The hills we die on
This is a post I wrote a while ago, and recently decided may be worth publishing. It's a combination of anecdotal retelling and reflection. At the time, I had been reflecting on a paradox in my behaviour. I often go to extreme lengths to enact justice, sometimes with full knowledge that doing so is not worth it.
Most recently, I ordered something off of Etsy from Spain and I paid sales tax. The total value was less than £135, so I don't have to pay import tax. So I was surprised to find that my parcel was held at customs pending a payment of gift tax. Gift tax applies to gifts over £39, but of course this was not a gift. So HMRC wants £23.45 import VAT plus an £8 handling fee, which I had to pay to get the parcel no matter what.
The only way to dispute this sort of thing is to pay, get the parcel, then fill in a form, send that and the parcel label to Border Force (Coventry) by snail mail, wait for a human to review it, and finally they might decide that you should get a refund, or they might not. Things like this really get under my skin. Part of the reason I don't return to Germany is to escape this exact kind of ridiculous bureaucracy.
When things like this happen, I'm unable to let them go. The knowledge that there's something wrong in the world will live in my head rent-free, like an OCD urge, until I can resolve it. I need to actively prevent myself from getting too involved with other people's injustices (and I don't follow world news) or else I will feel like this all the time. However, when I have personally been wronged in some way, it's in my face and I can't let it go.
Now obviously, if you consider the Lime bike I rented to get to the post office, the cost of the padded brown envelope and postage, not to mention the time I spent researching the law and queuing in the post office, it's not worth the potential money I could recover from Border Force. But if I didn't do this, it would weigh on me probably forever. Glad to report that I got the refund at least!
The silliest thing I've had this itch for: my local dentist owing me £5 from when their card machine was broken and I paid cash but they had no change. I had moved away and it was not worth the trip to Fulham for them to give it back to me. I was eventually able to let it go when they promised to donate it to a specific charity. Whether they did or not, I don't care, I could wash my hands of it on the back of their promise, and erase the "weight" of that injustice from my mind.
The most serious thing I've had this itch for: recovering the deposit of a flat I once lived in. Long story short, I filed an N208 claim to take my landlord to court for the maximum legal penalty of 3x the deposit amount for this particular offence. From there, things escalated very rapidly and I negotiated an out of court settlement with the director of his agency for my full deposit (and my brother's) plus court fees. Here too I was extremely annoyed at how difficult it is to do this sort of thing in the UK, and that I needed to physically go to a specific, hard-to-reach county court to file my big binder of post-it-laced documents (painstakingly printed at my nearest library) as evidence. Trees had to die and the printer at my local library had to waste ink!
I remember struggling to decide if I should even bother negotiating at that stage, or should instead drag them to court out of spite. I felt like the lengths I went to very few others would have the freedom or ability to (financial or otherwise), so I had some kind of duty to teach them a lesson so they can think twice before they decide to mess with a poor clueless student in the future. I wasted hours queuing in the rain at those free first-come-first-serve legal clinics to make sure I did things right.
Is this some kind of hero complex? Did I grow up watching too much Disney? Having held the metaphorical knife to their throat, I was able to release myself from this duty through the settlement, and erase the weight from my mind. But why did that weight persist for so long?
I have many examples like this, but perhaps the last one I'll mention for now is another David vs Goliath tale, starring me as David again, and British Gas as Goliath. What's notable about this is that it's a whole system/institution rather than specific incompetent/malicious individuals. This was another long saga that started when British Gas incorrectly classified my flat as a business, and had me on commercial rates rather than domestic rates.
There was never an individual person I could direct my rage at. British Gas is a giant lumbering machine inadvertently squishing things, the cogs in the machine unaware of its emergent behaviour. I did yell at some of the thickest of cogs -- British Gas employees and debt collector agents -- but overall, would you be angry at a transistor for a bug in your program?
The Energy Ombudsman eventually made them fix everything and also write me an apology letter. At the time this felt like vindication. I was ready to frame the letter; another notch on my belt in the struggle for justice. Who exactly did I beat though? I don't know the lady that signed the apology letter. I just looked her up on LinkedIn. She seems like a nice person. British Gas lumbers on.
There's not much of a conclusion to this post. I suppose it's a recognition of my sometimes irrational stubbornness. Sometimes I just can't let things go. My anger and frustration seems to spike around broken systems, rather than the actors that take advantage of those systems (the court rather than the landlord). I would love to build systems with few cogs that don't squish things.