Am I the jerk for calling the police on my fiancée? My fiancée, 28 and me, 30, have been together for three years. I used to live close to work and used public transportation, but after I moved into his house, which is hours away from work, I brought myself a car, since I'm a nurse and also, since there aren't any hospitals close to where we live that I could transfer to.
My fiance's car hasn't been working for close to two months now. It requires so much money to get it fixed and he refused my financial help when I offered it. He used to work for a friend's family but stopped after his car broke down. He said he'd never let me fix his problems for him and I stopped offering help seeing as he was against it.
Instead, he'd ask to use my car every now and then, and I agreed as long as it's not when I'm working, and also since he only uses it to trips for the supermarkets. We've had to talk before about him drinking and driving. I never agree on him doing that because of how reckless he can be on the road, and also any responsibility would fall on me as the car owner should he get into an accident or hit someone. On New Year's Eve, he told me he wanted to use my car to go hang out with his friends and celebrate.
But I declined because I had to cover a night shift and needed my car to travel to work. He insisted and even suggested that I take the night off or swap shifts with another nurse. But I couldn't do that last minute. When he kept disrespecting my job, this was me being fed up because I've done my best to support him and even uprooted my life and moved away just so that he could be happy. But in return, all I saw was disrespect towards me.
He had seen how much trouble I got into just by moving away from my work and having to reschedule my shifts, but he still thinks I worked too much and I'm being taken advantage of. He treats my shifts as if they're hangouts with friends that I could cancel or put off, which is not okay in any capacity. He eventually relented from the argument. I thought he dropped it, but then when I went into the shower and got out, I couldn't find him nor my car. I freaked out and started calling for half an hour, but he didn't answer me.
I tried again until one of his friends picked up. I demanded that he give the phone to my fiancé, but he said they were a house and confirmed that he took my car and told me that my fiancé said that it's better if I skipped my shift and he'll be back with my car later. I couldn't take it. I felt so enraged I had my fiancé on the phone, telling him I didn't consent to him taking my car to go hang out with his friends and said that I'd call the police to get it back if he refused to come back with it.
But he didn't take me seriously, so I ended up calling the police, and he and his friends were picked up at the bar where they were hanging out. Then they were taken to the police department. I went and got my car from there and still went to my shift. My fiancé was let go hours after I left and he blew up my phone with the missed calls and texts about how I was out of my mind to call the police on him and put him in this situation.
I didn't respond, but when I got off work the next day, we got into an argument, and he said he couldn't believe I'd do this to him. But I told him he made me do this, to which he responded that I was petty and callous. Because not only did I ruin his new year's celebration, but all of his friends aren't speaking to him after I put them in the situation as well, and he then kept giving me silence about it.
I did consider this a form of theft, especially since he went behind my back, after getting a stern know from me. But he was shocked that I'd even imply that he was a thief, and said, what's yours is mine, and vice versa, and so I shouldn't be using the terms theft and stealing. Admittedly, part of the blame falls on me, and the reason is because there were instances in the past where he tried to pull similar things with me, and I let them slide.
Like trying to talk me into skipping work just to spend time with him, and then hit throw a fit and say I'm prioritizing work over him when I refuse. I thought that my only problem was transportation, but even with that being figured out, I still have to deal with constantly being gilted for simply wanting to keep my job. It's exhausting having to repeatedly explain to him why my job is important, especially since he keeps accusing me of putting it before him.
and don't even get me started on his friends, the four of them lack any sense of responsibility or common sense. One of them, the closest one to my fiancée, has always been rude to me and calls me names and is the same person who picked up the phone when I called my fiancée. They all bring nothing but negative energy to our relationship. So, am I the jerk for calling the cops on my boyfriend?
Uh, no, not the jerk. He stole your property and stopped you from going to the damn frontline vital job that you provide to society. Not okay, and just so disrespectful even leading up to it. I also like that he's not just asking you to cancel your shift, which is a big just, by the way. He's also making you do so so that you can sit alone at home and do nothing last second or new years while he goes out drinking with his friends. The guy kinda seems like a deadbeat with no consideration for anyone else.
