I used to be close to a girl named Emily. She had a habit of being both rude and entitled. For example, she asked to come over to my mother’s house (I was home for the summer from university) to talk to me. I said she can come over and assumed that she would call me when she got to my mother’s, or ring the door bell. You know, like a normal person. Emily decided she felt “comfortable” enough with a house that she had only been in once before and walked right in without ringing the doorbell.
After a while, we drifted apart. I started school again and was fairly busy with that. However, we were still “friends” on Facebook, so I saw her posts in my newsfeed. Not too long ago, I noticed she joined Habitat for Humanity: Global Village. As bad as it was, I got a slight chuckle thinking of someone so selfish trying to do something selfless. I felt guilty at my initial judgment. I soon learned that perhaps I was right about her after all.
About a day later, she announces that she was accepted on a trip to Fiji. That’s fine. Her life, she can go wherever she wants. Another day passes before she begins to talk about people donating to her trip. Not only does she intend to go to Fiji, but Vietnam, India, and Kenya as well. She is “too poor” to pay for these trips herself, so she expects her friends to do it. Her incentive is that it is a tax write off and we should all tell our friends, our parents, and our parent’s friends to help her go to Fiji! Curiosity got the best of me, so I looked at the itinerary for her trip. Out of the fourteen days she will be there, she will only be working from 9AM-4PM for a total of seven days. I am sorry, but that seems almost like a vacation with a mild amount of work.
Today is Friday and since Wednesday, she posted the link to her donation site six times. Perhaps I would be less peeved by the “gimmegimmegimme your money!!! (Please)” if she did not spent an outrageous amount of money. She already posted about getting a new tattoo and how she will be getting a new one in a month or two. I just feel it is so wrong to ask people for money.
While it was immature of me, I decided to donate $0.35. When I told her the website will not allow me to donate that, she got angry at my amount. Especially since she kept going on about how “every little bit counts.” Apparently, everyone she knows should at least donate $5 to her trip…even though the website has a minimum donation of $10. I am apparently selfish for not letting her have an entire week of free time in Fiji. I am a nursing student, my husband has served four years in the military, and I will enter the service as soon as I graduate, then volunteer to deploy. I also do volunteer work for veterans on my own dime. In the past, I used to pay for us to go out, I drove over 30 minutes each way to give her rides, and volunteered to help pay for her speeding ticket if she agreed to sign a contract on how much she will pay me back with each paycheck. (She declined since she “could not afford anything.” Or so she said while she was drinking the $5 coffee I bought.) I hardly think I am the selfish one. 0821-10
Tag: Frenemies
The Postponing Guest
I have a story about a guest who just couldn’t sort out his obligations. We’ll call him “Jim.”
It was the day of the grand opening of a new Chinese restaurant just down the street from where I live, and my husband and I were excited to check it out. We called up Jim a week prior and asked if he wanted to come. I knew Jim was having a bit of trouble financially and had been complaining about being sick and tired of eating nothing but Mac and Cheese, so I figured that taking him out to a Chinese restaurant would be a nice change of pace for him. I even made it explicitly clear that we would be paying for his dinner (even though he doesn’t seem to be able to return the same favor to us, but that’s a story for another time). The plan was he’d come over, we’d go have dinner at the restaurant, and then come back home to hang out, watch a movie, and play cards.
I called him up the day he was to come over, and he said he’d be over right after work. Jim gets off work at 5pm, so we were expecting him at around 5:30pm. At 6, there’s no sign of Jim. We call him, since normally he’s very prompt, and he replies “Oh, something came up and I’m running a little late. I’ll be there at 7.” He refused to tell us exactly what was keeping him, however, which I found odd.
So we continue to wait, and we’re starting to get hungry. At 7:15, there’s still no sign of Jim. So we call him again. This time he tells us “Sorry guys, I can’t make it, I’m moving today and am still packing things up.”
What? MOVING? Yes, he was moving into a new apartment that day after work, and instead of telling us that he couldn’t make it, he acted like he was still going to be able to come over. He’d known when he was moving for several days (it wasn’t something that just “came up”), and never once thought call us and try and reschedule our dinner. He never once said, “Sorry, I forgot when we made plans that I was moving today and I can’t make it tonight.” No, he acted like he was still coming over, and he made us wait for two hours before he cancelled. I was baffled!
