Getting Snubbed by an Ungrateful Friend

By Editor |

Monday, October 2, 2023

Getting Snubbed by an Ungrateful Friend

When the pandemic started in early 2020, I was in a better financial position than I had been all my life, so I started giving money away at a faster clip than I had ever given before.  The thing that made this possible was that I got onto Section 8 a couple years earlier, which now pays most of my rent.  Section 8 gives applicants enough money to live a normal middle-class life, which includes such things as owning a car.  But I don't drive, so the money I would have spent on a car was just accumulating in my checking account.  (It is also true that I live frugally in other ways.)  By the time the pandemic started, I had $8,000 sitting in the bank that I wasn't using.  I felt bad about the state of the world, so I started giving money away, starting with mother/son immigrants in my neighborhood who lost their jobs because of the pandemic.  (I paid their rent for two months and later helped them buy a car.  In exchange they drove me to some doctor's appointments.)  As of the end of 2023, I have given away about $23,500, but I still manage to keep money in the bank for emergencies.

In late July, 2022, I met a woman via social media who lived about a mile from me.  She was in a very bad financial situation.  Her roommate had moved out and she couldn’t pay the rent by herself.  She cried on the phone, which really got to me.  So, even before meeting her, I told her I could give her $1,000 to $2,000.  Later in the conversation, when I told her I would start out by giving her $1,000, she asked for the higher figure.  That was my first indication that she had an attitude of entitlement.

After that we became friends.  However, within a month she told me that $1,500 was needed to save the life of her daughter's dog.  (Her adult daughter lived in the same building, but in a separate apartment.)  I took that as a request for money, although she later claimed that it wasn't.  I declined.  The daughter got the money by taking out a loan, but the dog died anyway.

I continued to give her (the mother) money through November, at which time I had given her a total of $3,255.  But her need for money was never-ending, and I started to wonder how much of an obligation I had to keep filling her monthly budget shortfall.  I felt that she wasn’t doing enough to help herself, so I didn’t give her anything in December — but that turned out to be poor timing on my part, because it meant she had a poor Christmas.

I'll call this woman Lenore.  She is in her early 70's, as am I.  Lenore is intelligent, and during our friendship we had some intense conversations, including a couple in which I gently shared my opinion that she had a somewhat negative view of the world (I called it “fatalistic”) and that she had an “I can’t” attitude.  But that also gave us something in common because I have a similar attitude, only mine is more like “I won’t” than “I can’t”.

Before Christmas I came down with the flu.  In a phone conversation in late December, she told me how desperate her financial situation had become, so I offered her another $250.  To get the money, it was necessary for her to come to my house to pick up a check.  Since she was coming to my house, I asked her to do me a favor:  I was running out of milk, so I asked her to bring me a half-gallon, which I would give her cash for.  I asked her to get the milk from store X instead of store Y, where the milk isn't as good.  Store X and store Y are very close to each other, and both of them are near my house.

Well, my request that she get the milk from store X apparently irked her.  The next day, when we talked on the phone before she came over, the first thing she said was that she'd have to get the milk from store Y.  It was evident that she had thought about this overnight.  As we talked, and as she gave me her excuses (which were ridiculous), I could hear that she was absolutely determined not to get me the milk I wanted.  One way or another, she was going to get me milk from store Y.

The excuses had to do with her dogs.  Store Y allows customers to bring dogs into the store, while store X doesn't.  She said she was babysitting two dogs, her own dog and her daughter's dog (presumably not the dog who died), and that the dogs didn't get along.  If she left the dogs at home alone, the big dog would "jump on" the small dog and abuse it.  The only alternative, she said, was to bring both dogs with her.  I asked her if she could leave them alone in the car for five minutes while she ran into store X to get the milk, and she said she couldn't leave them alone for even that long.  She had to go to store Y so she could bring one of the dogs in with her.

