Why do you ask a question when you know you're going to hate the answer?

Should you even try to get an answer or be satisfied with what you perceive as the real answer?

We'll start with something easy.

Ask Pat Robertson why he felt the need, after a devastating earthquake in Haiti, to blame the victims? Keep in mind an earthquake is not preventable. The Haitians couldn't have stopped it with better Xrays at the airport or tapping the phones of every citizen. It wasn't their fault. It was the fault they lived on.

But Mr. Robertson had a financial stake in this. You see, some of his followers might have felt they should donate to the Haitian relief effort. And that probably would have interrupted some of the money flowing to him for a month or so.

I'm pretty sure the belief in Voodoo didn't piss Pat's god off any more than Hollywood's belief in making money from crap like the Transformers. And since when did Pat's god favor the French on anything?

None of us want to hear an answer from Pat on this. We don't want to hear from him at all.

Early next week I have the opportunity to ask the president of the company I work for anything I want. And it causes me to face this exact conundrum. I know why our company is having problems. Why there will be no raises for years and salaries (higher than my own) were cut at the beginning of the year. Strangely, my paycheck still lost $5 from the year before, but that might be from a slight change in tax code.

But what good would it do to ask the guy in charge why they screwed up so badly? AND, at the same time, why the people who had nothing to do with the screw up have to pay for it?

It's nothing like an earthquake, because it was completely manmade and preventable for the most part. It occurred because of bad business decisions and flagrant uncontrolled spending by the people who were in charge. You can't even blame the economy for this (except, maybe, for the artificially inflated gas prices a year and a half ago).

When the bankers went to Capitol Hill earlier this week to talk about their mistakes, they compared the economic meltdown to a natural disaster. Things had been going so well for them, and then it all went to shit. How would they ever have foreseen that coming?

Apparently all the bankers have problems with math. And they're not too good at seeing trends, either. I mean, I knew I had to get a real job in the beginning of 2008. I didn't know it would be as bad as it was, but I knew it was coming. And I was only in charge of a small amount of personal investment funds.

In other words, you ask these questions, you get a naked emperor who blames everyone else (and some wacky interventionist god) for the fact he forgot to put on a robe.

At dinner on Friday night, our boss said we needed to come up with questions for the president. I really had no intention of bringing anything up because I don't want to hear the excuses. Or platitudes. Or that he's proud of all the work we've done but there's nothing he can do. If anything, it might make him feel better. But we'll feel that much worse.

The only real question is why should we keep working for the company.

I asked the owner at my last job, after the woman I trained and I spent six months straight being the only analysts (out of six) bringing money into the company, why we didn't get rewarded for our hard (and extra) work. His answer was, "You might not do that much work for us next year." And then he proceeded in the months following to reward the analysts who bitched that we were working too hard and this somehow lowered their self-esteem.

Ask me why I eventually left that company.

It's kinda like wanting to ask an ex-lover why they left. You think you want the answer, but actually you want them to accept some kind of blame. And they will never, ever, say it was their fault.

Matt Worley thinks you should contribute money to the Haiti relief, because it will make you feel a whole lot better than asking questions you already know the answer to.