Guy Asks If He’s A Jerk For Asking Neighbor To Cook For Him Since She’s “Making Food Anyway”

On Reddit, one of the best places to go to and read stories about oblivious people might be the subreddit r/AITA, which stands for Am I the A**hole?

The point of the sub is to share something that happened where you were left feeling a bit like an a**hole, and allowing the community to decide if you were or not.

Theoretically, you must accept your ruling, and if you are, in fact, an a**hole you should do something about it.

A man posting under the name u/AwayPerformer shared a real doozy of a tale under the title, “AITA for asking a neighbor if she wanted to share food?”

He starts by saying he’s 31-years-old, single, and lives by himself. He’s lived there for six years, and a couple of years ago a woman around his age moved in down the hall from himself. They’re not friends, they say hello occasionally, but that’s it. He doesn’t even know her name, so he decides to call her Katie in his post. AwayPerformer says he lost one of his jobs, so he’s been saving money by eating mac and cheese or cheap fast food. Because of that, he has been gaining weight feeling not so great.

This is where Katie comes in. I can always smell her cooking in the hall and it always smells amazing (I know it isn’t the other person at our end of our hall cause it’s a single old man). I’ve even complimented it a few times. So I got the idea that I’d offer to give her some money each week to cook a little extra and bring it over to me (or I can pick it up from her!) at night. She’s cooking anyway and then I’d have varied presumably delicious food.

I asked her the next time I saw her and she looked surprised and said she couldn’t because she was too busy (which didn’t make sense cause she cooks almost every day but okay). The next time I saw her a few days later, I asked her if she was sure and upped the amount I was offering, and she said she was sure and that it was rude to ask me, and that she isn’t a housekeeper for hire and I should get a housekeeper if that’s what I want. She also called me ‘a stranger’ even though we have talked in the halls before.

Overall she made me feel like a big jerk and really embarrassed for even asking her, and a little mad because she was acting like I was being creepy (I wasn’t, trust me, she isn’t my type). I think asking her to split cooking wasn’t completely outlandish, since she cooks every day anyway and it wouldn’t be hard to make a little more.

Can you believe this guy? Pretty much everyone cannot. The responses might be amongst the most unanimous AITA has ever seen. As people pointed out to him, what he was actually asking Katie to do was an enormous responsibility, one that would require a lot of prep, consideration, and work on her part. Cooking for two is not the same as cooking for one.

And she said no the first time! Leave her alone! And you are a stranger—you don’t even know her name!

As all good AITA posts do, a screenshot made its way over to Twitter.

https://twitter.com/daniellealberti/status/1189510854246572032?s=21

https://twitter.com/DanielleAlberti/status/1189526736121319425

The responses are incredulous and hilarious:

And someone pointed out that the OP was planning to only pay Katie $5 for her meals.

Would you interact with this creep every night for only $35 a week?

On the bright side, the OP updated his post to say this:

EDIT: Okay. It is abundantly clear that I was the asshole and asking her was inappropriate and, as much as I hate to admit it, creepy. My instinct is to apologize to her but since my instinct was to ask her in the first place, I’ll do the opposite and stay out of her hair. Thanks.

Wow. People really can learn from their mistakes. Now all he has to do is learn to cook, and he’ll be a full-grown adult.

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