Am I being oversensitive?

September 27, 2012 6:26 PM

Spent two days, 12 hours driving helping a friend move from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The whole time my friend seemed unappreciative of my help and didn't even go as far to pay or offer to pay for any snacks or meals. At the end of it all my friend offered thanks. Am I being over sensitive or do I have the right to be a little annoyed?
posted by nathanm to human relations (22 answers total)

You have the right to feel anything you feel.

I would wait until your friend settles in and gently bring it up. It could be that the move made your friend really nervous or anxious or something, and s/he may have forgotten manners. If this is an unusual occurrence, and your friend is usually polite, it may be a situational mishap.

But do address it if it bothers you, just give your friend a chance to understand and/or explain.
posted by xingcat at 6:30 PM on September 27, 2012 [6 favorites]

Kind of, yeah. It's pretty much universally agreed that the cost of asking a friend to help you move is food and/or beer when all is done. Sounds like your friend broke that rule.

That said, if he's a good friend you might want to let it go. Maybe he is distracted or depressed because of the move or maybe he's strapped for cash, I dunno.

It's a dick move, but one that might be worth giving a pass to depending on the circumstances.
posted by bondcliff at 6:31 PM on September 27, 2012 [4 favorites]

You have the right to be annoyed. It's very basic common courtesy to pay for food, snacks, drinks (in addition to all moving costs) when it comes to friends helping one move, out of their own generosity. Your friend sounds either totally clueless, or a bit of a jerk.
posted by raztaj at 6:32 PM on September 27, 2012 [3 favorites]

I can't speak for the hive, but there's much more I'd need to know before I could even begin to have an opinion.
Were his thanks heartfelt?
Is he deep in debt, made worse by the move?
Are you his best friend? His last resort? Well off?
Give us more.
posted by LonnieK at 6:33 PM on September 27, 2012 [9 favorites]

I'd be irritated as hell. But what do you want from this? You absolutely have the right to be annoyed; if you were my friend, I'd have paid for your meals and bought you your weight in beer and pizza at the end, and paid for your gas for the trip to SF and the return trip (assuming you were driving back to LA on your own).

But moving can totally wig people out and make them act in funny ways. If this is uncharacteristic of your friend, I'd keep my irritation to myself and just let it go. If it's part of a pattern, I may or may not bring it up, depending on how important continuing the friendship is.
posted by rtha at 6:33 PM on September 27, 2012 [4 favorites]

You have the right to be annoyed. I stopped hanging out with someone for a similar reason, and frankly, I don't like asking people for help with things like moving because it is such a pain in the ass that I always feel like I'm imposing.

Is your friend really hard-up financially? That doesn't excuse the unappreciative behavior, but they may literally be unable to pay for anything but the basics at the moment.

But some people are jerks. It depends on how close you guys are, what his/her financial situation is at the moment, etc., but if you're living in LA and your friend is in SF, the friendship might not last much longer anyway. I don't think stress is a very good excuse for this sort of behavior without other mitigating circumstances. (Ex: I'm MOVING and I'm DYING OF SOME SCARY DISEASE).
posted by ablazingsaddle at 6:46 PM on September 27, 2012

you are not being overly sensitive at all. when i moved from LA to portland, my best friend helped me pack up and drive the 26' foot moving van, and then helped me unpack. he even paid for his own airfare back to LA. i never even asked him to help me; he took it for granted that he just would. i bought him all meals including a really nice meal to thank him, and sent him a nice gift afterward.
posted by violetk at 6:49 PM on September 27, 2012

Of course you have the right to be annoyed, but please don't confuse this with the hive giving you permission to be a dick in return. Talk it over with your friend, or else forgive and forget.

The next time your friend asks for a major favor, however, it's perfectly acceptable to be unavailable to perform it.
posted by psycheslamp at 6:51 PM on September 27, 2012 [12 favorites]

Moving makes people nuts, especially if they're doing it because of the end of a job or a relationship or something. What your friend did seems not what I would consider an average response to the situation. I would consider your annoyance justified, personally.

