Tuesday, May 01, 2012

The lesson of the day is that you don't always get to pick your friends

My Mormon Friend: I need a huge favor from you

Normally, when someone says "I need a huge favor from you" it's borrowing a grand or hiding a body or donating a kidney, but when my Mormon friend says this, it's probably something as HUGE as letting her son come to my house for ten minutes after school so he can go to basketball practice with The Kid. She is seriously one of the nicest people ever.

Me: sure, what do you need?

My Mormon Friend: I know this is going to be a big imposition, especially since you're a Democrat* so I'll pay you $20 an hour.

Me: Unless you want me to wear a Romney t-shirt in public, I would never take your money.

My Mormon Friend: I'm only asking you because you know I'm awful with the computer and I agreed to do this and the guy said it would be easy, but it's not and you're the most tech person I know. I have to send out this email to a bunch of people but I don't want any of them to see the other people's emails.

I try to explain the whole BCC thing but she insisted that she would never get it over the phone so she begged to come to my house while our kids were at basketball practice. So she comes over, hands me her laptop and her yahoo password** and begs for help with everything from setting the homepage on her browser to setting up a contact list. Then I had to help her send out a mass email for some Romney fundraising thing. I even corrected a couple of typos and improved the wording on a couple places. And I managed not to roll my eyes out of my head.

Then, because I wouldn't take her money, she went to Wing Stop and bought approximately 50 pounds of hot wings and rolls and fries and brought it to my house because this email was eating into the time when I usually cook dinner***.

And she told me she wished I'd switch teams because then we could hang out at the Republican rallies and roll around in piles of cash or barbecue poor people or deny civil rights to minority groups or whatever they do there.


*this is actually a conversation we had the other day - we were at a basketball game and she gingerly asked if I was a Republican or Democrat - she seemed a little shocked that I'm not a member of the GOP. I'm a little shocked that she thought I was a rich old white dude.

**who does that? Someone who is so insanely nice that they don't even think anything bad would ever happen. How does someone like that become friends with me? For reals.

***She doesn't cook so it's kind of a novelty that I do