During my college days, I lived in a co-ed dorm for a short period of time.  The guys lived on the odd floors and the women lived on the even floors.

At the cafeteria, I kept eating the same time as this friendly and fairly attractive girl that lived in my dorm building did.  After a while of being in the lines at the same time, we started joking around and became friends.  Occasionally, we would even eat together, but this wasn’t an everyday common occurrence since I had a girlfriend and she had a boyfriend.

One day she was almost in tears back at the dorm.  I asked what was wrong and she told me that she was going to flunk a class because she didn’t prepare a report on the movie “Blade Runner” (I think she didn’t read the book or something like that).  So she was desperately looking for someone with a car that could take her to get the video so that she could watch and create a report based off of the video.

Since I felt like we were friends, I told her I could help.  So I drove her to a video store that was 5 miles away.  She picked up the movie and as we were going to the cashier to rent the movie, but the owner said we needed to be a member.  Fine, so I thought I’d sit back and let her become a member.

Well, turns out she didn’t bring her driver’s license and they required a license to get a movie.  I put on my proverbial super hero cape AGAIN and got a membership card.  My “friend” then gave me the money to rent the video.

She thanked me profusely when we got back to the dorm and almost ran to her dorm room to watch the video and write the report.

Time Lapse…  2 or 3 weeks.

I forgot about the video, thinking my “friend” got her boyfriend to drive her to the video store, but he hadn’t and the video store called me wanting their video back.

I try to contact her multiple times, but she didn’t respond and wasn’t around as much.  Eventually I did bump into her and asked her about the video.  She said something lame like she forgot and told me she is moving out of the dorm and into her boyfriend’s house.  I was pissed, and said that I need the video.  She said that she would get it for me before she moved.

A few days later, I came back from classes to my dorm and my roommate asked if a video he found outside leaning against our dorm door was mine.  I looked and it was!  Apparently my “friend” came, realized nobody was in the dorm and leaned it against the door and left… Nice…

So I returned it, and the video store wanted some outrageous money for it being so late.  I was hot about then entire deal and explained the problems I had and walked out never to return (yes I realize that it wasn’t the right thing to do).

After that, I never seen my “friend” again, and I’m guessing she did poorly in the class and dropped out of school entire or transferred.

The point of this story is even though I was being a superhero, I really ended up being a victim.

That was the last time I’ve ever lent anything of value to a friend.  So far, this has worked out quite nicely for me.  I know and heard of other friends going lending thousands and never getting paid back.

You can have a friend like I had (she was fun to be around), but if they are kind of flaky, don’t lend them money or things of value!

Have you even went out of your way to help a friend, only to have them stab you in the back afterwards?

MR