However what you decide to DO about that annoyance, the question you didn't ask, is what I'd be more concerned about. There may have been important mitigating circumstances to why your friend was in a weird/bad/crummy mood and/or was uncool about this situation so you might want to feel your friend out about that. At the very least, I would not offer to do them any big favors until you've come to some sort of agreement about what your part will entail and what your friend will be providing. And, I guess, I'd think back to whether there's a general imbalance in your friendship and whether that might have anything to do with this [does your friend think you owed them this for some reason? do you always help your friend and he is always a grump?] so you can properly contextualize this.

I'm with the other folks, I'm a person who helps people move a lot and even the most disorganized and out of it people managed to put together a pizza and some sodas. The people who were really on top of it were already packed and would pay for gas and/or take us all out to a nice meal and/or bump themselves up to the top of their "I will help YOU move" and/or people who would drive you to the airport really early or late.

tl;dr you're welcome to feel what you feel, I'd think a little more on it before deciding what to DO, if anything.
posted by jessamyn at 6:56 PM on September 27, 2012 [7 favorites]

You have the right to be annoyed, but I can tell you from painful experience that there's really no way to confront someone about their inadequate gratitude for your good services, without ending up feeling like a total dick. No additional thanks your friend could render at that point would sound remotely sincere, and bringing it up just makes you sound like the sort of person who helps friends in hopes of being extravagantly praised and rewarded for it.

If you need something concrete from your friend at this point-- like gas money, or whatever-- then by all means bring that up. Otherwise, I'd say to keep evaluating the relationship on its own merits, and write off this particular incident.
posted by Bardolph at 6:58 PM on September 27, 2012 [5 favorites]

Sounds like you inadvertently got some clear insight into how your friend conducts themselves when the chips are down. Now you can move forward in life accordingly, because that's pretty much how this person will act every time things get tough.

(Yes, moving is very stressful and people are very absorbed with a lot of unfamiliar details but that is not an excuse to be forget basic social graces.)
posted by 99percentfake at 7:00 PM on September 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

I have had this experience. Just as 99percentfake says, it turned out to be pretty much how that person acted every time things got tough . . . or even not so tough. If you are a person with a sense of social reciprocity, which you evidently are, this type of behavior will never cease to rankle. I eventually just moved on, and that's what I'd advise you to do as well.
posted by HotToddy at 7:46 PM on September 27, 2012

You mean you drove from LA to SF and back to help a friend move? That, IMHO, goes way beyond the standard friend favor level of a couple hours moving stuff or an inconvenient airport trip. The normal pizza and/or beer price for helping a friend move is for a basic cross-town U-Haul gig, not a 350-400 mile road trip unless you otherwise have reason to be in San Francisco. I wouldn't even begin to ask someone to do this for me unless they were an incredibly good friend (or I were offering to pay), especially if I were going to be moving and the friendship was about to be much more distant. I'd also be incredibly unlikely to help a friend in this way unless we were truly lifelong buddies or some incredibly special circumstance were involved. The lifelong buddies case would be one where I was truly so bummed that he was moving away that I simply had to spend a bit more time doing something together. Otherwise, if the circumstance were truly that special to get me to volunteer, I'd forgive most any lack of social graces as my friend being too preoccupied with bigger issues. Otherwise, I'd be utterly infuriated. Not that I wasn't being compensated in snacks or meals or anything, but rather that my friend didn't seem to realize the extent to which other people were going out of their way to help him.

So I guess my question for you is: why did you agree to help in the first place? I have a hard time saying no to favors myself, but it's an important skill sometimes and a good way to avoid getting yourself into these kinds of situations in the first place. That's not to say you shouldn't help people out (honestly, a lot of the reason I have a hard time turning people down is because I enjoy helping my friends when I can), but you also don't need to feel bad about being busy that weekend when a favor is more than you want to handle.

