CF Acquaintance turned up today despite refusing invite

[Grumpusaurus]

We live in a popular tourist destination and after numerous people took advantage of us, we nip it in the bud now. Most seem to follow the same script by contacting us out of the blue and mentioning that it would be so lovely to see us. I now answer in a very friendly manner that it has been years since we last heard from them and it would indeed be lovely to catch up over coffee in a nearby spot when they are in the area. This does tend to put an end to most of those potential CFs, however, one acquaintance pushed back and asked to stay with us at the beginning of September. I told her that this would not be possible, especially as we have a very tight deadline and will be working flat out to finish a commission. DH and I are self-employed craftspeople and sometimes we do work all day and most of the night to finish pieces and the DC stay at their grandparents during that last push. Not heard back from the acquaintance since July even though she clearly read my WhatsApp message.

The doorbell went this evening, I ignored it as DH and I were in the middle of working on our commission but someone kept pushing the bell. Our property is an L-shape so you can see from our workshop who is at the front door. CF acquaintance was standing there with a suitcase! DH is more of a people pleaser and while really cheesed off was about to answer the door till I told him no bloody way! He redeemed himself by immediately agreeing. The bell went a few more times and then got a flurry of WhatsApp messages, which I ignored. She eventually left after half an hour. I am almost bemused by the cheek of it but there is no way I am going to let anyone railroad me into being their free accommodation and greatly inconveniencing us, especially while we literally get up to work all hours and fall into bed. DH is fretting about her coming back but I told that we will just continue to ignore the doorbell. We have a back gate to a dirt track we can stealth like leave the property if she is holding a siege at the front door 😎 There are plenty of hotels and B&Bs in the area, albeit quite dear. Who does that! A rhetorical question but am just shocked by the cheek of just turning up after saying emphatically No!

She's an entitled CF.

Once your work is finished and you have had a rest; I would respond to her messages.

Just something like
'Hello CF, as stated back in July (show your message) I was busy last week so I have no idea why you just turned up at my property and think I could just drop everything.

Then leave it. Do not respond if she writes back
You need to call out her poor behaviour as she will keep thinking she is justified in acting in this way. Also good evidence if she tries this CFery with any other people in your group of friends

There was at least one snide dig about being oh so busy but yet coming to read/post on here. I really don't want to trot out the wanky line about how artists work but for me it is a bit of quick escapism to switch off from working on quite an intense process. MN so often provided some wonderful timeout, even if slightly addictive. I remember nearly missing a deadline ages ago when some wonderful Mumsnetter discovered her BF being on some dating site and she decided to catfish him and with the help of many brilliant suggestions sent him round the houses to eventually meet in front of the penguin enclosure miles away from home.

We are producing something creative that we had to come up with totally from scratch. That often involves mooching around a bit, when we do feel a bit stuck and then getting back to it after a short break. I just don’t have the mental/intellectual capacity right now to do anything more involved when I do stop for a short break. We have been working pretty flat out since taking on this commission but over the summer, we did set quite a chunk of time aside to spend with DC. This is why PIL have taken the kids for the last week, as we have that last push to get everything finished. Our work also has some periods of waiting around. We don’t do anything food related but just for illustration purposes, imagine you make cakes, there are periods where you have to hang around while things bake in the oven and wait for it to cool down. While we do other bits most of the time, sometimes we just use those periods for a brief timeout.

The turd storage container is a receptacle to store small shit nick nacks, fashioned in the form/shape of an impressive turd by someone with healthy bowel movements. It is fuggly and hilarious but I cherish it. I wasn’t entirely serious about them not being blessed by the artistic muse. They are creative in their own way and there is no pressure to do anything art related.

OP I imagine your L shaped home with workshop, at the end of a path, as being a really gorgeous home and I am well jel.

