Apples and Oranges

     No matter how badly you want to please all parties involved in an endeavour sometimes you just can't. You can't always have your cake without depriving someone else of hers. Let the gatekeeper stand watch in front of the gate to make sure scallywags don't get past without seeming elitist. Judge someone's work on his own scale without making him upset that he's not being seen in contention with his competitors.

      The ages-old battle of quality versus convenience.

     ***

     His job was awful. It really was, oh dear, yes. And this was even before you took into account that he sometimes had to deal with someone fidgeting and staring at him uncomfortably, like a crime had been committed in the immediate vicinity and he was going to determine whether the person across the table got to flee or get jailed.

     He'd probably enjoy that job. He'd be getting paid for it quite well.

     No, this was just a thankless, unacknowledged, grueling exercise. And it wasn't like he was just running around handing out his unsolicited opinions on the street like flyers to a garage sale, which were very big where he came from. No, these people came to him, asking for his help. And then they had the gall to be mad at him!

     Like he was just some... some... thing! Some unemotional thing that didn't worry about taxes or his family, or have hobbies that didn't include people telling him what to do and other people yelling at him! He was not just a robot who looked startlingly similar to a yellow Mynci. He had a life, oh yes he did, thank you very much.

     "What do you mean I'm not worthy of this loan? It's only eighty thousand Neopoints! I bet you're the type of person who thinks his elderly mother can fetch her own flipping soup and that she has no business owning a Schnelly, which is probably her only reliable companion in these dark times!"

     And, ah, the personal insults. He absolutely loved those.

     His job was all about apples and oranges, figuratively speaking, and sometimes they looked quite a bit like lemons, which aren't apples or oranges at all, and he was left to figure out oh my, how did that get in here and what does it mean?

     It was an effective way of thinking about his work, but really all it did in the long run was make him hungry for fruit.

     ***

     Sometimes, there is no middle ground, but being on the opposite side of the experience can help you get there.

     The artist being judged on his own scale will probably learn, when he himself is judging someone else's work, to be a fairer and more objective judge. He'll know how to balance the apples with the oranges and not come across any lemons.

     But it still doesn't quite work. The other person is going to be upset at being called an orange when he really wants to be an apple, and he's going to take it out on the first person because magically everything wrong with the universe is his fault now.

     "What do you mean I'm a delicious citrus fruit? How dare you insult my work so! I'll have you know that I spent seventy thousand hours on this painting and what do you know about art anyway even though you were once in this position?!"

     The problem, as it were, was that everything was subjective. The entire universe, from Kreludor down to Maraqua back up to the Space Station. Neopiankind ran on belief; belief in anything, really, but mostly on the fact that 'I'm right, and anyone who disagrees is wrong'.

     ***

     There were very few lemons in the world, and they popped up at the most inopportune times. Someone to facilitate an argument and make the parties realise that both sides have valid points and that it's all a matter of opinion? Lemons like that don't exist unless they're getting paid to do it, and let's get real: who's going to pay someone to disrupt the careful calamity of the world?

     Even small, niche sections of the world had their special brands of disagreement. Like the banking world, for example.

     It was an awful world sometimes, but a necessary one, he conceded. The city needed money, its citizens needed money, and money didn't grow on trees. There were some scientists and botanists trying, but it wasn't going to happen.

     It would stand to reason that someone working in the company of large sums of money every day would earn quite a lot of money himself, but all he got a lot of was disrespect. And he had to wear a suit to get disrespected at. He couldn't do it while he was comfortable, oh no sir he could not.

     He was trying so very hard to be a lemon in a fruit basket that just didn't want him to be a lemon. The bank had rules, you see, but none of its patrons acknowledged them, because they were basically there to tell the people that you can't ask for this money without someone judging your entire financial history and many other parts of your life and that just would not do, so ignoring the rules was the norm.

     ***

     "It says here that you're prone to late payments," he said, looking at a file.

     The purple Xweetok across from him shrugged his shoulders. "My business isn't making the money quickly enough."

     "And you think that means you should get more money because...?"

     "I need money to make the business better so I can get more money."

     "But you do realise that this doesn't reflect well upon you, right?"

     "Why not? It's simple economics."

     "Okay, let's try this: what sort of changes are you going to make with the money? Your business deals with magical cures and artifacts, right?"

     "I think I'm focusing on the wrong sorts of artifacts. People don't want nice, friendly relics and potions, they want dark, misty ones that cause misfortune to other people."

     "You're not doing yourself any favours."

     "What! But I'm trying to -"

     "Mr. Lake," he said, "what you're telling me is that you want to use this money, money that currently belongs to the city, which is trying to benefit its citizens, to harm other Neopians."

     The Xweetok sat silently, a contemplative look on his face. Then:

     "What if I promise no refunds in the event of injury?"

     "You're not getting the money."

     "I demand to speak to someone else!"

     "Sir, this is not personal."

     "The blazes it's not! You don't like magic, is that it? Or maybe you're scared that someone will hex you if you give me the loan! Is there someone else around that I could talk to? Someone reasonable?"

     "Would it be any better if the chairman told you that you couldn't get this loan? Because I can write him a nice letter about this."

     "What if I write to him first telling him about your inability to do your job?"

     "My job is not to hand people money. It's to determine whether or not you can get any based on your reputation."

     "My reputation as a fine, upstanding citizen!"

     "With a history of asking for money and not paying it back."

     The Xweetok further declined to see the point. "It's not like you can't just make more money, isn't it? I mean, there's a mint half a mile away!"

     "Yes, but it costs money to make money, and if there's too much money in the economy things will cost more. Look," he said, before the Xweetok could say anything else, "work on paying back the money you already owe, and then come back if you need more and see what the circumstances are then."

     "How on earth am I going to get more money in this state?!"

     "Just because there are no appealing options doesn't mean they're not there."

     And that was that. He refused to have anything more to do with Mr. Lake, and in fact got up first to leave his own office.

     ***

     What was the point of rules if nobody bothered with them? He was sure that the woodworker's guild never had problems with people following instructions, or the assassin's guild. Why were the clients of the administration's guild the stupidest?

     And why, for the love of Fyora, did having a government job mean that others could sneer at you and get away with it? If you provoked a member of the thieves' guild, you'd get stolen from. But if you provoked a government official, absolutely nothing happened. And if the offending bureaucrat did try something, he'd get sacked for 'abusing his power'.

     He reflected upon the merits of his job, as he often did, on his way home. It was warm and humid, and he was still in his suit, so his thoughts were unusually more sour. They rambled and went off-course a lot too, but that was nothing new.

     He sighed. One day he'd get enough, and he'd quit.

     He promised himself this. One day, he would be done.

     ***

     There's something satisfying about making something. There's something even more satisfying about making something better. And the streets were lined with vendors and merchants and other happy folks, and customers and passersby that were equally agreeable. The place worked.

     But it was easy to forget that you've successfully facilitated something so prosperous when you mixed your metaphors a lot and usually got the short end of the stick. After all, you only get thanked when you grant someone the means to do something, not afterwards when he's done it. And meanwhile you were stuck making decisions that would change lives, and not always for the better, because sometimes you had to make the wrong one, even if it was, in fact, the right one, and if you made a mistake you had a big mess to clean up.

     In the grand scheme of things, who really cared about apples and oranges? Everything, more or less, crumbled down into false analogies and insults anyway. It was impossible to please people when they just saw the messenger and not the message and its actual origin.

     And what, his brain casually threw out, does it mean that not all apples are the same?

The End