The Confusion of Dealing with Two People Instead of One

Has anyone here made the mistake of dealing with a middle man regarding an ongoing issue, only to realise that when there's a disagreement later on that it is very difficult for your mind to backtrack on events and say "no, that wasn't what I was told"? Is this a common ploy that is used by people in certain industries?Because when you're dealing with two or more people it can be hard to remember which person said a certain thing.

This has happened to me twice recently, and I'm not necessarily saying that I thought it was a ploy in either case. It happened once with securing a house to rent, and another time when I was dealing with recruitment lady more than the actual person I'd be working for. In the case of the recruitment lady, when I eventually got the job (that she'd talked up so much), I would ask my boss things like "so when is X going to happen" and have her say "I never said that". At those moments I would not quite be able to recall which one of them would have said so to me, or whether it was by phone call or email.

Apologies for the bad title

 

always go directly to the source

 

The other time was when I was securing a house to rent. After visiting the auctioneer of the town I was about to move to, I ended up getting a call from the mother of the owner of a near by house. The house owner owned a local business so I presumed he might have been too busy to make contact. The mother said that there were two bedrooms upstairs (her son in one) and one downstairs and that I'd have a choice of the free one upstairs or the one downstairs. I presumed that I could take what she said for granted.

At one point I did get a phone call from the owner, but it was off her phone! I guess it was his mother's idea that he should give me a call. I had a brief few words with him but I didn't think to ask for his own mobile number! It said a lot about him too, that he didn't take the initiative to ring me himself. A few days after this I was realised (due to my own circumstances) that there was going to be a 3 week delay before I would be able to move in, so to be fair I said I'd inform them (his mother) as soon as I could.

It wasn't until the viewing 5 weeks later that I relaised that the owner was actually sleeping in a different bedroom to the one she described. He was in the downstairs bedroom and said that he wanted to move upstairs and give that one to me. The two bedrooms upstairs shared a bathroom and one of them was his daughter's, who he said would come down to visit about once a fortnight. That basically meant that I'd be sharing a bathroom with his 13 year old daughter so you can understand why he wanted to move upstairs. Now if I'd been dealing with him, instead of his mother, would he have described the house the same way she did?

Now if I had asked for his number that time that he rang from his mother's phone, I could have dealt with him from there onwards. But I dealt with her from there onwards, and I guess I made the assumption that she was keeping him informed. Anyway in the end after I finally moved in and got fired from the job (different story entirely) I had to move out! When I was asking him how much of my deposit I'd get back, he argued that he couldn't give any of the deposit back because all of this had been sprung on him. It was only later that I remembered that I did actually make contact with him when he rang from his mother's phone and if I'd taken his number at the time, then he wouldn't have been able to say that all this was "sprung on him"!

 

its only a mistake when its a matter of choice at all.
real life is complex, and invariably involves being 'in the middle' between not merely two, but many, each with their own different sides, agendas and objectives.
there is no other way to avoid this situation, that i know of, then to avoid a majority of direct social interactions,
but instead, to wish all sides the best, and hope and try to assist, in a general and public way, for all to overcome the blindness, their hatred and distrust of logic, imposes upon them.

 

yeah, i came here to talk about my most confusing threesome.

 

why exactly three? the more sums the better sums?
i mean as long as nobody's got the plague.
(and there's enough of each flavour to go around, not just all for one and nun fur sum)

 

you're welcome to whatever number you prefer, but three applies here because the thread was about dealing with two people, and myself plus two people equals exactly three.

 

.

 

Are you and Pilot the same person?

 

Make sure that it's always somebody you can trust. If the third person is somebody that doesn't see eye to eye with you and isn't on the same page as you then you are better off sticking to people you trust.