The Petty Way You Betrayed a Friend

This week, YouTuber drama grew so large and so petty, it finally inched its perfectly FaceTuned mug into real celebrity tabloid headlines. Beauty guru James Charles and his makeup mentor Tati Westbrook got into it after Westbrook posted a long video explaining all the ways Charles’s sucks, which James retaliated by posting an apology video. There’s more to it (outlined here, and thoughtfully interrogated here,) but for the most part, it’s an exercise in social media influencers battling it out for the title of most trivial millionaire. And get this: the catalyst for all the infighting, the video posting, the gossiping was, of course, a brand deal and a betrayal. Charles posted an ad for Sugar Bear Hair, a gummy vitamin company and direct competitor of Westbrook’s main business, Halo Beauty, a beauty-supplement company. I doubt the dissolution of a friendship could get any more petty.

While following the story closely this week, I started thinking about all the silly ways friends have “betrayed” me in the past—flirting with boys that I was crushing on, pretending not to receive that text message—and I realized this would make for an excellent Pissing Contest. So now I’m asking you: tell me about the time you betrayed a friend in a super petty way. Humorous answers preferable.

And now, let’s take a look at last week’s winners: here are your most nightmarish moving stories.

I think this is the first time a Pissing Contest answer made me gasp. What the hell, andilynis…? This is horrendous:

The move was only about a block away so I felt comfortable being a little casual with my packing. One of my choices was to tape up the drawers of my night tables rather than empty them. My boyfriend at the time (now husband) handled the tape duty. When they arrived at the destination I noticed that the tape was a little askew (atypical, because Danny is meticulous). A brief examination of the drawer proved that everything was where it should be. But the drawer was that drawer, the one containing the toys. Later that night, exhausted and by myself, I decided to relax with my vibrator. When I went to turn it on it was dead. I didn’t think much of it; it hadn’t been used in awhile and probably just needed needed new batteries. But when I opened it I found that there were no batteries in it at all. But it wasn’t empty. Rolled up in the empty chamber was a note with a telephone number that read “Hi. I’m positive that I could get you off you better than this can. And better than your boyfriend, too. Call me anytime, Jeff from [Moving Company]. I’m the one who was wearing the sunglasses”

Also, he had taken the batteries!?!

MalloryKnoxxx, absolutely the fuck not:

Was planning a move with my boyfriend at the time. We had secured the new apartment but had only started packing up the stuff and wouldn’t be ready to move in for about a week.

I had been collecting black widow spiders for a while. (Science!) They all lived in their own mason jars and a few had laid egg sacs which I was removing and keeping in their own jug which was covered with nylon stocking held with a rubber band. Many of the sacs had hatched already so there was about 300+ baby spiders in the jug and I hadn’t quite decided what to do with them at this point. (Science…?) We had been gone from the old place for about a day and when we returned that night, I walked between the couch and coffee table to sit and felt myself walking through spider web. A LOT of spider web. In the process of packing, the nylon had gotten ripped and most of the contents of the jug had vacated. In the span of one day, the busy little fellas had set up shop along the floor connected to every piece of furniture. At their tender age, there was no possibility they could break human skin with a bite but the ick factor was more than enough for us to grab blankets and go crash on the bare floor of the new apartment. Packing up is never fun but it was a whole lot worse when every item had to be inspected for stray spiders first.

The original mama spider was named Jezebel, coincidentally.

Before FleshyDumpling, I thought I had some pretty bad stories:

Oh- so many terrible moving stories. I don’t know whether the slob roommate, the hoarder roommate, or the dumbfuck movers are the most entertaining, so I’ll tell ‘em all! Sorry for the wall ahead of time.

The Slob:

We always wondered why our place smelled. We had a few animals, but no matter how much I cleaned- it always stank. Turns out that our roommate’s idea of cleaning out the cat box was to take the shit from the box, bag it up, and put it in a trashcan in his room. There was SEVERAL months of cat shit stored in that can. We also found full slices of pizza in the couch cushions.

The Hoarders:

They left a few weeks before us and we got to deal with the cleanup. The toilet- inside and out was completely brown. I don’t know HOW they did it, but it took HOURS of cleaning to get it back to a usable state (key word here was useable- I never got the color back to it’s normal state). There were toddler sized black marks waist high all around the walls in the room, a pile of cigarette buts that was about 10in high- and a dinnerplate sized colony of lichen growing above where they had their computer.

Dumbfuck movers and presumptuous in-laws (probably the most stressful):

Showed up 5 days late. Dude was so big he could barely fit through our door. Told us it’d take 3 days to get to the new place. They call me the next morning around 9amsaying they’re just outside of town. We were staying at a family’s place 200 miles away so I truck it to our new place and manage to get there around noon. 4 hours goes by… then 8… I get a call at 9PM from a VERY frustrated driver bitching us out for not giving him the right address. I have him repeat it, it was the correct address- so I asked him the town and that’s where he went silent. They had just spent 6 hours driving around the wrong town, in the wrong state…. They finally showed up the next day and we find out that they picked up some methhead looking chick on the way up to help. She proceeded to DESTROY our bathroom with whatever foul substance that crawled out of her body. It took weeks to get rid of the smell.

To top that story off- my in-laws decided to tell us that they had planned a spur of the moment trip to “help” us… arriving less than 24 hours after the movers.

I was working remote at the time and the mover delay caused me to waste all of the PTO I had taken for the move, so of course- I had to work. My FiL got upset with me and made comments along the lines that I wasn’t actually working and just doodling (I’m a FTE artist). I had daycare set up, but said they’d watch the kiddo… He proceeded to make negative comments about my parenting skills because I’d get frustrated when my child started hounding me to play because they weren’t watching him. He said I was witholding all the bedding and towels and that I didn’t actually use them for packing like I said and I was just being nasty. He also got pissed because I wouldn’t go out and buy a mattress and a bigger couch right then and there and complained for hours on end about having to sleep on an air mattress. Anything he could pin on me and complain about, he did.

Oh, and he had the audacity to call my husband the moment he got home to scream about what a terrible host I was, how they’ll never come to visit us because I was just such an outrageous bitch, how he was concerned for the welfare of both my husband and my son, and that my husband should think about “keeping an open mind” about our relationship. Holidays have been fun.

Kender Again, here are your sympathy points. Take them!:

I just want sympathy points: my worst move happened LAST WEEK and I don’t even have any awful or hilarious anecdotes, it was just mundane gruelling stress of being given notice of eviction, frantically trying to find a new place in a horrific rental market (Dublin, Ireland), managing to land a place, and moving all our stuff out of our lovely little house to an apartment that’s smaller, further away from work, AND more expensive (but by far the best option going). While I was/am pregnant and my partner had nerve damage.

It went fine, everything got here okay (I think?? we’re still not unpacked completely), but between everything, I’ve just been sitting on our new, less comfortable couch for a whole week in my pyjamas “working from home”, which means in this context, long periods of feeling numb, interspersed with episodes of crying, answering emails badly, and watching anime…