A woman has caused considerable discussion online because she refused to pick up her parents from the airport. She thought the request was a joke. Now the 28-year-old’s parents are angry with her.
Unsure if she was in the wrong, the confused daughter turned to Reddit’s popular confession forum “Am I The A**hole” to ask anonymous users for their thoughts on the situation.
The Reddit user pointed out that her parents live about 15 minutes from the airport and wrote: “My parents recently went on vacation for a month.”
The day before her parents were due to return home, she called them. During the conversation, the Reddit user’s parents mentioned that they had a gift for her and that she would have to pick them up from the airport if she wanted to receive it from them. The Reddit user immediately concluded that they weren’t serious.
She confessed: “I thought they were kidding because they live 15 minutes from the airport and Uber is cheap (plus my parents have a lot of money), while I live about 40 minutes from the airport and an hour from their house. So it would take me about two hours to pick them up from the airport and bring them back home.”
When her parents landed at 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, the original author’s father called her and asked if she could pick them up. Still in her pajamas, the daughter said she thought the request was a joke, especially since it would take her two hours just to get to the airport.
“It would be quite inconvenient for me to get up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning and spend two hours in my car just so they don’t have to Uber,” she wrote. “Not to mention I would pay more for gas and tolls than they do for their Uber.”
Still, her parents wanted her to pick them up. The Reddit user refused, citing her “house renovation” as the reason she didn’t have time to go there that morning.
She noted, “I try to help them whenever they ask me to, but in this case, I don’t think it was justified to spend so much time and money just to make their 15-minute ride a little more pleasant.”
After some time, the Reddit user called her mother and asked if she could come over and feed her cats. The Reddit user claimed that she had forgotten about the situation at the airport and thought she could ask for the favor since she had done it in the past. Unfortunately, her mother was still upset about what happened and took the opportunity to scold her daughter for not picking her up.
Her mother called her a “hypocrite,” according to the Reddit user, and said she would have to pay for the taxi ride to her house so the cats would be fed if she did that.
The Reddit user admitted: “I felt pretty bad about the whole situation, but I know they never would have taken me if the roles were reversed.”
The daughter asked if readers thought she was the “bad guy” in the situation, to which many Reddit readers argued that her parents had been “unreasonable.”
“NTA, your parents are being unreasonable. They wanted to turn a 15-minute drive for them into a two-hour inconvenience for you, which basically means they feel entitled to your time and effort,” wrote one passionate correspondent.
Another commented: “If they wanted you to pick her up, it probably should have been arranged before the holiday.”
“NTA for not picking you up at the airport and it’s weird that they assumed you would be there without giving you your exact flight information and you confirming you would be there,” a third insisted.
A less sympathetic Reddit user argued: “I mean, technically it’s NTA, but I would always pick up my parents from the airport if they were gone for a month. It’s like that in my family.”
