Years ago, I was walking a few blocks home from Safeway with a few bags of groceries, when a somewhat agitated man called to me from his porch: “Excuse me! Excuse me!”
“Yes?”
“Do you have a VCR?”
“Pardon me?”
“Do you have a VCR?”
“Um… yeah.”
“Can I ask you a favour? I have to go out tonight, there is something I need to see, and I don’t have a blank tape to record it – can you tape it for me?”
“Uh…”
I put myself in his place. How desperate must he be to be at the point of running out of his house and imploring the first stranger he sees to help him out? Pretty desperate. Now he has my sympathy. “Ummm… I guess so… What is it?” (I’m imagining that his daughter will be on the news, or some other extremely significant (to him,) once-in-a-lifetime thing.)
“Empty Nest.”
“Do you know someone who’s going to be on the show tonight?”
“No, it’s just my favourite show.”
“Uh, is Beta okay? Because my machine’s a Beta. No? Good luck, then.”
It’s not that taping a crap sitcom is a huge request, but it’s more of an imposition than I’d consider asking of someone at work or something, much less a total stranger selected at random. WTF?
#1
Upon divorcing my wife of seven years, I moved from southeast VA to the DC area to take a job with a large corporate travel agency.
My ex called me one day (on our toll-free line, natch!) to book plane tickets for her and Danny.
Yes, this was the same Danny that she was banging behind my back while I was still married to her.
I asked her “Why ME?! There’s a DOZEN travel agencies where you live.”
Her response? “I trust you!”
My retort?.. “I wouldn’t!”
#2
Ex-wife calls me (again, at work on our toll-free line!) to ask if I still have my calligraphy materials.
Me- “Yes… but you must KNOW I’m not going to let you borrow my pens.”
Her- “I don’t want to borrow them!”
Me- “You can’t HAVE them either!”
Her- “I don’t WANT them!”
Me- “Then…what?”
Her- “Well, me and Danny are planning to get married and…”
I didn’t hear the rest of what she said because I was laughing far too hard.
and, yes… she actually DID intend to ask me to hand-letter ALL of her invitations.
Stranger still… I later learned (from my ex mother-in-law) that Danny thought it was a great idea, too!
A friend of ours was planning a surprise birthday party for his wife last month. He asked if we could help out with the food for the party. Specifically he wanted us to provide the potato salad, cole slaw, baked beans, rolls, chips and soda for 100 people. He said that we could consider it our birthday gift to his wife if we wanted. We ended up bringing chips and soda.
Last night at 11pm a neighbor called me up. I haven’t spoken to her since she failed to show up to babysit one afternoon (she was supposed to come over after Dominic got home from school and stay until I got home at around 8pm, just for a couple of days until I could find a new babysitter). She never showed up and I was never able to get her on the phone–oh, and she’d borrowed money from me against what I would pay her to babysit. Ha. Anyway, hadn’t heard from her since that happened, which was December 2005.
So it was weird to get a phone call from her at 11pm last night… she pretended to be chatty and ‘catching up’ for a few minutes, then revealed her real reason for calling: she wanted to borrow $60 “just until morning”. She said she’d been at her daughter’s house all day and that she had $60 and she thinks she must have lost it over there, and that if she doesn’t show her hubby/bf/guy that she still has it, he will be really mad at her. So she just needs to borrow it long enough to show him that she still has it, and she would give it right back in the morning. HA yeah right.
I fell for it the time two years ago when she called me late at night to loan her $20 for “her friend with a sick baby” and even drove her over to some “extended stay” hotel where “her friend” was staying so she could give it to her. Looking back, I probably drove her to a drug deal.
Anyway, I told her I didn’t have any cash, that I never carry cash and always use debit cards. It was easier than trying to deal with her trying to talk me into giving it to her, to just tell her I didn’t have it.
When I was about 12 months pregnant (not really, but you get the idea…) I was in the parking lot at Ralph’s grocery buying thanksgiving stuff. I unloaded and was (barely) pushing the cart to the corral when another customer called to me to ask if I’d take her cart too!
(To her credit, when I looked stunned, and the size of my belly finally sank in, she stammered an apology).
Oh my goodness Ivory, what a moron she was! It’s amazing how inconsiderate some people can be. What she should have done is approached you and asked if you’d like her to take it for you, seeing as she was returning her own cart anyway!!
My friend today mused that I’m only friendly to old ladies as I held the door open for an elderly woman at David Jones: She had arrived at the door first, just behind someone else, and I was on the other side, arriving after she had. The person in front of her opened it and continued on their way and I caught the door and held it open for her. She was surprised but grateful. I replied to him that I am not necessarily a friendly person (cold, emotionless etc. etc.), I am just courteous and polite to everyone and respectful, especially of the elderly.
My roommate in college used to get pissed off that I wouldn’t cover for him when he cheated on his girlfriend. Even more, once he got pissed off I wouldn’t cook her food when she was hungry.
Mine was eons ago, thankfully, in high school. My childhood-friend-turned-crush enlisted me to help him win the heart of my best friend, pumping me for information about what she liked and whether she was dating anyone. He had me be on the line when he called her so we could discuss whether she liked him back. Later, when they got together (thanks, best friend!), their relationship turned abusive, and they often turned to me to complain and cry. They would ask me to talk to the other so they could make up. They did this knowing I had feelings for him.
It was a wretched experience. I’d like to say I eventually grew a spine and a brain and told them both to fuck off, but that’d be a big fat lie. I don’t know what happened to them after high school, and I don’t really care.
Not me, but my mom. A couple of things my older sister has asked her:
1- My mom had a small rental house with some very reliable tenants living in it. Their rent made up a large part of my mom’s smallish income. Sis decided she wanted to move back to town and that mom should kick out her tenants and let Sis live there at greatly reduced rent. Mom didn’t.
2- Several years later sis had surgery shortly before Christmas. My sister and my mom live approximately two thousand miles apart. My sister asked my mom to fly to sis’s place, clean the house thoroughly, and then leave before my dad got there to spend Christmas with his girlfriend. Mom declined. Incidentally, my sister had two teenaged children who could perfectly well have cleaned the house.
As for me, I can only think of minor things. Once I was at a gym working out on an elliptical machine. I was about ten minutes into what I intended to be a half-hour workout, sweating hard and probably bright red, when a woman came up to me and asked if I’d get off the machine so she could use it while chatting with her male friend, who would use the empty elliptical machine next to me. I’m still flabbergasted at the cheek of it. She was obnoxiously persistent, and I was too thrown for a loop to think straight, and she didn’t back down after I told her ‘no’ several times, so I finally got off the machine and went to a different elliptical machine fifty feet away or so. She and her friend ‘exercised’ for about seven minutes on the elliptical machines and then left.