@Midpmcoffee numerous people took advantage of us, we nip it in the bud now. Most seem to follow the same script by contacting us out of the blue and mentioning that it would be so lovely to see us

I wonder how many times this has actually happened. That “numerous” people in your life a) have your number b) know where you live c) close enough to ask to stay with you and you say yes

i suspect a little hyperbole in the op.
Nah as someone who has lived most of her life in Edinburgh that rang entirely true. And judging by the recent thread on another pair of Edinburgh festival CFs it resonates with many others too. Counting back in the early years when we lived in the centre we would average half a dozen requests every year to come and stay during the festival. Some of those would be good friends or relatives when the answer would be of course and we'd look forward to it. Some of those would be casual acquaintance s and we'd take a view depending on whether we actually liked them or not and some would be friends of friends and they were generally a sorry not possible. Particularly the one who admitted they'd told their theatre group that we would put them all up ourselves or arrange for my parents sister and other friends to. ....
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CF has spent the morning learning how to paraglide at nearby tourist destination, and is planning on literally "dropping in" on OP thus afternoon from above....

I reckon she knew exactly what she was doing. Even if she somehow (how?) managed to miss your message saying No, a sane person would have checked back later. And then nearer the time there would have been messages about arrival times and so on, looking forward to seeing you etc. Not just radio silence.

The property stood empty for decades and was totally dilapidated with no roof etc. Especially, the former hangar/now workshop was really uggly. But for us it was perfect because it allowed us to rebuild it to exactly how we want. It took a number of years in backbreaking work to more or less rebuild it even putting actual floors in with embedded underfloor heating etc but both DH and I could do almost all the work ourselves. We then got the finished work signed off by the relevant tradespeople. We did stretch our budget but it worked out far more economic when you added together both mortage costs for our former house and lease for our previous workshop. We paid nearly 2 grand a month for a workspace that is a fraction of our current space that was in a really dodgy area and where we had to constantly worry about break-ins and vandalism! The area is truly beautiful and we aren't too far from PIL and now closer to DM.

@Grumpusaurus you don't have to explain why you're flat out but can come on here. You can be flat out catching up with the housework after a holiday or flat out sorting out three kids, but still come on here during a much needed coffee break! I run a small craft business and I'm always on here in between the processes. My head would explode otherwise!

Anyway, back to your CF acquaintance.

Don't reply with anything like 'did you find somewhere to stay' (you don't care), 'shame we missed you' (it's not), 'let's catch up another time - at yours' (because you don't want to).

Be honest, straight and polite. Bullet point it (she can't say anything was missed then).

'Hi X.

1. I did tell you on xxx when I replied to your original message, that we would not be able to let you stay as we are too busy.

2. I can only assume you dropped by on the off chance that we'd be at home working on the project and would give you a bed despite us saying we couldn't. Working on a project doesn't always mean we're actually in the house - we have to deliver commissions or collect supplies and that can mean travelling for us. Apart from that, we had already told you we were not free to host you.

3. This is the one of the reason we do not have people staying with us. We often have to drop everything to get a project started or items delivered and having others in the house is inconvenient. That's what we tried, politely, to say in our original message telling you we couldn't host you.

4. To save confusion in the future, the message is - we do not host family, friends or acquaintances. We run a business from our home, have insurance rules we have to abide by because of that and can't have random people staying when it suits them.

Adapt as you feel fit. You don't have to be polite. You don't like her, she wanted a free holiday and you don't have to give her a 'there, there stroke' as it's not a friendship you want to continue. You can still bump into her in the future with that sort of message as it's explaining exactly why you said no. Her decision to ignore it. Not your error, not your problem.

Almost anything to do with a CF, 'the CF had plenty of chutzpah turning up uninvited'.

Can't believe her cheek! Do not reply OP. She sounds like a CF pro

@Grumpusaurus owes this cf woman nothing in the way of a reply, acknowledgment or anything.

if CF is stranded/paying through the nose for swanky hotel accommodation, that’s all on her.

shes not a friend, she’s not a colleague, she asked, was told a clear no and turned up anyway

i can’t fathom at all how anyone would view another person purely as a target to see what they can take out of them.

it must be awful to live inside the head of someone like that.

I really respect and agree with a lot of the posts about communication in general. But you aren’t talking about a normal, reasonable person when it comes to CF! For us the conversation was finished back in July, period, when I issued a very clear NO that she could not come to stay at our home, very much reiterating that we did have no time to socialise either. Her rocking up regardless is a total violation of our privacy and basic boundaries. We are working. I am trying to find a really good example to compare that to. When a bus driver is driving in very busy traffic, he/she needs to solely concentrate on the road and cannot turn around to chat to someone. In many cases, people cannot just wander into your place of work in let's say the middle of an important meeting. That’s why people do not answer the phone and block out any other interruptions.