And the icing on the cake? The next day, he calls us and asks if we can bring our truck to help him move his couch! Even if my husband and I weren’t both at work that day, we were too upset with him at that time to help him move anything. 1101-08
“Give Me Gifts…And Dump Your Girlfriend, Too”
I have a story that I was reminded of while going through your lovely archives!
In high school, some of my friends and I sat at a table with “Deanne”. None of us were that close with her, but she had lunch at that hour and eventually decided I was her close friend. I didn’t feel the same way, but was polite and friendly to her because high school is a rough place when you don’t have many friends, and it wasn’t as though I was mega popular myself!
Deanne met a male friend of mine, “Jason”, one day when he came and talked with me at lunch. Jason had a sweet and lovely girlfriend with whom I was also friends. Deanne, however, ignored this fact and decided she would openly and rather bluntly flirt with Jason at every opportunity, including in a class they shared together in the second semester. He would tell me various things Deanne would do and say, including glare at his girlfriend or make snide comments about her, touch his arm or chest, etc. Typical high school drama. I started trying to distance myself from Deanne, since I don’t like to be friends with people who don’t respect relationships.
Her birthday rolled around and, since she was a twin, she and her sister were having a shared party. Deanne, for her portion of invitees, invited two people that I knew of – me, and Jason. Not Jason’s girlfriend, which in itself was a bit inappropriate. I politely declined her invitation – which I am not proud of – by saying I had a family event. Again, I didn’t wish for her to keep thinking we were such close friends when in fact I disliked her, and the thought of watching her flirt with Jason all night while also being surrounded by strangers was not an appealing thought.
Jason, however, could not turn her down so easily. Deanne told us about the party early on, and kept at him all the way leading up to the party. The kicker and focal point of our tale came about a week before.
In class one day, he handed me a piece of paper Deanne had given him. On it in her handwriting was listed several items, such as “earrings”, “necklace with green stones (emerald)”, and “perfume”. Things a guy would usually buy for a sweetheart. At the bottom she had written, “Please circle the thing you would like to buy me and then give me back this paper”.
Firstly, Deanne had invited Jason but not his girlfriend, after making it very clear that she was interested in him. Secondly, she “suggested” gifts that, to me, seem inappropriate for an acquaintance of the opposite sex. Thirdly and most horrendously in my mind, she had expected him to buy her one of these gifts and inform her beforehand which gift she was going to receive. After that, I spoke to Deanne as little as possible, and Jason rarely ever came to talk to me at lunch since she would be around.
In case you were wondering, Jason told Deanne that he had lost the paper and gave her some leftover Halloween candy as a present. 0515-15
The Carolines Of This World
This story happened to my husband a few nights ago and I’m still fuming. Husband is more laid back, but I know it bothered him too.
A bit of context first. Where I live, it can take from 10 to 24 months to evict a renter after he’s stopped paying rent. As such, potential landlords are very careful when renting out their apartments and the vast majority ask their renters for a third party to cosign the lease.
On to my story. I wouldn’t call my husband and Andy friends, but they are friendly acquaintances. They were introduced to each other by their mothers who work together and are very close. Andy is younger than my husband so during his university studies he would often call my husband for advice (not surprisingly, he ended up majoring in my husband’s field). They also went out for drinks a couple of times.
When Andy called a few weeks ago asking us very nicely to cosign his and his girlfriend’s lease (I’ll call her Caroline and we’ve never met her), it didn’t take us long to decide that we wanted to help him. During his call Andy explained that they had been looking for an apartment for 2 months and were getting pretty desperate at that point. We gave Andy our reply the next day, sent him the necessary paperwork and he thanked us profusely. A meeting between the landlord, Andy and his girlfriend and my husband was scheduled for two nights ago at 9PM (these are all professionals, so after work was the only time they could all meet).