Anyway, if your friend moved away now, this may all be a bit of a moot point unless you'll still be seeing him often.
posted by zachlipton at 7:55 PM on September 27, 2012

Just remember that some people take a slightly different attitude to offers of help. They think that once an offer of help is made, that the the helper needs no 'reward' - if they didn't want to help and do the work (time, effort, expense, etc) - then they shouldn't have offered. "They offered and they knew what they were taking on and that's that" .

Hard to explain 'cos it not my point of view - but certainly one I've seen.
posted by Xhris at 8:44 PM on September 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

When did this happen? A few days ago? A few months ago? If he's moving his life to another city your friend will most certainly be stressed out. It could be that he's still adapting in his new environment.

Have you hung out since then? Frequently? Did you move as well or are you back in your original town? Or is your town your friend's new town? There are a lot of mitigating factors you left out that make it impossible for us to make an accurate judgment of the situation. Maybe you could elaborate?
posted by zardoz at 8:52 PM on September 27, 2012

The times I have moved several states away I was pretty poor and not in a good mindset. I know for one move I had to finally admit halfway through the trip that I was broke and would need to borrow some gas money. I am socially retarded and hate asking for things. Friend was fine with it. Both of us have been in these situations before.

Do you know if your friend actually had enough money? Maybe he/she was too embarrassed to bring it up?
Maybe they were super stressed and just didn't think about it?
posted by KogeLiz at 9:32 PM on September 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

They're totally stressed out. You've helped them out so the fallout is a little less hard.

They'll turn around, when they realize how great of a friend you are.

They might think that you're too proud to be praised for helping out.

You're (incrementally) awesome! Do you feel like continuing to be awesome to people around you?
posted by porpoise at 10:34 PM on September 27, 2012

Is it unusual for a friend not to offer something in return for help like that? Yeah, that's pretty unusual. Would Miss Manners tell your friend that he is a jerk and he should buy you a nice dinner? Almost certainly.

There's no such thing as a "right" to feel something. If you like, you can just be annoyed without having to worry about justifying it. But what's done is done, and being annoyed in and of itself won't make your friend more considerate. (And if you took this question to Metafilter, you are probably not be the sort of person who is willing to just ask him straightforwardly for a favor in return, although that is an option which is available to you.)

So I think you should just accept this state of affairs, keep this possibility in mind generally when helping people, and remember not to spend a two days helping this particular guy again if a lack of reciprocation bothers you.
posted by value of information at 4:55 AM on September 28, 2012

Is what your friend did a deal breaker, or if you can give it enough time, can you take the time to educate them on how they could improve their game? I see the best way to resolve this is to make sure it doesn't happen the next time(s) your friend moves!
posted by kuppajava at 9:21 AM on September 28, 2012

I don't think that you're being oversensitive, but I basically answer all of these "how mad should I be?" questions the same way:

If we told you that you had no right to be annoyed and you should just get over it, would you be able to? If the answer is yes, then you should go ahead and get over it, regardless of the merits of the case. Being annoyed at your friend accomplishes nothing, and does nothing at all for you personally. If it's within your power to let go of that feeling, I think you should do it.
posted by Ragged Richard at 9:30 AM on September 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

You are right to feel annoyed because I've never heard of someone NOT paying for their friend's moving-day food, but you also should not have EXPECTED him to pay for your food. But it doesn't matter, what's done is done, and it'd be super awkward to have a conversation about it afterwards, if this is just a one-time event that won't happen again. If your friend is usually very thankful/polite/considerate and a good friend, then just consider it a fluke and forget about it. If your friend is generally this thoughtless, then just don't help him move or anything like that again.
posted by never.was.and.never.will.be. at 9:46 AM on September 28, 2012

If I offer to help someone with a job, I usually suggest something like "Dinner's on you, right?" Do you value this friendship? Then assume friend is just plain clueless, and let it go. An otherwise terrific friend is worth a lot.
posted by theora55 at 12:15 PM on September 28, 2012