Although every family is different in some way, many at least feel close enough that they’ll help each other out in times of need.
Of course, there are degrees of how reasonable a request from a family member can be. But if they’re in a tight spot and they’re not asking us to move a mountain, we generally feel compelled to lend a hand.
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Unfortunately, we can sometimes find that people in our lives will take a mile if we give them an inch. And it’s hard to find a better case of that phenomenon then a situation that recently befell one Reddit user.
Reddit is certainly an interesting place.
There are a lot of weird stories on the website which means that if you’re someone like me, you can be reading them for HOURS.
But this next one is particularly interesting!
When a member of one person’s family was visiting her parents with her boyfriend for a week, she asked them to house sit for them and feed her pets (not pictured).
![Image credit: Reddit | [deleted]](https://static.diply.com/s9BKKDVMpZvAOjNeZ3Mu.png)
As this person would tell Reddit, they knew they weren’t getting paid for this.
However, they were happy to do it so they could spend a week away from home.
Since the job went fine, they had little reason to think about it until they received a mysterious message about a month later.
As the house sitter put it, “The family member sent me a paypal request with no explanation.”
She was asking for $184.
When the Redditor called and asked what this was for, they were told that it was to cover their “share” of the utilities while they were staying at her house.
Although they told this family member that they took a week off of work to do this for free, she still insisted.
Since this person was never told that this would be part of the arrangement, they refused.
This drew the ire of the family member, her boyfriend, and her mom but it still seemed like a wholly unreasonable request to them.
Nonetheless, they asked Reddit whether they were in the wrong in light of the fact that this family member had lost her job due to the pandemic.
Reddit overwhelmingly sided with the house sitter.
Not only that, but the family member couldn’t even get her own circle of friends to agree with her.
That’s when you really know that you’re in the wrong.
Reddit users largely agreed that this opened the door for the house sitter to send a bill of their own, with one saying,
“Send her a bill for pet services. The going rate in my area is $70/day. This should have been discussed beforehand, not argued about afterwards.”
As for the family member’s own friends, the house sitter said,
“She ended up posting about me on facebook and the overwhelming majority of people on there defended me, some of them calling her stupid and laugh reacting.”
“Safe to say she deleted the post and blocked me after that and I haven’t heard anything since.”
It is indeed pretty hard to understand how someone can justify trying to charge someone for giving them free labor.
Now, we want to hear from you.
What do you think about this whole thing? Who do you think was in the right?
Let us know down below in the comment section! We would love to hear from you.
h/t: Reddit | 22022004
