I believe everyone knows one or two people like that: They have agendas. They are determined. They don't doubt for a second that you should follow their decisions. They know what they want and they are going to get it. But has anyone of us asked the question when dealing with these people: How far should I go with that?
Usually we let us go as far as they want us to.
I came across one such case a while ago. A friend's friend was visiting Beijing. The friend called me up and asked if I would like to meet the girl for dinner. I said:"Yes sure, actually let me take her out since she is the guest." I did not know what I got myself into until the next day when I spoke to her for the first time on the phone.
She said: "Okay, I will let you invite me for dinner. I stay at this hotel in the west of the city. I will be done today by 5 o'clock. You can pick me up in a cab at the gate of the hotel then. " An order with the clear where, when, what and how. I sure had to give her credit of being articulate about what she wanted. I guess she has become quite good at it with time.
I dreaded on the way from my office of east Beijing to the West in the city's famous traffic jam, I dreaded through the dinner while the things she was interested in talking about was only herself. During the dinner, I was constantly picturing myself lying on my comfortable sofa and relaxing rather than squeezing smiles right now in a restaurant ten miles away from home.
The next day at work, I got a phone call from her.
"Hi, I am leaving tomorrow morning. Can you come out this afternoon and take me shopping?" ... Oh yes, when you yield, they could smell it like leopards smell the prey. Is she really saying this to me? In the flash of the moment, I am asking myself: "Is this too much? How much IS too much?" If you keep humoring them, would that be too late when you realize it is too much? The answer is: Yes, it would, with a result of being manipulated, lost control, or let's take this to an extreme case --- the massacre at Virginia Tech Tuesday morning --- life threatening.
Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter who carried out the worst shooting massacre in modern U.S. history, had been sending warning signs all along before the tragedy occured.
News report says: Professors and classmates were alarmed by his class writings - pages filled with twisted, violence-drenched writing. In screenplays he wrote, characters throw hammers and attack with chainsaws. In another, Cho concocted a tale of students who fantasize about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them. The writing was so disturbing that the dean of the English department urged the school to remove Cho from class and asked him to receive psychotherapy. But the school argued that they could not act on it since there was no proof that Cho had a plan of killing.
Cho had been on medication for depression and he had become increasing violent and erratic. Some students "were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did."
But those signs were still not enough for people to pay attention until the morning came when Cho ordered 30 students to stand against a wall and gunned them down one by one. How many signs do we need for us to act? How much is too much?