CF is the kind of person to totally bulldoze over other people. Any form of response will just make her try to push people to force her agenda on them like some deranged godzilla. She has quite a bit of form for bullying people who are kind and accommodating. It would be really outing if we did mention specifics. Her coming uninvited albeit a long way is her problem and absolutely nothing to do with us! Her unwanted contact is more like some random sleazeball on the street that tries to force a woman into unwanted attention. You tend to ignore them completely and walk on, as even engaging with a Fuck Off! can totally escalate things and be very draining. She is not a friend, we barely exchanged more than one word over the years, in fact, she blanked us at events in the past. Why on earth would we want this utter cow in our home! Hotels are very expensive, as the nearby town is a chi chi tourist area but even if she could not afford it, it is absolutely none of our problem. We owe this entitled prat nothing! You do not have to always respond or explain yourself to some randoms that make unsolicited contact.

I admit that in the initial OMERFECKINGGAWD reaction, I blew this up far too much into a greater dramatic moment than it is in reality. But we don’t really care what this woman thinks of us or other acquaintances. Let her mouth off and tell bullshit tales about us leaving her stranded. If anything that might put off others trying to invite themselves. Our good friends, people that matter, know the situation. People tend to put up with absolutely outrageous behaviour from CFs for fear of gossip. Let them!

The turd storage container is a receptacle to store small shit nick nacks, fashioned in the form/shape of an impressive turd by someone with healthy bowel movements. It is fuggly and hilarious but I cherish it.

Ah, thank you for clarifying that. I thought it was an unfortunately-shaped brown creation that unfortunately looked a little turdish - I had no idea that it was actually designed to look like an actual turd!

Well, this has escalated muchly.

It also makes me laugh when posters do their cryptic-yet-oh-so-intriguing descriptions of their homes and work lives.

I’m enjoying imagining the OP sticking shells together to make small-scale depictions of the local flora and fauna in Bognor.

While DS appears to currently go through his 'turd' phase, this isn't a deliberate design choice. They just happen to really look like one...

You have absolutely no need whatsoever to communicate with her - just as she didn't see the need to bother contacting you up until the point that she wanted to use you.

If you ever did have cause to, it would definitely be a case of calling her out on her rudeness: asking why she barely knows you yet still asked to stay with you, and then, when you turned her down, she ignored you and then turned up anyway, fully entitled. She might just as well turn up at pretty much anybody's house at random and expect to be allowed to stay free of charge - after all, she hardly knows you any more than she would a stranger. She's expecting an apology from you; instead, she should receive both barrels and then some. If she tried to blacken your name to mutual acquaintances in future, I'd be crystal clear about what she did (although they probably already know her form, anyway).

I'm glad you've clearly (from your last post) found your anger at her outrageous behaviour. However much she might like to pose as 'oops, silly, loveable little me - what am I like, eh?!' she's actually a really nasty user, who doesn't deserve any further acknowledgement from you at all. It would have been rude to persist in trying to change your mind when you originally told her no; but to ignore you completely and then try to take it anyway by persistence and emotional blackmail is just beyond words.

😂😂

Would you like a saucer of milk with that...?

I’m enjoying imagining the OP sticking shells together to make small-scale depictions of the local flora and fauna in Bognor.

Like when people will cryptically whisper "Let's just say that I'm very well known in The City" - and then you find that they have a job emptying all of the public bins

If ever a text required a reply of "who's this?" it's hers lol

I'd also have gone for:

"Lol funny"

"Why?"

I was just coming on to say this to those who are giving this CF the benefit of the doubt.

If you texted a friend you hadn't seen

I would reply but only with a screenshot of my original message saying no and nothing else.

Boo! I can't be bothered to retype my long post. TLDR: No doubt she is a massive CF.

Nah. I wouldn’t want to impose. Thanks though.

It disappointed me that mates wanted to use us as a hotel when we moved to London. I’m very reluctant to host anyone now. Been put off big time.