"borrowing"

[GA girl]

What is the strangest thing that anyone has ever asked to borrow from you?
I have a neighbor whose teenage high school drop out daughter has been coming over a lot to borrow things. First a cup of sugar then early one Saturday morning she asked for 6 or 7 eggs so she could make her and her boyfriend breakfast. She has also asked for milk. Tonight she comes over and wants to "borrow" a capful of laundry detergent so she can wash a load of clothes! And she doesn't even bring a cup to put it in. SMH
I really need to invest in a peephole for my door.

[mgmnut]

UGH!! I have a neighbor like that..... RYAN!!!! He is like 30 something but acts like a 15 year old. He lives alone in the house next door that his father owns. In my eyes he's a lazy, goofy, leach on society. It is sad because his father is a really nice guy that I have know for about 14 years. I used to feel bad for Ryan but now I just have no tolerance for him what-so-ever. He would come knocking for bread, sugar, eggs, 5 bucks, etc. The weirdest one...ICE... and more than once. Who doesn't have flippin ice? Go grab ice trays at the dollar store, fill with water, put in freezer, and wallah, you've got Ice!

He came knocking on my door one night at like 10PM asking for a ride to the hospital, he had sliced his hand open trying to cut a big bar of soap in two.....HELLO?....Why? It's not like it will last longer!! He had his hand wrapped in a white sock of all things. I helped him properly clean it up and dress it, and then dropped him off at the ER. Another night he comes over claiming he was having trouble breathing and his throat was really soar and he couldn't swallow. Again, I drive him to the ER, on the way he's coughing, not covering his mouth, I had to tell him to stop it and cover up, and not very nicely!

Last straw.... I am getting ready for work one morning a few months ago....kids have gone to school, wife is already off to work. Chuckles comes knocking at the door, he doesn't knock once, but after I don't answer right away he knocks again getting my dogs barking. I fling the door open and there he is asking if I had some bread so he can make some toast... Grrrr!! I told him no, I was running late, and had no time for him. After I closed the door I realized it was still not even 7AM. Now I usually get up for work at about 5:15am so I had already been up and moving for a while, that is probably why it didn't sink in right away.

For a little background I am a Storage System / Network Engineer. I work odd hours sometimes to accommodate my customers downtime windows that are outside of their normal business hours. Very often I am doing 2 am system upgrades or network reconfigurations. To make up for it I may have 3 or 4 days off in the middle of a work week to offset of some lengthy overnight events.

A few days after him knocking on my door early in the morning I was out in his driveway talking to his father. His father keeps all his tools, mowers, etc in the garage at Ryan's house so he comes by often. At the ripe and early time of about 1PM Ryan comes strolling out of the house looking like he just rolled out of bed. At that point I just laid into him. I told him my house is not his personal convenience store and at no time is he ever to knock on my door again looking for anything.....Period! I reminded him how he had knocked on my door multiple times before 7AM a few days prior. I let him know that if I had been sleeping due to a heavy work load and he kept knocking like that, we would have had a very serious problem. As a result he has not knocked on my door ever since and my friendship with his father still remains unchanged.

I will always lend a hand to a neighbor in need. Neighbors keep an eye out for one another, keep an eye on each others kids, houses, cars, etc. Occasionally it is fine to reach out to a neighbor for a quick favor, lending of and ingredient or tool. But if the same neighbor just keeps asking for different things all the time it is time, squash it!!

Dropped out of school? Then go get a job, your in the real world now!!

[stephicakes]

mgmnut - that was an awesome rant! HA! Had me laughing out loud! Felt like I was watching an episode of some sitcom (Everybody Loves Raymond, maybe??) Too funny

And I TOTALLY agree with you! Good for you...

[TinkerbellT421]

Wow. These stories are amazing! Thanks for starting this post.

I have one neighbor I hate.....one day he came and asked to use our lawn mower because he didn't have one. We have an expensive ride one. My mom let him use it, I was petrified that he would break it. Most people don't use other people's belonging as if they were there own. He still doesn't own a lawn mower, but has his friends father come down and cut his grass. I don't get it, the first thing you do when you own a home is purchase a thing like a lawn mower....lol
Now this neighbor is not on my nice list. He told off my 76 year old mother, huge no no. And he has a dog, a big Rottweiler, which is not the nicest dog. Who jumps my fence into my yard and chases my dog. He doesn't have a fenced in yard, it's all open, so the dog comes in my front yard pees, craps and digs up my flowers and bushes in the front yard. And if my mother is outside he jumps on her and knocks her down. If you tell him to keep his dog in his house, he just looks at you with hatred and like he has no idea what the problem.

