There are a lot of wedge issues that can come between coworkers and roommates, but we can all agree that nobody likes that person who steals other people’s lunches.
And before you tell me that the people who do it might not agree, I’d argue that they probably feel differently when it’s happening to them.
Most of us can also agree that it doesn’t feel good to be spied on and that’s why there are so many tips out there to help us discover and identify hidden cameras when we’re staying at a hotel, renting an Airbnb, or even getting an apartment.
So naturally, that makes it hard not to feel conflicted when these two issues are combined and privacy concerns are weighed against security threats.
With that in mind, it’s perhaps not surprising that one woman’s response to her roommate’s pattern of bad behavior would inspire such heated debate.
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To establish some context for her dilemma, the woman we’ll soon hear from lives with three roommates we’ll call Zoe, Sara, and Kate.
With the exception of Zoe and Kate, none of these people are really friends. And while the woman gets along OK with Zoe and Sara, she’s never really liked Kate.
But as she explained in a Reddit post , that wasn’t the only reason she suspected Kate when it became clear that there was a fridge raider among them.
As she said, “I see multiple times a week that a large portion of my food and milk is gone.”
This has been frustrating for her, but also more time-consuming and expensive than it needs to be because she never has leftovers.
For that reason, she’s asked each of her roommates about this problem and Kate seemed to get the most defensive when she denied it.
All of them did so, but Kate went out of her way to say the woman shouldn’t accuse her without any proof. She also stays up the latest, which lines up with the fact that the woman’s food tends to disappear by the morning.
After mentioning this to a friend, he said that he was able to resolve a similar situation by installing a fridge camera.
And sure enough, when the woman did that, she ended up with incontrovertible proof that Kate was indeed the one responsible.
However, things didn’t go as smoothly as she expected when she confronted Kate and told her both to stop taking her food and to pay for what she had stolen thus far.
That’s because Kate took issue with how invasive she felt it was that the woman set up a hidden camera, even if it was only looking at the inside of the fridge.
As the woman put it, “She has since said she’ll never be able to feel safe in her own home again.”
And while Sara has sided with the woman, Zoe has unsurprisingly sided with Kate and both maintain the woman should have told them before setting up any cameras.
In response, she argued that this would defeat the purpose of setting one up in the first place.
And while a slim majority seemed to agree that Kate was just deflecting responsibility for her actions, there were almost as many who thought both her and the woman were wrong.
For those who supported the woman, it seemed as though Kate put her in a no-win situation.
As one user said , “She said not to accuse her without proof – you GOT the proof she demanded.”
But for those who disagreed with the woman’s actions, they weren’t as sold on the claim that she couldn’t solve her problem without telling her roommates about the cameras and subsequently spying on the innocent ones as well.
In another person’s words, “Telling them about the camera would have only defeated the point if your goal were the catch the thief. If your goal were to stop the thefts, it would have worked well.”
h/t: Reddit | Not_entirely_sure__
