I grew up on I Love Lucy. We used to have the reruns on at dinner time for years. I know practically every episode by heart. It goes beyond my being able to say whether I Love Lucy was a good show or a bad show; it’s just saturated in my bones.
One of the basic lessons I learned from I Love Lucy was: Never do business with friends. It always ends badly. Mix in the tolerance, desire to please, desire to forego, and resentments that ensue thereof, of friendship with the basics of business and monetary transactions, and you’re just asking for trouble — and for an end of the friendship.
So whenever Lucy and Ricky would go into business with Fred and Ethel (raising chickens, owning a diner, stuff like that), eventually the two couples would be fighting like cats and dogs, both feeling aggrieved and offended and exploited.
I pooh-pooh the effects of violence on TV on the folks who watch it, but I have an inevitable I Love Lucy reaction whenever the prospect of doing business with a friend comes up. Will I end up feeling taken or exploited? Will my friend? Will our friendship endure that inevitable disaster?
Anyway, that’s the long way around saying that I’m extraordinarily pleased by how relatively smoothly — and utterly lacking in rancor or the sense of exploitation (at least on my part) — my sizeable business transaction (selling the Saturn) went with Doyce. When all was said and done, both sides of the business seem to have gotten what they wanted in a pretty timely and positive fashion.
Maybe I Love Lucy wasn’t right after all. Though I don’t think we’ll be buying a diner with the Testerfolk any time soon …
Business with friends is always risky. I’ve had it blow up in my face a few times. Fortunately there are also good examples – I work for two friends I’ve known for about 8 years and we manage things pretty well. It sounds like you found a similar situation with your car sale, and that’s excellent.
Ironically, I turned on the TV this morning, and what was TV Land showing? The episode where Fred offers to buy a car for the Ricardos’s trip to California, leading them to disagree over who was out the money for the lemon he was conned into buying.
Let’s hope the Saturn’s transmission doesn’t croak in the next few weeks.
(Hey, Dave, remember “Where are those transmissions you intercepted?”? Still cracks me up!)
I think we made it over the ‘what the friendship can withstand’ hurdle we we made it back from London in one piece, but that said, I’m glad we were able to arrange it they way it came out, with you getting the lump sum and my easy monthly payments going to the impartial credit union; not the other way around.
It’s odd — like you, I don’t embrace these kinds of arrangements, but in saying that I remember that I’ve sold one car to the Herrera’s early on (it didn’t run great, but it did let Rey take a job that paid for a better car), another to Randy (which has been, IMO, nothing but an improvement over what he had been driving), and now this arrangement in the other direction… I’d call them 90% positive, all told.
Then again, with that said, just sharing the rent and utilities with some of my friends near the end of college caused all kinds of harm and left me overly cautious for years.
The times I have done business with friends — buying a townhouse quite some time ago, and selling a car quite recently (ahem) have all gone pretty well. On the other hand, it’s not something I would do most friends, and obviously not something I do all that often.
Was that the townhouse in Phillips Ranch?
Yup. Bought that from my friends Bonnie and Lance.