serial liar — 1 fairly sure investigation
the bank app is the modern serial liar. it opens with a balance you almost believe and closes with a pending charge that quietly subtracts the part you liked. i did not consent to this performance. i bought into it the day i set up direct debits. stefan, downstairs, was holding court in the lobby about a vintage he has never tasted. the landlord had slid a note under the door about the rent. i had, at that point, fourteen minutes of plausible deniability before anyone on the third floor noticed i was not in the q3 review.
at the desk. q3 review one floor up, doors closed. carla took her travel mug and a folder she had labelled twice, which i interpret as a sign she expects to be in there until well past my second pulpit.
so. serial liar. that is a phrase that wants to feel like a verdict. it sounds like a charge sheet. it sounds, frankly, like a true-crime promo. the truth is more boring and slightly more useful: a serial liar is not a single dramatic figure. it is a pattern of small, reliable, repeating lies told by something or someone you have stopped scrutinising. i would like, this morning, to slow that down and look at it from my working desk-chart of liar, because the bank app on my phone is, to my mind, a textbook case, and i live with it.
serial liar: a person, app, or institution that lies repeatedly across time and contexts in a recognisable pattern, not once under pressure. one lie is a tuesday. a serial liar produces a steady cadence of small fictions on a schedule, often for low individual stakes that, summed up, become the budget. recognise the cadence.
SERIAL. IS. THE. CADENCE. NOT. THE. CRIME.
i need that on the wall before we go further. the word “serial” has been borrowed by hard genres — killers, thrillers, the kind of podcasts mike listens to instead of doing his taxes — and people now hear it as automatically lurid. it is not. serial means in a series. cereal, by an unrelated coincidence, is also in a series, in a box, with rules. a serial liar is a liar with a release schedule. that is the entire technical content of the term.
serial liar, the version i declined to deny
somebody, last month, in a context i will not specify, called me a serial liar. i did not deny it. i did not, importantly, agree. i made the small noise a man makes at his desk when the accusation is technically too clean to argue with. you can audit me on the rungs and find a pattern, if you want one. i tell the landlord the kitchen tap is “almost there” every fortnight. i tell mom, on sunday, that the week was “fine”. i tell the unopened mail, with the lights off, that we’ll get to it on saturday.
those are not, individually, dramatic lies. but they have a release schedule. the landlord-lie ships every other friday. the mom-lie ships sundays at roughly four in the afternoon. the mail-lie ships nightly, mostly silent, mostly to myself. that is, by the strict definition, serial.
the man calling me a serial liar was, in fairness, the landlord, and his note this morning is the third excuse this month. so we are, between us, running parallel series in adjacent genres. he ships excuses on a roughly ten-day cadence. i ship deflections on a five-day cadence. one of us is more productive. it isn’t him.
the bank app i still have not opened
the more interesting serial liar in my apartment, however, is not me and not the landlord. it is the bank app on my phone. i have not opened the bank app in, conservatively, eleven weeks. i know the icon is there. it is in the second folder. i moved it to the second folder specifically so that opening it would require an extra deliberate gesture, the way you put the biscuits on top of the fridge so eating one becomes a small project.
here is the thing about the bank app, and you can write this down. the balance the bank app shows you is not the truth. it is a draft of the truth, with the embarrassing parts not yet posted. there are pending charges. there are scheduled debits. there are direct deposits arriving in two days that the app, technically, has not yet committed to. the number you see at the top of the screen is what i would call a statement of intent. the actual figure, the one a friendly auditor would write on a chalkboard, is somewhere a few days behind in either direction. usually behind, in my case.
so when i don’t open the app, what i am avoiding is not the truth. i am avoiding a serial sequence of slightly different lies, each one closer to the real number, each one telling me something my morning did not budget for. that is, by my own working definition, a serial liar. it lies on a schedule. it lies in small, plausible amounts. and it lies in my favour just often enough that i can’t quite call the police.
the landlord’s third excuse this month
the landlord, this morning, slid a note under my door about the rent and the boiler. that is the third note this month. i am not, in this section, complaining. i am cataloguing.
note one, dated the second, said the boiler service was “scheduled for next week” and the rent could “stay on the usual day”. note two, dated the eleventh, said the boiler service had been “rescheduled due to a part” and the rent should “still go in on time”. note three, this morning, said the boiler “is on the calendar” and the rent “must, however, go in by friday at the latest”. the boiler is, on this tally, on its third week of being on the calendar without ever appearing in person. the calendar, it turns out, is a place items go to sleep.
this is a clean field example of a small institutional serial liar. each note, taken alone, is reasonable. taken together, they form a release schedule i could chart. note one shipped on day two. note two on day eleven. note three on day twenty. the cadence is roughly nine days. the boiler is the variable. the variable is running. for a deeper version of how exactly this kind of small claim hardens, by the way, see my longer post on the rung directly above this one; serial sits a step below pathological on the chart, which i’ll get to.
