Ya make one mistake!
"One mistake."
Exactly why it's best to have no friends in the first place...or only ones who you can guarantee will 'love' and support you thru thick and thin, the good times and the bad times.
Easy to get friends...people will be happy to associate with you if there's something in it for them...free trips on yacht, free holidays, free food and drink, use you to promote themselves etc.
Rip you off at after work drinks at the pub...they talk you into buying the first round, you buy them all a drink 8 x $3....$24.
Then about 4 have another drink, you have a lemon squash costing $1.
You pay out $24 and get $1 back.
Next time...they say "your first shout bambu"...another $24 down the drain.
Morons, taking advantage.
Better off with no friends.
Get a dog...it will always be your friend.
Neighbours...baaah.
You'll be lucky to get good ones, most will like you until you don't agree with them about something, or object to something they're doing or want to do.
Neighbours...baaah, always wanting to borrow your nice stuff...then you have to go chase them to get it back....or they damage your nice stuff they borrowed, return it damaged and never offer to pay.
"Neither a borrower nor a lender be".
Your life sucks. I have no idea what you did to find yourself so readily taken advantage of by so many people, but I do feel sad for you and glad again that you did not have kids.
I've got a couple folks like you describe in my life, but I have more folks who would go out of their way for me and for whom I would do the same, with no thought of what the recompense might be. Nobody breaking my stuff and refusing to pay. Nobody from whom I borrow stuff and then refuse to pay when I break it.
Instead, a neighbor who has us over for pancackes every couple weeks and for whom I do shopping sometimes. We have access to each other's houses. Just visited one of my wife's friends/co-workers in the hospital. I know she would do the same in reverse position.
But I also have friends I met in decades past, who were my students, and who look out for me and who I look out for as well.
It sounds like a lonely world you live in.
I make my own pancakes.
No way I'd give anyone the key to my home.
Most of my 'friends' I see at footy games in Sydney. I sold up and moved out of Sydney a few years ago.
Complex I live in now has activities. I'm not into cutting and sawing stuff, so the mens group is not for me. I don't like swimming in the heated pool...the chlorine is overpowering and communal pools are not for me. Too hot in the summer for lawn bowls.
I don't like committing to anything...too much trouble, too hard.
I'm doing what I always promised myself I'd do in retirement...sleep/rest in, get up when I've fully woken up, have a leisurely breakfast, read the newspaper, have a shower. By then it's 10.30am.
Listen to no1 radio host from 5.30am until 6.30am, then, having heard what more of a basket case the country is becoming every day at the hands of useless politicians, and callers telling how bad it is in their world...I switch over to FM radio, where they're living in oblivious paradise. FM show finishes at 10am. Mrs bambu says, para: "it's mindless drivel".
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