If for some reason you stay together after this whole incident, I guess you've made the positive improvement on both your lives by at least temporarily taking him out of his D-bag friend circle. Which, even if he's not thrilled about it, sounds like it's a plus for you. And if he didn't somehow realize that he's not at least partially the author of his own misfortune once he'd sobered up,
then I can't really see him being the kind of guy who can possibly admit that he's wrong about anything. I guess, short answer, I don't think anyone could say you were the villain in this situation when the alternative is just letting a hospital go short-staffed or meekly taking a cab out of your area for work, which would be passive enough that I'm not sure he'd ever respect anything you said ever again. Well done, and I hope things got better for you.
Today, I messed up by background checking my girlfriend? We've been together a year and some. We live together. She uses a flip phone for reasons that are too long to get into, so she'll occasionally use my phone when she needs to check her email or download music. Anyway, back to my dumb butt.
I'm not going to lie, everyone. I trashed my brain as a teenager. I have issues with memory short and long, but today I woke up and was chilling for a bit while my girl was at work. Suddenly I thought, oh crap, what is my girlfriend's birthday? I knew what month it was in, but I couldn't remember if it was the 8th or 9th. That's okay, I thought. I'll go dig around a bit. Surely there's some paperwork around the house that has her birthday on it.
Spoiler, there wasn't. I'm definitely not asking her friends or family as they'll surely tell her I forgot. So I do what any reasonable guy does and I google Background Check Services. I enter her name and city and for $7.99 I receive an email with every traffic ticket, address and phone number she's ever had. Most importantly though, her birthday.
I write her birthday down in a safe spot and then I go back to chilling. All is well. I'm not a piece of crap boyfriend, what a relief. She gets home and our day is going well. When she asks to use my phone to read her emails, I completely obliviously just give it to her. She opens it and immediately sees a full background check on herself. I knew exactly what had happened once her face changed.
She immediately asked why I was background-checking her a year into our relationship and then started getting emotional, asking if I didn't trust her, among other things. This is the first relationship I have a not-had-trust issues in, so I immediately confessed that I'm a dumbass and I forgot her birthday and I paid $7.99 to get it, because her sister and friends would snitch on me.
Luckily, this isn't the first time I've come off as a total moron to her, so she believed me. But she's indeed also a bit upset I forgot her birthday. Next time, something like this happens, I'm just admitting guilt, I think. I'm also sitting here and just realized I could have waited till she was asleep and checked her license. In short, I forgot my girlfriend's birthday, background checked her to find it out, and then accidentally showed it to her on my phone, causing her to think that I don't trust her.
Well done, dear author. That's a slow clap from me. Also, the story is kind of cute in its own way. I'm just a little disappointed that you didn't discover anything particularly juicy about her. That could have really helped the channel. Criminal convictions, aliases, or her being the leader of a cult? No? I feel like we could have used something like that here. Or perhaps your notoriously faulty brain let us down once again and you've wiped it from your mind.
So, we'll never get what I assume was the true story of secrets, lies, high-speed chases, and international espionage that ensued before your memory finally succumbed to its regular entropy. But really, no bad ease here, just a sweet couple who are aware and accepting of each other's flaws, and a woman in a post from 2020 who uses a flip phone for some reason that I will be curious about until my dying day.
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I'm giving you useless information? Okay, enjoy your green hair. I have a long career of selling pool maintenance products. I could probably list 10 different ways pool owners would ignore my advice to get screwed over in the end. My favourite ongoing thing is when I tell customers to buy Algicide. Our stuff was super expensive, like 100 bucks for a 1 gallon jug, and so people would never buy it.
I'd always hear, you can get the same stuff at Walmart for $5. The Walmart Algicide is 5% concentrated and is used for water beetles. The stuff we used was 50% concentrated and actually helped your pool not turn green. So oftentimes customers would get frustrated with me when I would try to tell them to buy R chemicals because they think I'm just trying to screw them over and upsell. Realistically, I'm just trying to help them and I know what I'm talking about.
The funny thing is, I was always honest with customers and if there was a cheaper solution, I'd always tell them. Some of the balancing chemicals are pretty much the exact same no matter where you buy them. So if a customer said they were going to go and buy them at Canadian Tire, I would always tell them that was a great idea. But when it comes to maintenance chemicals, you really want quality stuff or it won't be effective and you'll end up spending more in the long run. Another common thing that would happen once a week is when dealing with a saltwater pool customer.
