what's your opinion of this situation?

[RollingsFarms]

The guy doesn't sound like a true friend so even if he does get mad about it and stops talking I don't think you will be losing much. We have great friends and then we have casual friends (the ones who are friends when it suits them). We know the difference and treat everyone with respect but we will sell things to our true friends without hesitation because we know if anything happens we will make right and keep our friendship.

In fact, one of our great friends bought a gun from us for a couple hundred dollars. He doesn't have the money to pay but he is always calling me to help out with my farm. This guy works a lot to begin with and is a lot like me so he offered to help me unload 650 bales of hay Saturday morning, showed up at 7am with his one son and we worked 4.5 hours unloading the wagons on our pace. He and his son did most of the hard work as I can't work like I use to and shouldn't even be doing hay (I am paying for it still). When we were done I offered to pay him and he told me to keep what ever I would pay him towards the gun. His son got paid though.

True friends will work with you and not get upset if you don't want to sell something to them. Best of luck to you and don't lose any sleep over this.

you want to trade your friend for mine?lol

It's not that I didn't want to sell it to him, it's that he had a year to come up with the money and didn't, and I have another buyer for the gun. Money is no issue with this guy, he makes plenty of money, he can come up with $200 if he wants.

 

[CurlyDave]

...why he gets all mad about things like this is beyond me.

You know as well as I do, the reason he gets mad about this kind of stuff is that he isn't really your friend. He just likes to take advantage of you.

Let me tell you about how a real friend does something that sounds pretty similar.

When we built our house, for a reason which isn't part of the story, we had had four sections of 20' x 6" steel well casing left over, which sat by the driveway for about a year. One day someone just driving by saw them and offered to buy them. I agreed and we worked it out so that money would change hands, and he would take the pipe sections the next day. The price was real close to the price for your rifle.

Later that same night I mentioned this to my friend in passing, and he said he had had his eye on the pipe sections for a future pole barn. The he wrote me a check for the price I had already agreed on.

So, I called up the first buyer and explained that a friend wanted the pipe and called off the deal. Sure, I felt a little bad about that part, but friends are friends. Anyway, I picked up the pipe and took it down to my friend's house with the backhoe the next morning, just so it didn't "disappear" sometime.

The difference here is that my friend came up with the check right away, and also made it clear that if I felt obligated to sell to the first buyer he would understand.

For my part, I told my friend that I wasn't going to deposit that check for a couple of months, which gave him some time to come up with the money, instead of putting him in a bind. For me, it was found money, and I got rid of an eyesore, so I didn't really care if I got it today or in a couple of months.

We both came out of that with our heads held high.

 

[Redbug]

Rollings,

I would say that if you have a bad feeling about someone or something...the feeling is probably right. Many people do not follow that inner signal and try to logic it out...and that's what gets them in trouble. I don't like to be around people that play these games and are not upright and straight forward with what they say and do. You should not have to put up with someone trying to make YOU feel like the guilty one. I would go slow and not loan him things. And...I would lay the cards on the table and if he does not like it...you are much better off.

CurlyDave has a real friend...and CurlyDave is being a real friend...that's what life is about.

 

[California]

RollingsFarms, what you described isn't a friend.

Friends want the best for you.

This guy doesn't want the best for you, what he wants is your stuff, for him, for free.

I have eventually cut loose 'friends' like that. One time I requested a week's vacation to go camping together with neighbors who were good friends. (Our kids were best friends, and we jokingly said we were an average family with 2.5 children when we took their daughter along somewhere.) When the time came, I then sat in town burning up my annual leave allowance fuming over his day by day delay from Saturday morning, our planned departure, clear through the following Friday evening. He hadn't told me he would lose a week's unemployment pay if he left before 5pm Friday. Heck I would have just given him the week's unemployment pay (under $200, I think) so the kids could enjoy this week up in the woods if he had just let on what the holdup was. At the time I only earned 2.5 weeks vacation for a whole year and his secretive nonsense burned up nearly half that year's allowance.

Then the following year I invited them on a long-weekend camping trip I would make with or without them, and put in my vacation request for Friday & Monday. Then he changed his available dates a month before the trip so I went back and changed my vacation request. Then he wanted to switch back to the original date because he hadn't been paying attention to the well-advertised date of a conflicting event he felt was more important than taking the kids camping. I refused to switch back my invitation date to accommodate him, he got huffy, and I told him it doesn't work like that. I was sorry to see the friendship between our kids strained by this conflict but I'm sure they all understood. We haven't talked much since, aside from attending the funerals of elders in both families where we all felt that being supportive, particularly for the kids, was more important than our unresolvable differences.

That was the same family we had planned a trip together with to Hawaii, but they kept finding they couldn't get time off work in the pleasant months, and kept putting it off until September which is unpleasantly hot in Hawaii. Then a week before departure they canceled. We went, and we broiled. Some fun. That trip had been their idea that they talked us into.

With real friends you accept the bad with the good. But when it gets that far out of balance you realize it's just not working.

 

[ToadHill]

When your "friend" borrows something and it doesn"t come back in a reasonable time, you might try what I do with my kids. When I visit at some point I will hush them and ask if they hear the sound. They say no, and ask what it sounds like, I tell them its a wimpering sound and I know what it is. It's my tools crying to come home, they get the point and now all I have to do is hush them.

 

[RollingsFarms]

borrowing I can understand, it's the borrowing and NOT returning what you borrowed that really bothers me to no end. having to go get your stuff back that someone else borrowed should not have to happen. not to mention them throwing a hissy fit about it when you do also is mind boggling. come to think of it, I've never borrowed anything of his and I'm pretty sure he either wouldn't let me borrow it, or ask for it back the very next day if I did borrow it. I guess why I am so confused is because I don't expect adults to act this way, now if we were kids that's one thing but grown men acting this way???

 

[California]

You're too decent to know how to recognize someone who is lacking common decency.

I would never loan that guy stuff ever again, as a minimum.

 

[jinman]

I think it is funny that your "friend" says that you promised to sell him the gun but fails to see that he promised to give you $200. I'd say he is the one who has broken a promise, not to mention the promise to return your gun in the first place. Some people only see the "manufactured" shortcomings of other people while failing to take a look at their own behaviour. With friends like this. . . .

 

[MrJimi]

I don't loan stuff out and I don't borrow anything, I will buy buy it first or go without.
Like others have said, you do not have a friend there at all.. You have a ONE-WAY person that turns it all around in his favor.

 

[weldingisfun]

Rollingsfarms, if you consider that fellow to be a friend worth keeping then stop lending things to him. If he had done the things you describe to me, he would be a former acquaintance.