Did you ever perform a good deed and wish afterwards you hadn’t? Tell us about it.
Lotsa times. But you go first. 
“Pops” Mercotan
Lent my cousin and her husband $400 to move to Florida and start their “new life.”
Turns out their “new life” was just as crappy and deadbeat as their “original life” and I never saw the money again. Haven’t seen the cousin or husband, either - but that’s because I know and she knows I want to strangle her.
Lent a grundle of money to BiL to help him get out of a verry deeeep hole - old warrants, traffic tickets, etc. …
Should have known better, but my wife has always been hopefull that her little brother would turn his life around.
The money went to some illicite interprize having to do do with some type of pharmicuteteygal do do.
None of those are typos. Just as screwed up as the deed my money paid for. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Lucy
My husband’s youngest brother and his then-psycho-bitch wife always seemed to have money problems. They’d been evicted from several apartments, had cars repossessed, had their phone cut off more times than I could count.
A church friend of theirs rented them a house - a really kind gesture. We loaned them a set of dining room furniture that had been in my family since about 1958. When they got evicted again, we got back the furniture, sorta. All 6 chairs had been destroyed and they tossed them out. They’d used the cherry table, without protection, for various corrosive hobbies - the table top was scarred and discolored, but we thought maybe we could save it. And they put some lovely deep gouges in the hutch.
All we have left is the hutch - the table was just too far gone. I’m hoping to restore in for my daughter. The psycho bitch is now an ex. And I really regret anything we ever did to help them - she was a taker and a user, and I haven’t said anything about what she did to my brother in law. If she was crossing the street in front of my van, the only reason I’d swerve would be to protect my van…
Sounds liek you paid $400 to never have to deal with these people again. Sounds like a good deal.
My husband loaned a truck to one of his nephews. They agreed that nephew would start making payments on the truck when he got his first paycheck, or return the truck if he got another vehicle. Never saw any money come in from nephew, and when we finally got the truck back it was completely ruined, good only for parting out, and not many parts were in even good enough condition to remove. The damage wasn’t just normal wear and tear, but the kind of damage one gets when one doesn’t clean or maintain the vehicle, and when one uses the truck as a Personal Party Pod.
Fast forward a dozen years or so. Nephew got caught embezzling his employer, and he asked my husband to bail him out. Fortunately, my husband said “NO!” this time. I had urged my husband to loan/sell the truck in the first place, but he didn’t consult me about loaning the money. Just as well, I would have said “HELL no” to that request.
When I was four years old, I went out in the back yard to play in our little kiddie pool. I saw that a fly had landed in the pool and was drowning, so I reached in, scooped the fly out, and lay him on the grass. Before I’d gotten very far with this plan, the fly revealed itself to be a bumblebee, stinging the crap out of my hand.
Whenever I hear that no good deed goes unpunished, I flash back to being four years old, crying on the porch swing as my mom puts baking soda on my finger.
Daniel
I once invested $2500 in a business a “friend” was starting up. He needed a bit of cahs to get through the month until the rest of the club got finished and the bank loans came through. No problem, they’re already approved…just waiting on the paperwork. Got a nice, legal IOU with interest. Care to guess what kind of money I got back?
I’m starting to see a pattern here…
I have possession of my neighbour’s house keys.
One day their alarm went off so I went round to take a look. I turned off the alarm and walked around the house. I found nothing amiss until I checked out one of the bedrooms. The room was a wreck. Drawers hanging out, clothes scattered all over the place, floor covered with CDs and books, work documents all over the bed, cigarette ash and butts on the dresser. Someone had really turned the room over.
I called the police.
They came round and examined the room without finding a point of illegal entry. So I rang my neighbour at work and told him what was occurring. He said ‘Oh, that’s (my son’s) room. It’s always like that’.
Since then, as I understand it, the son is under orders to keep his bedroom somewhat more tidy then formerly. Oh, and the alarm was faulty.
When I was about 24 or 25, a friend I’d known since high school needed a $1000 loan to pay for his college tuition. He told me he’d pay me back $100 a month plus interest, and would give me a stack of post-dated checks. I wasn’t rolling in money at the time, but I had a good job and decent credit. I thought about it for a while, figured that losing $1K wouldn’t put me permanently in debt, and I’d like to help him out. So I lent him the money, and figured I’d never see it again.
The good news is that he did pay me back about half of it. And I never did see the other half again, though he often mentioned it and told me he was going to pay me someday (I didn’t cash most of the post-dated checks as I knew they would bounce). The loss of the money didn’t bother me that much. What really bugged me is that when he got married a few years later, as part of his wedding gift I wrote in the card “Don’t worry about paying me back the rest of that money” and returned his post-dated checks to him - all told, about $500. That was on top of the standard wedding gift I bought him.
He never thanked me, he never acknowledged that I even lent him the money, or that it was a nice thing for me to just forget about it.
That’s hysterical.
I need to learn a lesson about selling things and accepting payment over time. My daughter’s still mad at me for selling a car to a friend. It had sentimental value to her, as it was her late dad’s last car, a 1969 Pontiac in mint condition with low miles.
I sold it to a good friend. He made two $50 payments, and then something went wrong mechanically which he couldn’t be bothered to check out. So he let the car sit for a year in his yard, from which it was towed by his landlord. Last I heard, it had been used in a demolition derby. (Yeah, I had signed over the title.)
Hubby just “sold” a 2-year-old snowblower to his stepson. We paid $1200 for it, used it for two winters, maybe 4 times. We’ve been paid $100 of the $700 sale price, and that’s probably all we’ll get for it.
No more selling to friends and relatives, and no more loaning either. I can’t count the books and DVDs and clothes and nice dishes (for taking home leftovers after holiday dinners) that never came back to me.
