Take The Moral High Ground

Last night I was “Toastmaster” of our Toastmasters meeting - meaning, I lead the meeting. And one of the responsibilities of the Toastmaster of the meeting is to give an intro speech and set the “theme” for the meeting - although it’s rare everyone else follows the theme. I feel the theme I selected is important for everyone, and decided to post the speech as a blog entry. Enjoy.

Some of you may know that last week I moved into another apartment. I had been in the old apartment for about 2 yrs and figured it is time to move because our landlord was giving us a lot of trouble, first she raised the rent and started to send people to look at the apartment without even telling us. We concluded that our landlord was simply out of touch with reality. What really confirmed our deduction was when it came time for the actual move. First, she would not allow the wuye to give us the slip to allow our moving truck to leave the complex until she had someone look at the apartment, probably to make sure we weren’t steeling anything! Of course, this refusal came on the day of the move. Apparently us telling her several days beforehand didn’t help at all. So, that delayed us a bit. Second, when we first rented the apartment, our landlord provided some furniture in addition to the furniture that I owned. She provided a Sofa Bed, or Shafa Chuan. The Sofa and Bed, however, are mine. In the first contract we had, the two words were together, written as Shafa Chuan. When we went to sign the 2nd year contract, she rewrote it, and we didn’t realize she conveniently added a comma, so now the contract wrote that she provided both a bed and sofa. So, this was a big discussion that ultimately had me dig through our boxes to find the old contract! (This is one reason why I never ever through away any paper) Finally, she insisted that she send us the security deposit only to an agricultural bank account, no other bank. Even after we offered to pay any transfer fee, she still refused. So, we had to spend over an hour in line one day to open the stupid bank account… After all of this, my girlfriend and I were pretty angry and we wanted to do something to make us feel better. I thought about “conveniently forgetting” a package of extremely stinky cheese that would work like a time bomb – give it a few weeks, the apartment will stink like nothing else! After thinking about this a lot, eventually we decided to not do anything. We both feel we did the right thing – let’s be realistic here – the landlord would probably not learn from this- she’ll always be greedy and mean. Looking back, we would probably regret this as well. For me, knowing that I didn’t have do this ultimately makes me feel better. I know that she will eventually get what she has coming to her as life generally works in a circular motion. (Bad Karma) You get when you dish out. So, next time you are confronted with a situation where you could react in a negative way, think about it beforehand and try just letting it go. Take the moral high ground. People in the wrong will always eventually have their day.