I also had another neighbor ask if she could park a car in our driveway until her daughter turns 16 which at the time was 3 years away....and in Rhode Island it's illegal to have an unregistered car on your property btw....so obviously we said no. But I can't help but think how gutsy that is. I would never ask a family member never mind a neighbor!

And don't even get me started on the infamous "can I borrow such n such and then never return it and when you ask for it act like its mine" I have since stopped allowing anyone to borrow anything, that includes family. I have books, DVDs, CDs, etc that have been lost out of my possession for borrowing and then never returned. The one that breaks my heart the most is the one that I let my cousin borrow our family video tape of our first trip to Florida when we were kids. My father has since died. I never saw that tape again. I asked her for it years ago and I was told she didn't know I was talking about, she doesn't have any VHS tapes blah blah blah. So either she has and is lieing, which doesn't surprise me, or she threw it out, or lost it when her storage unit got taken away, and now the tape is gone forever. It upsets me a lot. And since then we had a falling out and haven't spoken to each other in over 10 years. So my stuff she had borrowed is pretty much gone.

[mgmnut]

Now this neighbor is not on my nice list. He told off my 76 year old mother, huge no no. And he has a dog, a big Rottweiler, which is not the nicest dog. Who jumps my fence into my yard and chases my dog. He doesn't have a fenced in yard, it's all open, so the dog comes in my front yard pees, craps and digs up my flowers and bushes in the front yard. And if my mother is outside he jumps on her and knocks her down. If you tell him to keep his dog in his house, he just looks at you with hatred and like he has no idea what the problem.

I would have a camera near by so you could capture video of the dog defecating on your lawn and your neighbor not cleaning it up. Also to capture when he chases your dog and jumps on your mother. Rhode Island has a leash law and it is your neighbors responsibility to keep his dog under control and clean up any bio waste he produces on public or someones private property. If he chases your dog or jumps on your mother, especially if it is not in a very playful manor, you could have animal control come give him a warning, even better if you have video.

Do other neighbors have the same issue with his dog? Get others to corroborate that he is an irresponsible dog owner.

Going back to the OP you can ask him if you can borrow a shovel, tell him it is to bury his dog if he attacks your mother again...hahaha

[TinkerbellT421]

I would have a camera near by so you could capture video of the dog defecating on your lawn and your neighbor not cleaning it up. Also to capture when he chases your dog and jumps on your mother. Rhode Island has a leash law and it is your neighbors responsibility to keep his dog under control and clean up any bio waste he produces on public or someones private property. If he chases your dog or jumps on your mother, especially if it is not in a very playful manor, you could have animal control come give him a warning, even better if you have video.

Do other neighbors have the same issue with his dog? Get others to corroborate that he is an irresponsible dog owner.

Going back to the OP you can ask him if you can borrow a shovel, tell him it is to bury his dog if he attacks your mother again...hahaha

Lol! They're not nice people either. My mother is worried of retaliation if he is to find out it is us complaining then he has very clear access to my property so the thought of doing something to my dog is a real possibility, ie poisoning,etc. one point last year he was spraying chemicals for "weeds" on a windy day while he was covered in goggles and a mask right up against the fence and my dog was RIGHT there. I was furious and went out there and was like "really?!? you didn't even have the common decency to come to my home or call me and say hey I'm spraying chemicals for weeds take your dog in the house" my dog threw up that night several times and I called the vet had them check him out and hopefully it was just slight breathing in and nothing serious but I had to bring him back to the vets for several days so they could do blood work to make sure nothing was happening with his inside organs. This dog has gotten lose and ran up the street, etc. and to make it worse, there's a kids park across the street from our houses. Some day that dog is going to attack a child during their baseball game, guaranteed.

[Aurora]

When we first moved into our house, our next-door neighbor was a man in his 50s who was separated from his wife for seven years (with no divorce in sight). He was a creepy man who owned three big dogs that he would let out whenever my kids went outside to play. The dogs would jump up on the fence and bark at my children until my kids couldn't stand it anymore and would come inside.