Now, I wasn’t there for this last part as I had to leave on a business trip, but this is what happened according to my husband. On the day of the meeting, my husband left work at 8PM and went straight to their apartment (that meant a one-hour commute). Hubby had hoped to get this over with quickly, but as always with all the documents that needed checking and signing, he ended up missing the last bus home. When they were done, my husband and Andy started chatting in front of the building. About five minutes in, Caroline (who my husband tells me kept looking at her watch and sighing), finally said: “I hate to break this up, but it’s getting late and Andy and I have to be getting home”. My husband, who had come there straight from work, to help them out of a desperate situation, had missed dinner and the last bus home, was so flabbergasted that he wished them goodnight and left (it was a 30 minute walk on foot).
The rational part of my brain realizes that my husband’s reaction was the correct one, but the less civilized part thinks that the Carolines of the world act the way they do, because no one ever calls them out on their boorish behavior. I keep asking myself if he should have said something to her. What do you think, Miss Jeanne? 0417-15
The responsibility fell upon Andy to have said, “Yes, it is getting late. Please join us for a quick dinner and we’ll drive you home.” He and Caroline should have discussed their plans earlier and planned on asking your husband to come to dinner with them or offer to drive him home given that your husband had just done a great service that, frankly, I would have been leery of doing. Andy’s own mother would not co-sign for him but your husband will? Warning flag. And the lack of graciousness and gratitude upon receipt of that kindness is another warning sign.
The only reply your husband could have said was, “Yes, it is late and I have a long walk ahead of me before I can eat and relax. Good bye.”
Stealing Baby Names
This is a question I wanted to pose to E-Hell readers. It’s happened twice in my circle, in differing time periods. I’ve been told by each side that their side was right in what they did, and the other side was wrong. I was appealed to for sympathy from both sides, but I bean dipped each time. As it happened, although I knew all the parties involved in both cases, they didn’t know each other, so no one could “learn a lesson” from the first instance. What do the E-hellions think, please?
The basic story in both cases is, a young man dies. He’s a well-loved only son in both cases. It’s tragic, and friends and family are torn with grief.
About a year or so after each of these deaths, a close, lifelong friend of the deceased and his family becomes a new father. By coincidence, in both cases, the deceased had a sister who is pregnant with her first child when her deceased brother’s friend and his wife becomes new parents. Each time, the friend of the deceased has a boy and gives the baby the name of the deceased. In both cases, the pregnant sisters of the deceased are hurt and angry and they basically stop talking to said friend, because the sisters in both cases had planned to name their soon to be born babies after their late brothers. In each case, then, the friend and his wife become hurt and angry, because they felt they had the right to use the name of a lifelong dear friend who had died suddenly. A break occurs between the families and the friends, and is never healed.
It was extremely uncomfortable, the tension over this, the first time this happened to people I knew. When it occurred again to others, a few years later, I couldn’t believe it had happened again, just the same.
Is it wrong to appropriate a name of someone who died when the deceased’s family might want it and have an occasion to use it soon? Should they have asked before using it? Or is it wrong to expect a lifelong friend to forego naming his child a name he truly wanted because the family planned to use it? Does the family have the etiquette right to say no one can use it, and expect to be obeyed? 0408-15
What a ridiculous thing to fight about. It’s obvious that the last names of the infants are different than the sisters’ family names so no one is allowed to use the same first and middle names? For example, friend’s baby is named Robert Micheal Smith and sister’s baby is named Robert Micheal Jones…what is the problem here? One child can be called Robbie, the other Bob.
One would think the family whose son died would be honored that others valued their deceased son/brother so highly that they would want to remember him in a very personal manner which will last a lifetime. It’s a way to keep the memory alive, to honor a person whose name carries with it a significant degree of respect and love. It’s a way of communicating to the child that he is named after a role model his parents esteemed very much. What a lovely tribute.
Do the sisters have a right to be offended at the use of their brothers’ names by close friends? My thought on that is that if I were the parent who lost the son, I would be counseling my daughter that she does not have a right to the name of her brother, as if she owned it. I named my son and it was his name to do with as he wished. I “owned” it first, gave it to him and he did with it as he wished. If he lived his life in such a way that people respected, admired and loved him enough to name their children after him, that honor is a credit to his name, character and memory. The sisters cannot claim theft of a name that never belonged to them in the first place. It is dishonoring to the memory of the deceased to fight over his name as if anyone other than the deceased had a right to it.