I offered to let ‘BeelzeBob’ stay in my apartment for two months while he worked on a project. It turned into a year. I made it clear that after the first two months, he would have to pay half of the rent. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t. His thinking was that since I have to pay the rent, utilities, etc. anyway, otherwise I’d be out of a home, he really didn’t have to. His grandfather made up his debt, and I kicked ‘BeelzeBob’ out. Lesson learned.
In any case, I agree with muldoonthief.
If 6 people are paying for 8 beds, and then a 7th person arrives last minute and takes a bed for free then there is going to be grumbling, thats just a simple fact of life that anybody could have forseen. Its just human nature, they definitely will have felt there was an obligation there to offer the room once they knew about the parking lot plan, and they definitely will wonder if your situation was rooted in plain meanness.
Whatever your circumstances the fact is that you freeloaded, almost by definition. And you will have known that you were freeloading and you must have known that the others would see it as freeloading. None of this can be a shock to you.
You should either have refused the offer or, if you accepted the offer you should have went to great lengths to make very clear that you would rather have refused than have people feel like they were being taken advantage of.
Personally I think that you will just have to accept said grumblings as a consequence of your shitty financial situation.
Yeah… an extremely reasonable interpretation of “hanging around a supermarket car park” is that you would be in a car. If your plan was to just loiter in the parking lot, then you definitely tied your family’s hands and forced them to come up with a solution.
That’s what family does, and what it particularly does in short-notice situations where a lot of the extended family has to quickly get to the same place.
Can anybody explain why “I’m going to spend the night doing back-breaking work to earn £50” is more sensible than “I’m going to spend the night in a safe place reading my book to save £60” as I’m sure nobody would have a problem with the first statement, but everybody seems to think there’s something wring with the second.
The first option doesn’t put family members on the spot. The second option is designed to do exactly that. Are you in the UK? Do store security and your cops just ignore somebody loitering around a parking lot for hours on end at night? I expect that was one of the things your family took into consideration.
Look, you can be a mooch and get free stuff off people, or you can have your pride. You can’t have both.
Shelter is a fundamental human need. We’re hardwired to feel badly when people with whom we have ties (like family) are incapable or unwilling to fulfill those needs.
Go away, little gnat.
How is a supermarket parking lot (or inside the supermarket, for that matter) a safe, usual or normal place to spend 6-8 hours in the middle of the night? If you weren’t going to sleep/stay in a car, where would you sit and read your book? I would think store employees would become worried and concerned and alarmed.
Where can you reasonably stay and read a book in the middle of the night? An airport, bus or train station seems more reasonable, but there aren’t that many of them in most places.
People who work overnight do so because that is what their job entails. They are assigned that shift, or work it regularly. Most people don’t just stumble onto overnight jobs on a whim, so I fail to see the correlation in your question. Now, is your question really “why should I work to earn 50 pounds when I can freeload and save a similar amount?”, ignoring the time of day red herring?
No.
I think the idea about buying doughnuts for everyone the next morning is good. Or make everyone breakfast, or wash the car, or something. You might not have money, but you clearly had time, if you weren’t planning on sleeping that night anyway. A gesture through which you expend your time in a show of appreciation for folks will leave everyone feeling a lot better about the experience.
OK. I’ll take your answer at face value. So, I think you’ve gotten plenty of feedback on your original question. The answer is that you are right, the person who offered you the bed for free is right and the grumblers are right… from each person’s perspective. I can see all of the reactions and opinions having validity.
But I am curious how you hang around a supermarket parking lot all night long reading a book in any manner that is comfortable and safe, and without alarming the store employees or attracting police attention. I’m struggling to see how that is accomplished.
During the gasoline shortages that occurred in the late 70s(?) I once pulled up to a gas pump as my car sputtered out of gas. The station was closed that day, but was open at 8 am the next day. I slept at the pump from 9 pm till 8 am in my MG Midget.
Boy, did that ever suck.
OP: how was Aunt Doris’ funeral, anyways?
And how the OP expects to be at all functional the next day if he intends to not sleep!
Scumpup, the Moochie McLoad comment is out of line. Drop the name-calling. You’ve had your say.
Mr Shine, you’re allowed to disagree with people who are criticizing your actions, but you’re over the line with several comments in this thread. Leave the insults out of it.
Seriously, you’ve never had to stay up all night? Once “night” is over and you’re back into “day” you function as normal and the need to sleep dissipates. A single nights non-sleep won’t impair you at all once you’ve powered through it.
Personally, I wouldn’t think of sleeping in a place without offering to pay. If I couldn’t pay, and I had to go, I’d ask directly if I could stay without paying. Staying silent on the matter and relying on the fact that no one objected is weasely. I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking action that wouldn’t withstand scrutiny. It’s like when kids whisper, “Mom, I’m going to go do xyz, if that’s okay then just don’t say anything!”
It’s taking advantage and that is independent of what the others think. That alone would make it not okay in my mind.
shrug I may be more sensitive than the average guy but no, I wouldn’t ‘power through it’. Going all night without sleeping leaves me fuzzy-headed, lethargic and irritable. It’s certainly not a state I would purposefully try to incur for a family event.
LOL…Well yes. Skipping events you can’t afford to attend is a perfectly acceptable option.
Are you offering someone a room because their planned accommodations fell through or because they showed up in the middle of the night at the door of your hotel room with no money and tell you they have no other place to stay? Because the first example is helping someone out. The second is someone creating a situation where you have to decide whether you want to extend them charity or feel like an “asshole”.
Umm…by what method does one quickly earn £50 in the middle of the night that also doesn’t involve a parking lot?
That would be jaw-breaking work, surely??
But he could afford to attend it, as long as he was willing to stay in a car park all night, which he was. It’s only because there were other people along who would feel obligated to give him a place to stay that that plan somehow became unacceptable.