standing if your convenience turns out badly, so he consults the rule, and the rule, written by people who imagined abuse rather than need, says no. Act, and the same person faces an entirely different arithmetic. Now the burden of motion is his. He must notice, mind, compose a sentence, send it, and then sustain an interest in you across the following week. Almost nobody will pay that much for the pleasure of stopping you.
Between the things you are permitted to do and the things you will actually be punished for doing there is a great deal of slack, and almost nobody takes it up. Written down, the rule looks like a rope pulled tight. Put your weight on it and it swings. I have come to think that the practical skill of adult life, more than charm or diligence, is the ability to judge how much slack a given rope is carrying, because the figure most people work with is absurdly low. They treat every rope as taut and call it prudence.
Consider the landlord. Ask him whether you may paint the second bedroom and he will say no within forty seconds, because the wall belongs to him, because he has seen what other people's taste does to a wall, and because every yes he has given in fifteen years has been read back to him by someone moving out. His refusal is not laziness. It is sound policy for a man who cannot inspect your judgment down a telephone line, and he would be a fool to abandon it for a stranger who has lived in his flat for six weeks. Paint the room, and he must find out, mind enough to raise it, decide it is worth the friction with a tenant who pays on time, and put it in writing. However irregular, however unapproved, however plainly against the clause on page four, the wall stays green. The clause was never a wall. It was a hedge against a conversation, and you declined the conversation.
Bureaucracies are the purest case, because they have no memory and no appetite. Telephone the office in advance and describe your situation, and a person paid to be careful will give you the safest possible answer, which is that it cannot be done, or that you need a document that does not exist. Arrive instead with a complete file, correctly assembled, cheerfully presented, and your papers join the stack, and the stack moves. The clerk at the counter is not a judge weighing your worthiness. He is a man with a queue behind you and an interest in the queue getting shorter.
The asymmetry is social before it is administrative. A refusal given in advance is aimed at nobody. You have done nothing yet, so there is nothing to accuse you of, and the man can hand you his no as policy, as simply the way things are done here, and remain on excellent terms with you for the rest of the year. It costs him not one unit of standing. A refusal given afterwards must be aimed. It says that you did something you should not have done, which obliges him to conclude that you are a person of poor judgment and then to tell you so, with his name at the bottom of it, and to hold that position through whatever you say back. The first is a sentence. The second is a quarrel, and he has to want the quarrel more than he wants a quiet Thursday.
Consider what the slack pays out. The painted wall. The ninety minutes you take back every Monday by declining to attend a meeting nobody has the appetite to summon you to, which is fifty hours a year, which is a fortnight of your one life recovered from a man with a slide deck. The desk by the window that nobody assigned you and nobody has ever asked you to leave. None of it was granted and all of it was kept. People mistake the sensation of having asked for the fact of having tried, and they pay for the mistake in years.