But of course, there were other options.  She could have locked the dogs in separate rooms in her apartment for the fifteen minutes she would be out of the house.  Or she could have brought one dog with her and left the other dog at home, and then left the dog in the car while she got the milk.  Or she could have brought both dogs with her and left one of them in the car while she tied up the other dog outside the store.  The point is, there were lots of easy solutions.  As it turned out, she left the larger dog at home (despite saying she would have to bring both).  Even so, she got me milk from store Y.

I understood from the moment this discussion began that she was looking for a way to snub me, but I just didn't know why.  I could hear the resentment in her voice.  My best guess was that she was resentful of me for not giving her money before Christmas, causing her to have a poor Christmas.  My second guess was that she resented having to keep begging for money.  (I wasn't making her beg, but I did ask for an explanation of her needs each time.)  My third guess was that she resents anyone who helps her because it makes her feel indebted.

Getting me milk was the first favor she had ever done me, despite a half-year of accepting money from me.  Once before I had asked her to drive me to and from the doctor, but I paid her $50 for that, so that wasn't really a favor.  (Actually, there was one time when she brought me food, which was nice, but that was a spontaneous gift, not a favor.)

Now, it may seem that not getting me the brand of milk I wanted is a very small snub, and I shouldn't be so focussed on it, but that's not the point.  The point is that a person with good values doesn't snub someone who has been so generous.  What made this snub so outrageous was that she was taking more money from me at the same time that she was snubbing me.  That she had planned the snub overnight meant that it was a premeditated snub, and that made it all the worse.

Up to that point, Lenore and I had talked on the phone once a week or so.  After the snub, I decided to wait for her to call me because the amount of time it took would be revealing.  She finally called almost four weeks later.  That made it clear that she knew she had snubbed me.  If she had not consciously snubbed me, she would have picked up the phone sooner.  By waiting four weeks, she was either hoping that I hadn't noticed the snub, or hoping that I would be over my annoyance.  But I wasn't.  She played dumb on the phone, pretending that there was no snub, and that caused me to lose my temper, and I ended up yelling at her.

The saga with Lenore didn't end there.  A half-year later, she called me again.  Both she and her daughter were being evicted from their apartments so that their greedy landlord could get a little more rent money.  Both Lenore and her adult daughter had been renting apartments in the building for more than a decade, but this landlord felt no gratitude or allegiance to them.  Not only that, but the landlord gave them only a month to leave.

Lenore wanted to stay in our town, but wasn't able to find a place that was available immediately, so she rented a place in another town for two months.  At the same time, she made a commitment to another landlord to return to this town and rent an apartment from him after those two months were up.  In typical Lenore fashion, she made these commitments without figuring out how she was going to pay for them.  To make the situation worse, she hired very expensive movers instead of going on Craig's List and finding someone cheap.

So, being the generous sucker that I am, I gave Lenore $2,000 more.  That got her (and her daughter, who is living with her now) to the second town for two months, but she didn't have enough money to get back.  So two months later she called me up looking for more money.  That conversation wasn't a good one because I criticized her for not being practical.  I learned, for example, that she had never sat down and written out a budget to determine how she would pay for everything she was doing.  I again yelled at her, my intention being to yell some sense into her.  I should have stayed calm, but I wasn't able to.  The truth is, having helped her up to that point, I just didn't feel that I could abandon her, so I felt obligated.  (Later I ended up giving her an additional $1,000.)

Yelling at her on the phone gave Lenore the permission she needed to "tell me off" in an email, and in that email all of her entitlement came pouring out.  The most outrageous thing she said was that I wasn't actually giving away my own money, but rather "government money".  Of course, all of the benefits I get from the government are benefits I qualify for.  Once the benefits are received, they are mine.  If the government sends me more money than I actually need, that's not my fault.  Indeed, I feel that Section 8 should be restructured to give less money to more people, but I'm not the one who writes the laws.  Any other person in my situation would have gone on multiple shopping sprees, or just put the money in the bank.

Having convinced herself that I wasn't actually giving away my own money, Lenore now has a solid excuse not to feel grateful.  Altogether, she got $6,555 from me.