Reading the responses in this thread, I’m finding the differences partly personal, and partly cultural. One of things that I’ve missed over the time I’ve lived in the US is having friends and neighbours drop in at little or no notice. It’s partly because when living in Australia and having our children growing up we had neighbours with kids of a similar age, and they treated each other as extended family, so you had a band of up to ten kids just wandering as they felt like it from house to house. With one neighbour we knocked down part of the back fence so the two backyards became one. (I wasn’t there at the time, but I heard that our neighbours had the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney at a party at their house, and his grace wandered into our backyard looking for some red wine…)
Of course, when friends do that, they don’t expect your house to be immaculate, and they don’t expoect to be served much more than a cup of coffee or a glass of wine from a cardboard box; and if you’re just about to go out, you can always say, “Sorry – we’ll catch up with you later.” But I found it wonderful having friends like that.
My ex-wife had some friends who were very careful about calling and setting up a time to come over, but were incredibly demanding when they did come over.
They were over 10 hours one day. Just no sign they wished to go home until we both insisted that we had to go to bed and they had to leave.
Middle of the afternoon, mid conversation, the wife rolls her head back like a wolf howling at the moon and says, very loudly, “I’m hungry, FEED ME!”
About an hour later, we got “I’m bored now. Entertain me!”
When they finally left, we vowed to never let that happen again.
Then, of course, they wondered why we didn’t invite them over again and made excuses for when they wanted to come over.
My in-laws did the pop-in on me when me and Mr. K were in the midst of a housework stand-off, whereby I quit cleaning the bathroom and left all kinds of clutter laying around.
These people are clean-freaks. My house was a fucking disaster and sure enough, the Fucking Brother In Law threw it at me during an argument about something completely unrelated. I’m still pissed off about it all these years later.
Fuck the pop-in. I want a phone call so I can make the required effort to spruce the joint up. This changes, depending on who’s doing the popping in. If it’s The Clean Freaks, the answer is No. If it’s my best friend, I’ll do what I need to do to make us both comfortable.