To ask whether you’ve ever regretted a kind gesture?

[Rainbowb]

I offered to pick up a friend’s daughter after school three times a week when she got a new job. I then discovered the child liked to jump on furniture, trash bedrooms and eat me out of house and home! Was two terms before I had the guts to pull the plug on it! Was wondering if any of you guys had ever tried to do something kind and wish you hadn’t bothered?!

Yes. I gave a colleague a leaving gift and a card. I didn't know her very well and I had already left the organisation, so it felt a bit weird giving the card and gift to her on a night out. It was overkill. I wasn't sure whether to give her the gift, and then thought always best to err on the side of kind and generous. On this occasion, I was probably wrong! It was ill-judged.

Slightly different

I was asked by a neighbor to do something
I declined, because I didn't want to commit to something for a long time & I didn't really know them at all.
I've always felt guilty
However, I ended up supporting a family member instead near this time

Then I moved away

A few times!
A friend was really struggling with his MH, and out of work, really skint. Our whole social group was going for a golfing weekend (not the actual sport) abroad. He was gutted he couldn’t go, and was actually a qualified coach. As I had space in my booked caravan, I offered to pay his flight (£120) and let him share accommodation in return for him helping my newbie boyfriend with some pointers.
Honestly, I would have just paid - he was a good friend, he didn’t have to “work” for it. But he kept saying he wanted to do something for me, and it seemed better for his pride.
You can guess where it’s going - didn’t help by boyfriend AT ALL.

DH's stepmother welcomed lots of people in her house throughout the years. Mostly illegal immigrants. She had her house trashed, money and possessions stolen...
Her funeral was last week and not a single one of them attended or sent a kind message.

DH is a tradesman. A few years ago our neighbours pleaded poverty, so he took half a day and installed their new boiler for free. Two weeks later they bought a brand new car.

I volunteered for a national charity. It was rewarding work. They paid for extensive professional training and in return I volunteered many hours a week for nearly 10 years. I loved what I did and was very good at it but it was never enough - they wanted me to attend meetings, sit on committees, take on other roles. No matter how much I did they wanted more.

Eventually I stood down because they were asking too much. It was taking up 20+ hours a week of my time & getting further and further away from what I originally signed up for. I have good friends who are still involved and they have recently been asked to make monthly financial contributions to the charity on top of their extensive volunteer hours. So they are being asked to pay to volunteer professional services.

Took over chairing a preschool committee for a friend who was struggling.

Three years later I had a nervous breakdwon and dind't work for 15 months, in part due to the bonkersness of preschool politics.

Quarantine I had the same for a local MH Trust. I started off doing voluntary admin and ended up doing a full working week with Power Point slides for clinicians, organising events and meetings. A lady I worked with got a bit shirty one day and suggested I was after her job. Made me realise I was being taken for a ride as she was on a fairly high salary and I had barely noticed 6 months going by.

Can't get a job now even doing basic admin, so volunteering didn't help in the long run either.

Can't get a job now even doing basic admin, so volunteering didn't help in the long run either.

Yes that's the thing - we're often told that volunteering looks good on your CV, but in my experience it makes no difference whatsoever.

Bought PILs theatre vouchers one Christmas so they could choose a play to go and watch. FIL said he didn't like the theatre so one of MIL's friend's got a free night out on us. DH takes his Mum now instead.

Lent a book that my boyfriend had got me to a work friend..the book was the first present he'd bought me and was literally the most thoughtful thing anyone had ever got me.
This friend was like a neat freak, she always looked polished and everything on her desk was always perfect.
The book came back all ripped up and with a thousand creases...the look on my face must have said it all..she laughed and said I'm not that careful with other peoples things sorry

I think most of us were brought up to be kind and helpful to our fellow humans and we are hammering it into children’s heads that sharing is caring but then we quickly realise it doesn’t always pay off. I try to be nice and polite to everybody but I very very rarely offer help to anyone because most people are advantage taking tossers and they mistake kindness for weakness. I only offer my help to family, the rest of humankind has to ask for it and then I think about it. Even in professional life I only do what’s expected of me and what’s in the contract and no more. If you go the extra mile you get a thank you but you won’t get a salary raise.
Of course I do things like helping a mum carrying up a buggy on the stairs in the tube or similar little gestures but this is where I draw the line. And most people exaggerate their problems, especially financial ones and they are just looking for an idiot to take advantage of.

My elderly NDN asked me to water her house and garden plants (she has about 50 house plants, no exaggeration) at the start of lockdown whilst she stayed with her sister. I don't know the foggiest about plants, told her so, said I couldn't guarantee to keep them alive but I'd do my best. She said that's all she asked and it would be fine.

She popped back home for the first time two weeks ago to pick up some bits. She looked at her plants, went ballistic that some in one room had a disease and told me not to bother going in any more. No thanks for going in twice a week for the last three months!

I was part of a Facebook group for people who had been ripped off by a company selling Disneyland holidays.

A lot of families had their holidays cancelled last minute so I decided to do something nice for one of the children affected.

I sent a little girl a Disney stationery advent calendar. Didn't hear a word of thanks from the mum. I didn't expect fanfare or a parade in my honour, but a message to say it was received would have been nice!

Wish I hadn't bothered.

