So that was a bad idea... What is the most regrettable favor you have ever done for someone?
Has anyone asked you to do a really big favor for them lately? It happened to me two weeks ago.
Seriously? Can I keep my four hours and just give you 20 bucks? You can keep the change.
A couple of weeks ago, my uncle Steve called me and asked, "Will you help me..."
I didn't even let him finish the question. I was in. I would help my uncle Steve do anything.
Luckily for me, he didn't finish the request with "get rid of a dead body?"
I probably would have had to do it. Steve is one of the nicest people I have ever met in my life. I know for a fact that if I asked the same question he asked, he too would not even let me finish. He would immediately say "yes"... and probably bring along a twelve pack for good measure. Which is awesome unless your request ends with, "supervise a 3rd grade trip to an Amish village?"
For you young people, this is from Billy Madison. It is a movie made in the very brief period of human history when Adam Sandler was funny.
Steve is an electrician and has helped me with many electrical problems in my home (some of them weren't even caused by me!) He has picked me up from the airport, helped me fix my stairs, and volunteered his son to be the ring bearer in my wedding.
When I was a kid, he took me water skiing with his teenage friends. Actually now that I think about it, Steve is the one who taught me to ride a bike.
And Steve does this for everyone in his life. He is "that guy". He is the one that everyone can count on.
So when Steve needed help moving to a new house, it was no surprise that ten of us dropped everything and showed up to help do the absolute last thing any of us wanted to do. Moving sucks! But it was Steve so we all came.
In most cases I think I'd rather make new friends than help my current ones move.
The first part of the move was simple enough. He rented a huge 26-foot truck. Although we carried an almost endless stream of boxes and furniture to that truck, with ten of us working, we finished incredibly quickly.
But half the truck was still empty. Steve is not a dumb man. He is also very thrifty (oh wait you will see how thrifty very shortly). There is no way he would waste that much space.
I asked, "Did you miscalculate? Is the extra 13 feet for 1000 twelve packs?"
He smiled.
Oh I've got a surprise for you...
Oh crap! I did not like that smile. Most smiles are intended to express joy and happiness. This smile was intended to be a shield. I could practically read my uncle's mind, "If I keep smiling when I say this, it won't sound so bad. In addition, no one would ever punch a smiling guy in the mouth."
Through his Joker-like grin, Steve said, "We need the space for the bricks."
Bricks? What bricks? Whose bricks? Does he think he's one of the freaking three little pigs?
Then he showed us.
He had a pile of about 3000 bricks next to his house. Remember when I said he was thrifty? He had been given these bricks ten years earlier... for free. He had planned on building a patio with them. But then he moved FOUR times. Each time he brought them with him.
This is not the actual pile of bricks... the real one was much larger.
Although he wasn't joking, I decided I should. Well at least half-joke. I chuckled and said, "How about we all take up a collection to buy you some brand new bricks and have them delivered to your new house?"
Even though several members of the group thought this was a brilliant idea, Steve thought this would be a huge waste. After all, he had already invested FOUR days of work into moving them before.
Because it was Steve, and we all owed him favors, we formed a line between the pile of bricks and the truck. One by one we passed the bricks down the line and into the truck. Approximately 90 minutes in, I became convinced that someone was unloading the bricks as fast as we could load them and was running around the other side of the house to secretly add them back into the pile. It was like a cartoon. The pile never seemed to get any smaller!
This is obviously not us. These people are smiling. By the way, check out what buildon.org does. It's pretty cool.
Finally, three and a half hours after we had started loading the pile of irreplaceable bricks, mercifully, we finished.
A couple of hours ago, I returned from the doctor. Apparently, there is a problem with my sciatic nerve. Hmmmmmm I wonder how that happened?!
Oh so that is why it hurts so bad. There is an explosion in my lower back. Yep that is pretty much what it feels like.
Curse you Steve for being so damn nice that no one can say "no" to you!!!!!
