I say a lot of things that start with, “I’m sure…”.  I’m sure that woman ahead of me at the check out who is screaming at the cashier is perfectly nice… she’s just stressed.  I’m sure that the big, scary ape of a man at the bar who just grabbed one of my ass-cheeks would never do that if he were sober.  I’m sure that the young man walking ahead of me doesn’t realize how stupid he looks with his pants hanging down mid-thigh.

Let’s face it – I think about a lot of things and am very opinionated.  I attempt to placate the opinionated beast inside with little fibs that start with, “I’m sure….”.  Here’s the thing (Hmm, I’ve just realized I say that a lot), whenever I say something about a person with “I’m sure…” around DH, he counters with, “I’m not.”  He’s right, I’m just fibbing to myself.  The screaming lady at the check-out, I’m not sure that she’s just stressed, she could just be a bitch to everyone.  The big, scary ape of a man at the bar?  Yeah, chances are he’s like that when he’s sober, too.  Okay, the young man with the hanging pants… yeah, he probably doesn’t know how stupid he looks.

So, why do I choose to fib to myself about people?  I think it’s because its easier to give the benefit of the doubt and not jump straight to saying someone is badly behaved right from the start.  I started to think about this because a situation came up the other day as I was responding en masse to an email among friends, the whole “reply to all”.  I wrote out my response, which was short, and clicked “send”.  Immediately I got an error that the page wouldn’t load and to retry.  I retried, same error.  Third time is the charm!  Then I got a reply from one friend, to the first message that I thought “damn!”

I sent out a new response apologising and explaining that I got an “unable to load page” message the first couple times so thought my reply never went.  One friend teased that they thought it was my OCD showing.  Then a second reply came through from another friend that while I know deep-down was meant to tease, was interpreted by me as a really mean thing to say.  Their choice of wording wasn’t very funny, just… hurtful.

I dwelled on what they wrote, and then decided not to respond to them, but send a message to DH, saying “I’m sure that they felt they were being funny, but what they said was just hurtful and mean.”  I chose to fib to myself, because surely a friend wouldn’t knowingly say something to hurt another, that the reason they said what they did was because they didn’t know any better.  Yes, I’m sure that’s the reason.