A friend of mine, let’s call her Susie. She’s married to Brad. It’s is his birthday soon, and she wants to do something special. She wants to make a video for him. Helpful soul and aspiring filmmakerthat I am, I agree.
It turns out that the charger on my very amateur video camera is blown. Both of my batteries, the extended and standard ones, are dead for all intents and purposes. Having told Susie that, we decide that she will instead just sing for him and put together a little video of pictures, a simple affair.
My circumstances change and I no longer have the time to put together a tasteful collection of pictures (that she provides) for the video. I tell her this, and she makes an offhand comment like, “well….the whole point is to see the video….to make it special for him. Or I could just sing for him here lol”.
This to me screams, “Hey look at me, I’m an ingrateful fuck!” She keeps saying things like, “But I thought you were going to put the pics in.” I just fucking told you that I don’t have the time. By saying this, it sounds like you’re fucking whining. I always provide people with an alternative when I can. I tell her that she can easily use Windows Movie Maker to put together a little slideshow with her singing. To my knowledge, Windows XP comes with it. I even looked up the download link for her just in case she didn’t have it.She tells me, “I don’t know how to use that stuff and to put music in it, especially if it’s going to take forever.” Then she starts to hassle me for the link to download her song. I had pasted her the public Dropbox link in the IM. She insists that I email her the link. She insists while I’m telling her that I’m fucking pissed. She also insists that I alternatively send it to her over AIM. I gave you the fucking URL, just look at it! Scroll up and LOOK AT THE FUCKING URL. We had earlier tried to get a DOC file transferred and I think that it was her firewall that interfered. Either way, AIM transfers were not working. She asks me to email her the link, saying, “You don’t like it when I send it in AIM and I don’t either.” I don’t have to explain myself to her, but I will logically explain my stance on the use of various forms of communication.I use AIM for conversations, nothing more, nothing less. I have in the past expressed my preference for links to be emailed to me. However, I am usually on AIM via my BlackBerry. Sending me links to webpages is moot: I won’t look at them. If it’s something you really want me to look at, email me. Since I got my MacBook though, I’ve been using iChat. So that explains my discrepancy of the sending of links. As for email, I use email for anything that needs to be remembered or referenced to later. It is used for anything that requires more than one or two sentences.
The thing that pissed me off was that here I am, steaming mad, and she’s insisting shit. She tells me she wants the fucking URL in her email or for me to send it to her on AIM. Whose fucking court is this? Fuck off! You’re the one asking me to do you a favor, so I make the fucking rules. “Don’t you ever forget that, bitch.”
Back to her unwillingness to make the video part of the video herself. I have two points of contention here.
Point number one: how the fuck is this HER present to her husband if I’m doing, ohhh, let’s see, 80 percent of the work? I’m spending all the time putting together and fine tuning her multiple takes of singing. I had to rip the music from YouTube and synchronize all of the audio. I had to enhance her singing to sound better. Then, if everything went her way, I would be putting together her pictures and photos tastefully. Mind you, she is only providing me with the photos, and possibly giving suggestions.
Point number two: how in the world can you know that the program is going to take forever to learn? Have you ever used it? Have you ever tried to use it?Haveyou ever seen it? The answer to all three is a big emphatic NO.
I lied. Here’s point three. How special is your husband to you if you are not willing to flesh out your vision on your own, regardless of the availability of other people? If I had special thing I wanted to do for my wife, let’s say a video, I would ask for the best help I could get. But barring things that I cannot physically do, like singing – wait, no scratch that. There is no end to what I would do to achieve my goal. If I wanted to sing to my wife Never Ever Anybody Else But You, I would go take lessons. If I wanted to strum the guitar like Ricky Nelson, I would get fucking lessons. I wouldn’t give up. The only that would stop me would be a lack of talent, but by no means would I ever give up because I had to learn something new.
After all, isn’t that a perfect reason to go learn something? Because you want to show your spouse just how much they mean to you? Otherwise, I might as well go pay some guy to play the guitar for me, some guy to film, some guy to edit the film, and some guy to sing the damn song for me.
On to something else that bothered me. Susie said, “I asked you if you could do this for me, and now you’re getting mad. I said up front what I needed or wanted.” People should be grateful that anything is ever done for them. By no means do I owe Susie anything. In fact, she owes me quite a great deal. I’ve done much for her and I’ve been very generous. And now, when things change (i.e. I can’t get her video done) she decides to throw away the whole idea. I can’t stand that.
You ask me for some help to achieve a goal. I try my best to help you along as far as I can. And when you give up, because of one little setback. That pisses me the fuck off. She set out to make a video for her husband. We lowered our expectations to audio and a slideshow. Now I can’t do the slideshow, and she wastes my fucking time by not finishing what we started.
That’s like starting up a steak on the grill and then finding out that you have no salad spinner for the salad to go with the steak. So then you go and throw out the steak. What the fuck is that? To top it of, I told her exactly where to find a salad spinner.
Words say everything. Your choice of words, your timing, everything tells me something about your state of mind. I do not believe that one can read too deeply into what a person says. Every word that comes out of one’s mouth is a conscious or subconscious decision. Either way, it is indicative of that person’s state of mind.
The overall vibe I got was that Susie wasn’t grateful for my work. Remember, upon my informing her that I couldn’t do the video, she said that she could just sing for Brad instead of doing this. Jokingly or not, I find that offensive. I busted my ass to get all this together, and as shitty as it may be, it was still two or three hours of my life that I’m never going to get back.
The correct response would’ve been to say something like, “Oh, thanks anyway! I’ll take the audio and figure out how to finish the rest of this!” Not once did I ever hear any thanks or appreciation.
The other thing is the whining: here I am, trying to help you out by pointing out that you can make the video yourself very easily with Windows Movie Maker, something that was designed so that even Grandma can use. All Susie could do was repeat that she didn’t have the program, DESPITE my download link. All she could do was say that she couldn’t do this or that. Then if I’m doing all the fucking work, how is it YOUR fucking present? I still don’t get it….
I might not be so apparent to anyone, but Susie has always repaid my generosity with ingratitude and a sense of self-entitlement. I’ve had it up to here. Enough is enough. Fuck this shit. I know that this paints an incomplete picture, and one may or may not agree with my stance, but I just needed a release….