How to Play the "Unfair" Card

It is almost funny how often I hear the phrase "it's unfair for other people."

At college, if you want to due your homework late, the professor will tell you “it’s unfair for the other students” in the same class, who may have skipped their friend’s birthday parties over the weekend to finish the paper.

At work, if you don’t copy other members on your team when you send out an email to someone in another group, if anything goes wrong, your manager will tell you “it’s not fair for him/her or anyone else on the team” because they were not involved in the first place and were not able to correct you in a timely manner, and now everyone looks bad in front of some other team.

Then I started to realize how powerful it is to pull the “unfair” card. I was once organizing a group trip to the west coast and someone decided to pull out last minute due to budget concerns. Besides everything else I said, I told him, “this is not fair for everyone else who committed to the trip” and who believed the price will be at $XX for the hotel, now with you not going, everyone else will have to pay extra.

He ended up going of course, and he had a blast.