Why would you take a turkey, even a free one, that you didn’t want or need?
Because it’s free. Doesn’t matter what it is, some people just have a need to take free stuff no matter what.
It depends entirely on how you said it. Sounds like you came off like an asshole, rather than making a joke. Whether that’s because your friend is touchy or you actually said it like an asshole, I don’t know.
Either way, apologizing and saying you were joking, followed by an explanation about not having enough room in your fridge would probably go a long way towards fixing things.
A lot of times, with friends, it doesn’t really matter whose fault it was.
The timeline in the OP could use some work. How long was it between the day your friend asked you to stow it in your freezer, and when he asked you to thaw it? One day? A week?
Naw.
A real friend would chew it up and regurgitate it right into their mouth.
And then teach them to fly.
Frankly, your “friend” is just sponging off your good will.
Give the turkey to someone that would appreciate it.
It’s entirely possible that the next request from the friend would have been to stuff it - I think OP headed that off nicely.
Okay, I’m dying to know what sexual innuendo would come to mind for this situation.
I have a wonderful friend who once asked me to take 2 weeks off from work and fly to a different state and take care of her horses. I was happy to do that for her. I don’t think I’d have thawed out a turkey for her, but she probably would never ask.
Call your local food banks, they are begging for turkeys now and they like them frozen.
What you should do is, don’t thaw the turkey. Leave it frozen and when the friend comes to pick it up, put it in a duffel bag and swing it around as hard as you can into your friend’s skull. Then when he’s down, keep pounding and pounding on his face with that frozen turkey until you get your message across. That’s the only way you’re going to get respect.
Now THAT’S turkey talk!
Either that or invite them over for coffee and then cut the bitch.
Sounds like a friend of mine. Calls me up to borrow a tool, then wants me to bring it over to his house.
I actually did. Then he complained it wasn’t good enough! :rolleyes:
Moved to IMHO.
Peel off the plastic, plunk it in a bucket of brine, pt in the garage fridge. No dripies, no mess, no problem. They can fish out the internal organs on their own when they pick it up.
I guess I’d be curious why they couldn’t pick up the turkey. If they didn’t have a car and they were waiting for a friend to give them a ride over, I probably wouldn’t give them a snarky response, but I wouldn’t agree to clear out my fridge either. But if they were just too lazy to come over, I’d bust their chops a little. Not the same way the OP did, but I might say something like, “Hell to the naw. You need to bring your crazy ass over and get this damn turkey before I give it to someone else, fool.”
If I’m calling you a “fool”, it means I love you.
Moving it from one spot to another is not that much trouble, provided you have the space, but now I’m supposed to go purchase a food safe bucket to help my friend enjoy the free turkey? And then hoist 40 lbs of salmonella-laced liquid into my fridge?
In reality, I’d probably defrost the turkey and possibly even cook if for them, or at least I would have in the past. I have come to realize over the years what a mistake doing favors for people generally is, as it is typically leads to bad feelings all around, so hopefully I’d now have the sense to refuse to even store the bird and would give it to someone else from the beginning. I have enough chores of my own.
Sorry, we have 2 food safe buckets with lids - we cook a lot. And even as broken as my body is, if seated I can move 40 pounds from floor into fridge with relative ease [my upper body gets a fair amount of exercise hauling my broke ass from wheelchair to car seat, or sofa, or bed, and using crutches for very short distances on good days.]
And the chance of salmonella in commercial food products is actually a hell of a lot less than one would assume.
If you don’t want to heft all that water around, then plop it in the bathtub, and periodically dump a fresh bag of ice into the water in the bucket, the overflow can be rinsed down the drain and when the bird is finished thawing, you can clean everything up and dump chlorine in if you are still twitchy. Or a laundry sink, if your house is old enough to have one.
But are you sure there isn’t a way that is even more trouble than that?
That’s what I was thinking. 
No way do I have room in my fridge to defrost a whole turkey. But I don’t have room in my freezer to keep it either, which is why I’d never be in this position. I don’t even cook a turkey for thanksgiving.