I have a friend who’s an emotional moocher. She may have broken up with me, because I told her the truth. She’d complained to me that people seemed to turn against her for no apparent reason. Except that I knew the reason, and promised myself I’d explain it to her should the opportunity arise.

It did. We happen to both be members of the same community choir, one which, like every community choir on the face of the earth nowadays, depends on email and text messaging to organize rehearsal schedules, etc. She isn’t very tech savvy but she’s smart and took to text messaging like a fly to shit once I showed it to her. She’d been complaining that her millenial children never called. I was like, “of course they don’t call! They’re millenials! They text!” So now she texts merrily away with her children.

I described all that to show that she can learn technology if she feels like it.

So. She was asking me about the rehearsal schedule for the annual summer concert. I told her there was an email, and that I knew she was in the distribution list because I checked. She tried to get me to handle it for her with the implication that I should “be a friend” and do this.

So I seized the moment and said something like, “W, you have wondered aloud to me about people turning against you. Here it is. You try to manipulate people into doing things for you that you either can do yourself or it is high time you learned to do for yourself, often with this passive-aggressive edge to it.” She has mobility issues, so I never mind getting things for her and putting things back. But this sort of thing, well there is nothing wrong with her brain so it bugs me!

Later I texted her with a screenshot confirming my claim that she was on the distribution list and telling her, “K. needs you to let her know which rehearsals you can’t make so she can plan.”

When a second email from K arrived with all the revised info W was not on the distribution list, so I guess she never replied.

I haven’t heard from W since our conversation so I may have been friend-jilted for the crime of being an actual real friend and trying to help her fix a problem in her social life.

Dang! This is a two minute read. If I make it into an article I’ll tag you.