My wife helped someone get a job at where she worked and she ended up being my wife's supervisor and turned into a total bit#h. Needless to say my wife has been VERY carefully who she helps out now.
Hopefully karma will settle her account but it astounds me how short the memory of some very ungrateful people is.
Oh yeah this has been a common one that I had not thought of. Helping Someone get a job is a huge favor. I hope things end up ok for your wife.
Shit man that sucks.
What a great article you have written here. Nice pictures as well and it is quite fun to read. Especially the part about the person returning the bricks to the heap made me chuckle. I at one time helped one of my friends to "fix up a car for a bit". Ended up tearing half the engine apart and the amount of issues on it kept going up. About half a day in he just folded though, had the car scrapped in the end haha. Have fun out there and good luck with your future posts!
Good for him for being able to know when to say when. I bet you wish he had figured that out before starting, but better late than never. Plus now he owes you one!
Well my cousin got drunk one night and went out cold on our way home at 2am i had to carry him for miles! I ended up spending $300 to get him home because at one point we passed by hospital to check if he will survive the night. He quit alcohol that day.
You are a good cousin! I think one of mine may have just left me on the road lol.
Great post, and very funny!
I regret helping a lot of people, even tho I learned a lot from the experiences. When I was younger I helped a guy I considered to be my friend build a website, and everything was okay, until he found a better friend and they both bullied me for years until elementary school was over.
Another thing I regret was helping the friend of one of my ex girlfriends. Her friend apparently gave a picture with her, half naked, to a guy who shared them online, just because he was a jerk.
Since my ex knew the kind of guy I am, and that I do not look at naked girls the way others look at them, she showed me the pics and convinced me to help them report every Facebook page that had them posted. I spent around two or three hours doing that, closing a few Facebook pages with our reports.
A few months later, the exact girl was the one who convinced my ex that it was better to break up with me... awesome!
And lastly, I regret every single time I help my brother repair his computer. I'm okay helping him with anything, even money, but when it comes to his computer, God, I always spend too much time on that damn machine, it's always broken, no matter what I do to it.
Those are only a few things I regret when helping others, there are way more, but I won't write all of them here.
Anyway, great article, really enjoyed it, best of luck! :)
Thanks. Man it sounds like some bad luck there. But it hasn't stopped you from being nice and that is so important.
Yeah, I'd rather focus on good things than bad things :)
When I was 19 and really naive, I was working at a movie theater, and a pregnant girl about my age walked up to the ticket counter and acted like she knew me. I had no idea who she was, but she insisted we knew each other from high school and had been great friends. I figured it must have been one of those classes that wasn't Drama or TV Production, so I didn't remember anyone from them. I took it on her word that we knew each other. I didn't consider until years later she may have just read my name tag and pretended.
Anyway, she was without a ride home for some reason, and asked if I could take her there when I got off work. I didn't see any harm in it, so I said yes. She hung around the theater lobby until I clocked out.
That's when Mr. Toad's Wild Ride began. There were people chasing her. They'd been waiting in the parking lot while she hid out in the lobby, and they followed my car out of the lot. I didn't notice until we were in a relatively deserted part of town after dark.
She had me take her to what looked like a crack house in the worst part of town, but asked me to wait in the car for her, because she just needed to get something from the house. She wasn't staying there. I would have driven away at that point, but a guy I actually knew came out of the house and started talking to me. He was the older brother of a girl I knew, and we'd met before. He said he was doing some kind of "pennance" by being there, and that I should NOT be there.
The girl came back out of the house and got back in my car, directing me where to go, and the car following us began to get right up on my bumper, nearly forcing me off the road a few times. I pulled into a brightly lit gas station, hoping that would offer some safety, but it didn't. The car of followers pulled in behind me so I couldn't back out of the parking space, and then a very angry, large dude got out and started banging on MY driver's side window so hard, I thought he was going to break it.
I was pretty upset at this point, which seemed to confuse the girl, and she asked me why I was acting that way. She got out of the car and told the angry dude he was scaring me, and they argued, which resulted in her eventually getting back in the car. I ended up pulling out sideways to get away from them, because the other car wasn't moving to let me leave.