Very rarely, but yes, a couple of times. Once was when I agreed to help a slightly senior colleague on some things she was finding stressful - until I discovered that she was representing it to our immediate boss as that I was insisting on 'taking over' and getting above my station (it was a very unpleasant atmosphere, and I moved as soon as I could to another job within the same organization). The other was when I gave a student friend some help with her thesis, and then she took offence at something unrelated to the thesis, and started telling people that I was only helping her with her thesis in order to sabotage it. Fortunately this was so over-the-top and improbable that no one believed her.

Yes, i gave an old bat at work the benefit of the doubt, praised her to managers. She stabbed me in the back.

Many times, but a couple that stick in my mind:

I used to own one half of a double garage, the other half belonging to a woman in her late seventies. I live in a place where there is a lot of snow, and I used to have to shovel it out of the way of the garage door for months of the year. I used to do my neighbour´s garage door while I was at it, as shoveling snow is heavy work. Never said anything and no thanks or comment was ever given. Until one day I was off work sick and she came to my door angry that I hadn't shoveled the snow that morning.

Second example was a close colleague who had been a single father to his daughter for many years and was feeling a bit sad about her leaving home and him being on his own. So I invited him to come over for coffee the evening after she left if he was feeling lonely. He turned up and then sat for an hour in my garden, eating my cake and drinking my coffee, telling me how him coming over did not mean that we were friends.

Yes and it cost me thousands never consign a loan!

I also agreed to clean my friends house (my job at the time) for costs and minimum wage her house was filthy literally sickening think used sanpro on the bathroom floor (three women in the household) towels so rotten they fell apart in slimy heaps it took a paint scraper to clean the floor and acid to clean the "brown" stains off the toilet not only did she not pay me I went back two weeks later they had been dumping sanpro on the floor again

She has no idea why I choose not to speak to her anymore

Covered a friends business for him for a week when his Father died. Not a word of thanks and 6 months later when I asked him to print something on his A1 printer that would have cost him pence he charged me £30.

Old next door neighbours owned their house, but rented it out to students whilst they lived and worked in another fairly nearby town. They used it in the summer as their own holiday place and also rented out to holidaymakers. They asked if I would pay the window cleaner in their absence, and then they would pay me back as they couldn't trust the students to pay him. I carried on paying him for the first year of term, and despite them coming back at Christmas, Easter and the summer, they ignored the letters I sent with the receipts, and tried to walk past me in the street as if they didn't know me. Stopped that once I realised they were never ever going to pay me back. Funnily enough, once they sold the new owner (who knew the previous ones) came round, and asked if I was happy to carry on the 'arrangement' that I paid the window cleaner for her, as she wasn't sure she'd be in very much. No chance!

Can't get a job now even doing basic admin, so volunteering didn't help in the long run either.

Yes that's the thing - we're often told that volunteering looks good on your CV, but in my experience it makes no difference whatsoever.

Yep, that's my experience too. Whatever charity I've volunteered for they always want more and more. And it did very little for my chances of actually getting a job.

Giving lifts to crew practice for a girl on DD's crew team. It wasn't on a regular schedule, her mum would just ring me on very short notice a few times a week. There was never any reciprocation.

One time she rang me to ask for the lift and I told her that I was 200 miles away, in another state, visiting universities with DD and couldn't do it. She cursed at me and hung up.

Needless to say I blocked her number. No more lifts after that.

We were doing our house up and instead of selling the old furniture and kitchen appliances, I have them to my best friend for her son, who had just got his first flat. We practically furnished his entire flat. A few months later, our DDs fell out, my friend stopped speaking to me over it and in a very nasty message, accused me of only ever thinking about myself and my family.

*gave, not have

Yep, also childcare. Our preschool did full days used to close in the afternoons to juggle higher staffing ratios for really impressive, educational and fun outings in the mornings a couple of times per term. I very much supported this although I had to juggle my part time work around it.

One mum complained bitterly that this was impossible for working mothers like her and wanted the PTA to get the afternoon closures stopped (which meant stopping the quite ambitious outings which required higher staffing levels, so the afternoon staff worked mornings on those days).

I offered to take her child on the days of the outings. He turned out to be very nasty to my child and to require fully focussed supervision in our house.

After looking after her child 4 or five times on the afternoon of closures, having juggled my work hours to cover childcare meaning working additional weekend hours, she let slip that she only worked mornings but "needed" her afternoons free to get her housework done and catch up. She wasn't even nice about it. I was quite blunt about my reasons for stopping once I knew and about the fact I wouldn't keep the fact she was able to do her own afternoon childcare quiet if she tried to get the morning outings cancelled because of siscrimination against working mums again - she had fewer children than me and worked fewer hours, why was I doing her childcare!

I minded my friends 10 month old baby so she could pop home for an hour to put washing on and then return (she lived in her own house but regularly stayed with her parents in my hometown). 9am she left “for an hour” and 6pm she returned, she’d been watching tv and relaxing 😡 I have my own child to take care of.
Another (worse imho) time was when I met my bio sperm donor for coffee in a local cafe many years ago after he disappeared when I was a kid. We each brought photographs to look at. Only when it came to ordering the coffee he said “Oh I haven’t brought my wallet” and made me pay for a bacon sandwich and two more coffees for him. I demanded a quid to cover his first cuppa though. He then proceeded to go through my photographs and take the ones he fancied whilst telling me that I couldn’t have any of his! He has form for this though.