He then took up with a woman in her 20s who had two more dogs. They let their five dogs go in their yard all the time and never cleaned it up. (Now, this is a Chicago city backyard -- about 30 feet wide by 60 feet long.) In the winter there would be pockmarks in the snow where the dog "do" was, and it stunk. The well-endowed "girlfriend" would go out in the morning and sit on the front stoop in her bathrobe or a tank top. She once called my then-2-year-old son "sexy."

Then one day the wife came driving by and screamed at the girlfriend that it was her house and who did she think she was and she needed to get out that minute. The house was put up for sale soon after and a single woman bought it and started renovation. She finally moved in a year later.

She has been there for about 15 years now and I couldn't ask for a better neighbor! She is thoughtful and generous and we are good friends. I went from "neighbor from h-e-double hockey sticks" to the best I could have hoped for, ever!

There is light at the end of the tunnel!

[Dulcee]

Well DH is a cop so while we don't often get can we borrow this we often get "can you help with...."

The requests run the gambit from jumping cars, breaking into houses after locking themselves out, into cars that are somehow locked with keys in the ignition, restraining loose dogs.

To be fair we had to make an unusual request of our neighbor a few days ago when our dogs got into (and ate) a whole box of raisins which can be highly toxic to dogs, especially our 16 week old puppy. After a frenzied door to door search we found some hydrogen peroxide to induce vomiting. All parties were fine after the event

[GA girl]

We do not let these neighbors know when we are going out of town. A few years ago we asked them to keep an eye out while we were gone over Memorial Day weekend. When we returned we found that one of the steps on the ladder in the pool was broken. We found out later that they had a family pool party while we were gone. She did not even offer to pay for the broken step. Now when we leave every thing is locked up tight and they do not know we are leaving.
This girl really has no hope in getting a job. She is 16 and dropped out of school. Her mother says she has a "learning disability". She just sorry. My daughter was outside with some friends over the weekend playing basketball and she comes over with a beer. Then leaves and gets in her mothers car (she has no driver's license). When she came back a few minutes later her mother comes outside and starts screaming at her and hitting her. She has already been arrested for possession (but it was not her's of course....it was her friends that was in the car with her)
I try to stay on my side of the street and avoid them if at all possible.
It's like watching Jerry Springer through my front room window.

[DVC2004]

Oh wow! Makes me glad my neighbors are little old ladies and a divorced guy who keeps to himself. We say hi and whatnot but no one asks to "borrow" anything, ever, in all these years.

On the borrowing note though not with a neighbor my SIL used to borrow or hang on to things then not return them. She kept a lantern that was used for camping for years. we forgot what happened to it but husband looked all over for it several times. When my husband saw it at her house (his sister) one day, he said hey isn't that mine? It was and she got huffy saying she thought he gave it to her to keep. He wouldn't have, so I don't know if she was confused or just trying to make it look like a misunderstanding. When my kids were little they would come home from her house without things they had brought (baseball caps, small stuff). Her boys are around the same age. When we visted their home another time, my kids saw their items and we had to nicely ask for them back. The worst was when my husband offered to sell her our NFL playoff tickets one time. She got really angry when he said about meeting to exchange the tickets for the money. She thought he was giving them to her as a gift. LOL, OK, I don't know who goes around gifting $150 football tickets to people. She then said forget it, if you are going to charge me I don't want them.

I guess with some people it's expectation or an entitlement they feel?

[SBETigg]

I've lived in my house for what will be two years in June. I still haven't met anyone on our street. Our neighbors to my right, we have waved to once or twice, no introductions. We have preservation land on our left, and then the street continues down around the corner. It took us eight months before we realized that we know the nearest neighbor to our left, a former coworker of my husband's. We still rarely speak to him.

We're very private and a bit shy (yes, I am shy, some of you might find that surprising), so we haven't gone around to introduce ourselves and no one has come knocking (except for local representatives of a religious group). It's weird, maybe, but we don't mind it. Everyone's respectfully doing their own thing, and there are lots of wooded areas around us and between houses. But I'm sure they're checking out my zebra pants when I go check the mail.

[DisneyDog]

My neighbors ask for things every once in a while. For a while, their neice was living there and she got a job as a waitress. They called me at about 8pm asking if the neice could borrow a pair of khaki pants since she needed them to wear as part of her work uniform. It took me a few minutes to process this strange request. First of all, the neice is quite a bit taller than me and I wear petite/short length pants. Second, I don't understand how someone could borrow clothes to wear as a first time waitress and return them in good condition without any stains. I suggested they go to Walmart which is open 24/7 and get her some pants that are her own size.