Obnoxious friends

We all have friends that we like to hang out with after school or work. They’re the people who get us to relax and reflect on a hard day, and help us to enjoy what’s good in life.

Except sometimes they don’t. These are the friends who go out to a bar or restaurant seemingly never having learned an ounce of etiquette or possessing any sense of decorum.

For instance, there’s the friend who never wants to split an item with you but feels perfectly fine swooping in like a vulture if you get too full to finish. I’m not talking about someone who occasionally might eat a fry or three if you get too full off your burger. Fries get stale and cold so quickly anyway; there’s no loss if you can’t eat them in the first 15 minutes.

I’m talking about the person who doesn’t want to pay to split something but then waits in silence for you to start slowing down. I’ve had a friend actually ask, “Are you done with that?” and then grab food that I’d been planning on taking home in a doggy bag. It’s cheap, its insensitive and it’s a
bit unnerving.

There’s also the friend who actually says she will “share” something with you, but somehow take no responsibility when the bill comes. I’ve seen friends talk others into buying food they can’t finish on their own and then inhaling half of it with abandon. Of course, when the check comes, she lays out only enough cash to cover her Pabst and maybe a small side dish she ordered for herself.

Then there’s the kind of friend who seems to be so entrenched in technology that he can’t put his smart phone away. He’ll leave it out on the table, silently flipping through pages and zoning out of the conversation half the time.

Or—perhaps worse—he involves his phone in the conversation by looking up random status updates or finding answers to even the smallest questions. In some settings, this can be passable behavior, but when these buddies start taking pictures of their food, snapping pictures of the restaurant or stretching their arms out like morons to get a new group picture for Facebook, the line has been crossed.

There is also the old-school etiquette rule that dictates splitting the bill evenly is, for a bunch of college students, an obnoxious protocol.

In every instance I’ve seen this done, someone always pays more than he should have, and other people pay less. It’s not one of those things that evens out with most groups; there are always going to be the people who get bigger entrees with a few beers to wash it down, and the people who perhaps have one drink to complement their
small meal.

When you’re a college student living from paycheck to paycheck, it doesn’t make sense to always share the cost of other people’s food, no matter how much you like them. To avoid this completely, be polite and let everyone know ahead of time that you’ll be paying with cash.

Of course, there are also the friends who never bring enough cash to dinner and then perpetually owe you a few dollars here or a tip there. Credit cards are ridiculously convenient until it comes to splitting something, and usually one person ends up paying more.

There’s an abundance of obnoxious dining habits that can turn a restful evening into one more irritation of the day, and anything involving money can become an enormous point of contention. We all have our little eccentricities or routines that we might not even notice, but we should all make the attempt to be a courteous dinner pal.