Oh, boy. I was really hoping that I was done posting in this thread.
So everything had been going fine for a few weeks. I mentioned in my last post that Jack was making a few little passive aggressive comments, but nothing serious and overall it was making me chuckle. Life was good.
Until my birthday weekend, when my parents came to town.
Little bit of background info – I’m the independent kid. My siblings live within 20 minutes of my parents, while I live roughly 9 hours away. My parents are pretty well off and EXTREMELY generous to begin with. Since I’m not around as much as my siblings, they tend to go a little, well… overboard on spoiling me, when we do see each other.
In addition to my parents, my little sister and several cousins also came in. We’re all really close, so I offered to put everybody up at the apartment for the weekend. Knowing this would be an inconvenience, I’d run it by Jack a month in advance. Then invited him along to all the family lunches/dinners out of common courtesy. He got along well with the group, everybody had a blast.
The problem started after everybody left on Sunday afternoon. You see, between 7 people’s worth of leftovers from a full weekend of eating out, and a couple pounds of beef brisket my parents had catered for the ~50 people we had at the party on Saturday night (I told you, they go overboard)… My fridge is now PACKED with more food than I can possibly eat before it goes bad. On top of that, we also had way too much beer left over. A few different brands, including a couple that I’m not crazy about (Coors Light is water, IPA’s are too hoppy for my taste, etc).
I made people take food home with them. I let the guy whose house we used keep a full case of beer and more than half the brisket… but I still came home with too much. So here I am, with an overstuffed fridge and a cooler full of beer, coming down from the mental high of a great weekend. And I figure – what the hell. I don’t want any food to go to waste, and I’m never going to drink some of this beer. I tell Jack to have at it.
If you’re smarter than I am, you already see where this is going.
We ate like kings for a week, and somehow managed to finish everything off. Nothing wasted, nothing thrown away. Awesome.
Except, to use our running analogy, Jack now thinks he’s back on the nipple.
MOTHERFUCKER, I’M A DUMBASS.
I started to realize it halfway through the week, when I was opening the presents that some particularly generous friends had gotten me. It’s pretty well-known that I’m a bourbon/scotch drinker, and I received a few bottles that are a step or two above what I normally buy myself. Nice enough to label “sit back and slowly enjoy” liquor, not “pound it fast for a wild night” liquor. As I’m opening them, Jack walks into the living room and says “Damn, looks like we don’t need to buy booze for a while, we’re gonna drink good!” Because, being a mooch, someone else’s good fortune naturally translates as his own. I’m all for sharing a drink here and there, hell, we had people over a few nights ago and I opened the private stash to start everybody off with a nice drink. I’m not trying to be a selfish prick, but damn it, don’t act like you have an equal right to my shit.
I’ve reset the boundaries since then, but I kind of feel like I’m back at the beginning of the battle. What the hell.
It’s hit me over the last week that there’s more to my issue with Jack than him just being a mooch. It’s that he runs his entire life based on what feels good at the moment. No comprehension of delayed gratification or long term consequences, it’s 100% “what feels good NOW.” The more I think about it, the more I can’t help but realize he’s a child.
I suppose that explains why he’s so much fun to hang out with, and simultaneously miserable to live with.
His dishes were piling up in the sink for a week or so. When we walked in the other day, the apartment had a very obvious stench coming from the kitchen. He starts complaining, I say “Hey, they’re your dishes.” He walks over, digs around, finds ONE bowl that he thinks is the source of the smell, washes THAT ONE BOWL, lights a candle to mask the stink, then goes back into the living room to play video games like everything’s taken care of.
A few days later, I’m washing some of my own dishes (we don’t have a dishwasher) when he comes over and goes “Oh, are we knocking these all out right now? About time!” and starts towel drying what I’d set on the counter to air-dry. So I finish washing mine and start to walk away. “Hey, PencilThinStash, what about all of these?” “Jack, those are yours. I’ll towel dry, but it’s not my job to clean them.”
To his credit, he did most of them at that point, but you could tell he was peeved that I hadn’t just taken care of it myself.
What’s really getting under my skin right now, though?
Before I got this job, before we moved in together, Jack had called me up because he’d just started with a temp agency in the area. He knew I was looking, and had even talked with other temp agencies, but wasn’t having any luck. He recommended the one he was using, so I walked in the next day to talk to them. Got a call from the agency a few days later asking if I’d like to interview with the company I’m working for now. Said yes, quickly set up the interview. Was talking to him a few days later and realized that he’d gotten a call to interview at the same place, but Jack let it go to voicemail and didn’t schedule anything. By the time he got around to calling the agency back, the company had already given me the job.
In Jack’s eyes, this means “I’m the one who got you the job” and “If it wasn’t for you, I’d be the one working there right now.”
On one hand, he’s right. I wouldn’t have my job right now if he hadn’t told me about the temp agency in the first place. I’m grateful he did.
But implying my work ethic and skill set had nothing to do with the fact that the company loved me and decided to bring me on full time? The fact that I actually answered the phone call and scheduled an interview immediately, while he took a week to call them back – That doesn’t play into it at all? Nope. The only thing that matters is that he told me about a temp agency, and stole the job from him.
Someone at work quit recently, and in Jack’s eyes, the way I can “pay him back” is getting him that open job. To be honest, he has the skill set for it. It’s what his degree is in. If I trusted his work ethic, I’d be happy to do it. If I didn’t think he was a child, I’d be recommending him to my boss right this moment. However, the reason he got fired from his last serious job is that he was warned multiple times to stop being lazy, stop coming in late, stop socializing all the time, and actually do work. He calls it a layoff, but if you’re the only person they let go, and it’s because you never worked, that’s a fucking firing.
If I’m going to put my reputation on the line vouching for somebody, I need to know they're not going to drag it through the mud.
He won’t stop bugging me about it, though. “Dude, think how much fun it would be to work together! We’d be running that place within a year!”
Am I being an ungrateful, selfish asshole here? Or am I just so far into crazy that I can't even tell anymore? Holy hell, I’m just… done.