I don’t have one single thing in my house that doesn’t belong to me, or that I owe someone for, and nobody else should either. 
Back in the seventies, I had a boyfriend named Jim. This guy was great-looking, funny, smart, a fireball in bed, lots of good things, but had a rocky background (which he assured me was in the past). He seemed to have straightened out his life: he was drug-free and employed, and was planning to return to college to finish his degree in electronics. Jim was desperately trying to get a loan to buy himself a motorcycle, but his credit was poor and he had a spotty work history, so he got turned down every time he applied for a loan. Finally I cosigned with him on a bank loan. My good credit and stable work history enabled Jim to get a great Kawasaki bike. A few weeks later, without a word to me, Jim and the motorcycle took off to parts unknown. Since I didn’t want to wreck my credit score, I was stuck paying off the loan on a motorcycle that I never saw again.
If you’re reading this, Jim, I don’t want you back, but I’d like either my money or my motorcycle.
Many years ago when I was in university, a friend of mine was horribly injured in an industrial accident. It was touch-and-go for a while, but he survived, thankfully. Over the next few years, he was in and out of hospital and therapy fairly regularly. It was available locally, and his friends and parents were always nearby.
Then, his physicians though it best if he went to a hospital in another city, since there was some sort of specialist there that could help him more than the local facilities. Okay, he went. The treatment was great, but he was lonely. His parents made the trip as often as work and funds allowed, and his buddies (me included) would go when we could. But it wasn’t like it used to be for him, where his buddies would be over almost daily, ready to watch a game on TV or play chess or to shoot the breeze over a couple of beers (we had the beer, he couldn’t because of his meds, but he had a good time anyway).
My girlfriend at the time, who was also a student, was getting ready to go back home for the summer. Home, for her, was the city where my friend was laid up in hospital. So since he knew nobody in that city, except for his doctors and nurses and therapists who only saw him on a “business” basis, I asked my girlfriend if she could stop in and see him from time to time. This way, he’d at least see somebody a little more often than his friends and parents could make it. Nothing special, I told her, just pop in to say hello, take some books and magazines and candy if possible, that sort of thing. She agreed.
Next thing I know, I’m getting a “Dear John” letter from her! She went to visit the hospital, really liked my friend, and the feeling was mutual. To make a long story short, they ended up getting married, and have been married now for probably close to 20 years. With a couple of kids too, I understand.
Bitter? Actually, not any more, though I was at first–indeed, I was feeling betrayed, and I doubted if I’d ever try to do a good deed again. But there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. On the rare occasions when we are in the same city, my old friend and I try to meet up for at least a beer or two. We laugh about it all now, in fact. Time does heal.
I was going to post about a completely different episode, until I read this post.
Several years ago I let a work-colleague stay at my house rent-free while he found his own place. My work involved some travel, and during his stay I went on one of my trips. I arrived home one morning, jet-lagged after my long transatlantic flight, opened the front door, and saw the state of the house, which looked a lot like the description of Chez Guevara’s neighbours’ son’s room. I didn’t go as far as calling the police, because it did dawn on me after the first few minutes of staggered disbelief, that this was his normal mess. I called him at work and told him I was home, and he was mortified. He had thought I was arriving a couple of days later. Presumably he had planned to clean the house before then.
I can’t think of one - and I do good deeds frequently. Two recur annually and are extremely time consuming with out of pocket expenses. I enjoy doing them. All of them.
We give our kids money when they need it—even when they don’t ask for it, and since the money’s been gifts, we’ve never asked for a return.
Oh, I’ve lent out shovels and such to neighbors that have never come back. I might have groused about 'em momentarily, but all in all, I have no serious regrets in this area that eat at me.
I am a successful publicist. I am 47 years old and old enough to know better. Last year I cooked up a scheme with a friend that I was going to help her meet (and hopefully, bed) the “man of her dreams”, a “Hey, It’s That Guy!” actor.
It was stupid, but we had seen too many Meg Ryan movies (he wasn’t in any of them) and it seemed like what I cooked up might be a hare-brained enough plan that it could work.
Bottom line…they did meet…NOTHING happened and I learned that you shouldn’t mess around with other people’s lives. You should mind your own business…uh, let’s see, what else? You can’t hurry love? You can’t force chemistry? That people can turn out to be users? That too many cooks spoil the broth? That in the end loyalty is proven by actions and talk is cheap? That I got what I ultimately deserved because I wanted to prove I had what it took to give someone their heart’s desire on a silver platter? (My theory was, if you have somebody behind the scenes pulling some strings and promoting you personally with your best interests at heart that forces could be manipulated… Ah, I’m a fool!)
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
But it seemed romantic and fun at the time.
WRONG-O!
Tried to help out a sick friend with some cash for groceries, etc. Too bad her sickness was alcoholism and addiction, and I enabled her right out into the gutter.
I have no idea if she’s alive or dead- last I heard she was living on the street doing bad things for drug money.
Yeah, I’ve learned that lesson. Don’t give 'em money for groceries. Buy 'em groceries instead. Don’t give 'em money for rent. Pay the landlord yourself. And if you do these things, do them with the thought that it’s a gift, not a loan.
I have a friend from school who had a baby, now has a bit of a drug problem, and a junkie boyfriend and father of her child. Whenever she invites me to Brighton for a visit I go in the understanding that I will be buying groceries, paying her bills, filling in her welfare forms and generally sorting her life out. I don’t mind this, I know what I am getting myself into and know I won’t be getting any money back.
But the last time I visited I arrived to find her in hysterics because her boyfriend was arrested the day before. After some begging on her part I paid his bail and “lent” him some cash to pay off some debts. He apparently decided not to pay them and move out of town instead, because my friend never saw him again; she got a letter saying he was still alive and living in London. I REALLY, REALLY wish I had just left him in jail.