The short version is that soldiers made of sodium chloride, and so salt pools just split those two chemicals apart to give you a more natural chlorine. Well, if your pool is green with algae, you need to shock it with a burst of chlorine. There were so many customers that would get mad at me for telling them to add chlorine into the pool to kill any bacteria that's in there. No, you don't understand, I have a salt pool. Salt pools don't use chlorine.
Yes, they do. They just use more natural chlorine. Salt is sodium chloride. A salt pool just uses chlorine from the salt itself. So salt pools use chlorine. You need to add chlorine to help fix your pool. No, you're wrong. My pool will be worse if I add chlorine to it. You don't add chlorine to a salt pool. Yes, you do. Let me speak to your manager.
My manager would come out and always agree with me. Sometimes the customer would walk away and go to a different pool store. Sometimes they'd swallow their pride and admit they were wrong. But something about pool owners is that they think they're king crap because they own a pool. So they'll almost never admit to actually being wrong. Anyway, let me tell you another story from the last story I worked at selling pool and hot tub chemicals.
One part of the job is testing customers pool and hot tub water to see what kind of chemicals they need. If you don't take care of your pool or check it out often, you need a lot of chemicals to fix the mess you've made, particularly if you use chlorine pucks. They generally have such low pH level that it burns away at your heater coil and causes you to have copper in your water.
Well, a couple of years ago, a customer came up to me to test their pool water. It was a complete mess and it had a bunch of copper in it. This isn't the exact conversation because it was a while ago, but these were the main points. I said, yeah, the main issue is that your pH is so low, it's making your chlorine less effective, and you have copper in your water. Customer said, yeah, just let me get the stuff I need to fix it.
I went and grabbed all of the chemicals he needs and put them on the counter. So how much is all of this going to cost? Around $250. I'm not paying that much, is all of this really necessary? Yes, you won't be able to hold chlorine, and you need to get the copper out. If you oxidize copper with a shock, it's going to stain parts of your pool and even tint your hair green.
If you've got recently died blonde hair, my daughter is having a pool party next weekend and I just want the pool to have chlorine for then. Yes, and you need all of this to make sure you're good to go. Can't you just put everything away and only give me the chlorine? Fine. I'm not going to argue, I don't work on commission.
So he fast-forward a couple of days and the customer's wife came in. It was subtle, but you could tell her hair had a funny tint to it. She asked for all the chemicals that I recommended to her husband, and she paid with zero hesitation. The husband never came in again and his wife took care of the pool maintenance from that moment forward. The next time the wife came in, it looked like her hair had been dyed to the original blonde colour she used to have. In short, a customer ignored my advice and his wife came back with her hair tinted green.
You know, it would have been funny enough if the customer had only died their own hair green and quietly accepted the shop assistant's advice going forward, and I'm sure that would have been a smug and satisfying experience for the author anyway. But it makes it a million times funnier that the customer inflicted it on the one person who was going to hold it over his head and never let him forget it.
Recoloring your spouse's expensive new hairdo is the kind of mess up that will be used as leverage for the rest of your marital days. So hopefully the customer used this as a learning experience and never ignored the advice of the professionals he interacted with again. The fact that his partner evidently didn't trust him with any pool related problems going forward is the cherry on the cake. Author is on the right and customer is an arrogant idiot. The wife is the victim of them both.
10 out of 10 would enjoy the tale of the woman who was temporarily transformed into the Grinch again. Am I the jerk for leaving a family gathering because my family made me sit at the kids' table? For context, I haven't seen my full family together in quite some time, so they set up a get-together at a park today. The family includes me, a 22-year-old male, my brother, 21,
My sister, 25, and her husband, 29, and their two kids. My dad, stepmom, and her kids, 6 and 9 respectively, my aunt, uncle, and my two cousins, 15 and 20. Also, grandma and grandpa. I got there with some picnic items, I brought a quiche and the cups, and I saw a few members setting up.