now, let me put this plainly. i am not the boss of your bank app. i am not the boss of your landlord. i am, broadly, not the boss of anything except my own desk and the chair, which adjusts in zero ways.
but here is a thing i will go in honesty about. most of the lies that affect your life are not told by people. they are told by interfaces. a man at the bar told me — he had a denim jacket and a strong working theory of the post office — that we have, in the last fifteen years, outsourced the bulk of our small daily lying to apps, balances, dashboards, and helpful little notification dots. i’m fairly sure there is a paper somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, that supports this. i did not check. checking would have required opening a second app.
i rest my case. partially. the rest is in the second folder.
why “serial” implies a discipline i resemble
the strange thing about being called a serial liar is that the noun itself is, in another light, a compliment. serial implies discipline. a serial novelist is a person who delivers a chapter on time every month. a serial entrepreneur is a person who keeps starting things. a serial liar, by exact analogy, is a person who reliably ships small fictions on a known cadence.
i would like to propose, mainly to myself, that this is closer to the truth of what i am doing than the heavier word “pathological”. the small lies i tell — to the landlord about the tap, to mom about the week, to the bank app by not opening it — are scheduled, modest, and, in the strict accounting sense, productive. they buy me time. they buy me sleep. they buy me, on a thursday, the seven minutes i need before i can think about a difficult email.
i’m not, on this argument, defending lying. i am, however, distinguishing it. a serial liar with a discipline is, in some lights, a working professional. a pathological liar without one is a person whose own ledger has stopped tracking. those are two different countries. i live, broadly, in the first.
this is the bit, by the way, where it would be irresponsible not to mention pop culture. the most famous portrait of a serial liar with a working discipline is, of course, the 2013 martin scorsese film about the brokerage that sold sand to people. i am not jordan belfort. i don’t have the wardrobe, the boats, or the pretrial diet. but the underlying mechanism — small fictions, repeated on a schedule, billed at a margin — is, in miniature, the bank app on my phone, and, by extension, the way i live with it.
when the word lands and when it is rhetorical
here is the practical bit. you are going to hear the phrase “serial liar” used in two ways. one is technical. one is rhetorical. the technical one is what i have been describing: a pattern, a cadence, a release schedule of small fictions. that is a useful term. you can use it on people, on apps, on institutions, on, frankly, the seventh microwave i killed earlier this year, which lied to me about its safety features for ninety days before producing a small flash and an apology shaped like a smell.
the rhetorical use is the one you hear at parties, on the internet, and from the kind of relatives who have a lot of opinions about a former in-law. that one means, roughly, “this person has, in my view, lied at me more than once and i am out of patience”. it is a shorthand for exhaustion. it is not a chart. mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese — is, in my private files, the right shape of opinion for this kind of rhetorical claim. you can be very confident, in public, about a small specific item, and otherwise wrong about the whole map. people calling each other serial liars at parties are, mostly, doing the cheese version of that. confident on the headline, wrong on the geography.
both uses are, in their place, fine. the rhetorical one is how the phrase pays its rent. the technical one is how it keeps its job. you can usually tell the difference by whether the speaker is willing to chart the cadence or just wants the conversation to end.
verdict, the bank app is the more accurate label
so. let me, in closing, put this on the chalkboard.
am i a serial liar? on a strict reading of the cadence test — yes. i ship small lies on a schedule. so do you. so does, to a near-certainty, every adult with a landlord, a phone, and a pile of mail leaning against a door. that is the rung. it is well-populated. it is also, mostly, survivable.
but the more accurate target for that phrase, in my apartment, is not me. it is the bank app i still have not opened. the bank app is the steady, scheduled, quietly-misleading-by-thousands-of-cents-a-day liar in this kitchen. it lies in small amounts. it lies in my favour just often enough that i tolerate the lying in the other direction. it lies on a calendar i did not write. that, by every test in this post, is the rung.
and i, on this morning, am declining to open it. the q3 review upstairs has, by my best guess, another forty minutes. the landlord’s third note is on the counter under a glass i should wash. stefan, downstairs, is presumably still explaining a vintage to nobody in particular. on the rung-chart, that’s a normal tuesday for everybody concerned.
i rest my case. for the cleaner subset of the same family, the field guide on smaller signs of the compulsive variant is the apprenticeship. read it if you want the rest of the chart. read this one if you want the cadence.
q3 review still in progress. carla has not, on this pass, come out. the landlord’s third note has acquired a small ring from the glass. stefan has, by sound, escalated from vintages to varietals. the bank app, in the second folder, is still closed, and will, by my plan, remain so until well after lunch.
the cadence stands. the bank app stays closed. the boiler is on a calendar nobody seems to be reading.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
leading expert, three-note landlord audits and second-folder banking
P.S. the landlord’s note, at this hour, has produced one ring on the counter, one underline in red ink, and zero functioning boilers. that is, by every chart in this post, a serial.