We went on a wild chase through the town, and I got a little bit ahead of the bad guys. Eventually, the girl said to drop her off at this abandoned gas station, because the angry dude would see her there, and they could have some privacy to talk. But, she wanted me to be sure to come back and pick her up in ten minutes.
I dropped her off and drove away, thinking about what the right thing to do would be. I wasn't sure if I knew her or not, she was pregnant and in a bad situation, but she seemed to be playing me, too. I drove a very circuitous route around town to make sure I was no longer being followed, because the angry dude's friends had dropped him off, too, presumably to pick him up later. I did not want those friends on my tail, and drove all the back streets and weird routes I could think of to make sure they were gone.
When I hadn't seen them for a while, and was relatively confident I wasn't being followed anymore because I lost them, I made my decision.
I went home and locked the door.
Fortunately, I never saw her or her angry friends again, as I was concerned they might come back to the theater. They didn't. THAT is the worst favor I ever did for anyone.
Yeah that is really bad. What a bizarre situation. It reminds me of soemthing you'd see in a tarrantino movie. So random and weird... but fascinating! I'm glad it ended up ok for you.
Me, too. It's one of the freakier things that has happened to me, and one of the most potentially dangerous, which is why it sticks out to me so much all these years later. Most people don't have the experience necessary to make the best decisions when they're 19. Now, I'm old enough to know better than to ever put myself in that kind of situation.
The Dumbest favor I ever done for someone was at work. I suggested I would be the one to take our paranoid schizophrenia patient to the A & E . She was showing a lot of signs of distress and I felt so sorry for her being the kind hearted lady that I am.
I began to regret the decision after 5 hours out in the A& E department though, when she voiced to me she was hearing voices telling her to kill me
:}
Oh yeah. You win! That one is rough.
What is A & E?
haha :) brings back awful memories hahaha!!
Accident and Emergency
Wife talked me into letting her friend and 3 girls move into our place "to get out of a bad situation". 8 weeks later their bad situation is now our bad situation. FML
Oooo 8 weeks. Wow. Good luck man.
This is brilliant! We always have those nice people that we just can't refuse. One of my nice acts was helping my friend study for a test. She asked if I could help tutor her, and being the nice person I am, I said yes. Low and behold, 5 hours had passed, it was nighttime, and she was still as confused as when we started. The moral of the story? If you don't know something 100%, don't teach it lol
Lol! Uh oh I should have thought of that before becoming a teacher. You sound like a good friend!
So a friend from High School got out of jail after three years for stealing a car. He came from a poor family and had a rough life. I felt bad for the guy. After he got out, he said he cleaned up his life and wanted to hang out. I told him I was going to a party and he wanted to come. I invited him. We get to the party and we are having a good time until he comes up to me and says we should go. I was trying to mack on this pretty thing, and didn't want to leave but he was persistent. I told the girl, who lived at the house, that I had to go, and she was kinda upset, I had a good night ahead of me. I say fine, and walk to the car and we get in. As I pull out two police cars pull up and block us in. It turns out he stole a bunch of jewelry from the party and the police wanted to arrest me and him. The cops finally realized I had no clue and he took all the blame. The worst part is, the girl who I was trying to get with, it was her jewelry and she never wanted to talk to me again.
Great story! Even better gif! I mean really good one. Did you ever talk to the guy again?
Thanks!!! I texted him about a six months ago and we talked a little to see how things were going. He has some kids now and a steady job, so he's doing OK. He was always a good dude, just in a bad situation. He also helped me out when we were real young so I always kinda looked out for him after that.
You sound like a really good friend. With an excellent taste in gifs...
Thanks! I really appreciate it. I do what I can. You picked up a new follower!
I offered to edit a relative's book. It was a great story -- but the draft was 400,000 words! Way more of a time commitment than I expected.
Wow! 400,000 words. I think I wrote a post about the ewok movies about that long. ;)