I said hi and helped set up the tables and set the food out. We talked and played games while the others showed up. When everyone gets there we sit down to eat. I sit next to my dad and get a weird look from my aunt as she says to me, this is the adults table. To which I reply, I'm an adult? She tells me that the first and second generations are considered adult and the third and fourth generations should sit at the kids table since we don't have much to contribute to adult conversations.
I tell her that I can drink, that I drove here, that I pay rent and have a job, so how am I still considered a child? She says that until I have kids of my own, I'll have to sit at the kids' table. According to my aunt, there are eight children, ages 6 to 22, and eight adults, ages 25 to 75. So I should just sit at the kids' table, since it'll be even. But there's plenty of space at the adult table, and I don't want to be stuck with five literal children.
My dad was the only person to speak up for me, but he was shut down by his parents. I'm surprised that my brother accepted this. He's 21. I understand my cousin's situation, though, since she's my aunt's daughter, and it's not like she's going to talk back. So there are going to be three people over 20 at the kids' table. What? She still agrees, and at this point, my uncle and grandparents are backing her up.
So I say, screw it, take my quiche back, tell them to have a nice day and drove away. I got a few texts telling me to come back by my dad and my grandparents.
I ask if my aunt is going to apologize and they ask, for what? That was enough for me to disregard their other messages and calls until I got home where I am now. I feel crappy that I might have possibly ruined a nice family gathering, but I also feel that my family doesn't respect me at all, and apparently think that I'm still a child with the same mentality as six-year-olds. So, am I the jerk for this? By the way, my quiche did taste a lot sweeter afterwards for some reason.
Yeah, your aunt seems like the kind of person the narrator would not get along with. Imagine thinking that having kids is your only milestone to adulthood. That kind of opinion is generally only held by people with no other achievements in their life other than having popped out a baby or two. Which is a part of adulthood, and your kids can be your greatest achievement,
Maybe you should have asked her that if you had knocked someone up at 14 and run away to be a deadbeat dad, whether you would have qualified to sit with your fellow adults. I'm sure that would have gone down well. More to the point, I can't see why this particular thing should be the hill that anyone would want to die on, especially if she thought that you were so juvenile. Your snotty kid is going to sit at the adult table? Sure, go ahead, kiddo. Do so and not talk to people your own age and probably not have as much fun.
I honestly think I would have caused a much bigger fuss than you would have before I left and got pretty snarky into the bargain. So good on you for being mature enough to just remove yourself from the situation. Your aunt sounds annoying and your family picked the wrong side. Next!
My ex demanded that I cooked the dinner he wanted. This happened a long time ago, but it still tickles me. The year was 1971, and I got married for the first time. Things were a lot different back then for women. We'd just gotten married the day before, and the next morning my husband woke up and told me he wanted cabbage, sausage, and potatoes for dinner. At this point, I'd never eaten sausage and was never going to do it strangely enough, and had never had cabbage.
I told him I didn't eat those things and he simply told me that's what I was fixing for him. So I unpacked the new pots and pans, put the biggest pot on the stove and added water, cabbage, potatoes with seasonings and turned it on the high. When everything inside the pot, which was teflon by the way, got burnt to a crisp, I still left it there until it completely ruined the pot.
When he got home, I told him going forward I'd be cooking dinners that we could both eat. As we had been dating almost three years, I clearly knew what kind of foods we both liked. He was seriously angry. I calmly stuck to my guns and told him he wasn't going to bully me, and just because we were married it didn't mean he got to tell me what to do. That marriage lasted a year and a half. I couldn't wait to get away.
Thank you for the 50-year-old story of a complete jerk that you eventually ejected forcibly from your life, and a posthumous congratulations on the end of that marriage. This was definitely a test of control for him, and you have to be commended for showing him that it wasn't going to go the way he thought it would. The fact that he waited until the literal day after your wedding
shows a special sort of twisted logic about his plans for a relationship. Step 1, get wife. Step 2, subjugate wife. Step 3, settle in and enjoy the remaining life of free servitude. Eugh. What a jerk. Oh, and specifically choosing a meal that your partner can't eat and making them cook it regardless of their protests. Good luck making that fly in a healthy relationship today. Some bad ones maybe. Get effed, former husband. I hope you learned your lesson.
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