The no that keeps moving

Near the university in Assiut, two copy shops face each other across a narrow street. One started taking files by phone message a while ago. A student sends a document from the lecture hall, walks over, and the pages are waiting.

Ask that owner why, and he is precise. Fewer people crowding the counter. Fewer mistakes from scribbled page numbers. Students come back because it saves them the queue.

Ask the owner opposite why he does not, and the answer moves. First it is viruses on the computer. Then it is that students will send files and never come to pay. Then the printer would not cope. Then it is that things have worked this way for twenty years. Answer one and the next arrives, sometimes contradicting the last.

That kind of no is rarely about its reasons. Under it there is usually something nobody likes to say out loud: I am not sure I can do this, and I am worried about what it would change. Since fear is hard to admit, it comes out as a string of objections, sometimes with a raised voice to keep the string going.

Which is why arguing does so little. Every objection could be answered perfectly and he would find another, because the objections were never the thing, and he is not really listening to the answers.

What moves him, when something does, is different. Either he tries it once, on a slow afternoon, and finds out for himself that it works. Or the pavement opposite fills with students, and doing nothing becomes the more frightening option.

A yes has to be specific because it is reaching for something. A no can wander, because it is only holding on.