I am very fortunate in that I have a sizeable stock porfolio which I am able to meet my needs by the quarterly dividends that accrue. Some of my friends are aware of my good fortune and it seems whenever they find themselves in financial difficulty, they will ask me for a timely loan. I wouldn't mind loaning them the money if it wasn't so fucking hard to get them to pay me back! As a matter of fact, one of these so-called (dead beat) friends hasn't made any effort to repay me $3,000.00 that I loaned her over a period of time while we were dating, that I'm going to have to get ugly. Sometime in January 2007, I'm going to pay her a visit and demand that she fork over her entire income tax refund for 2006. If she isn't willing to hand it over, I'll tell her that I'll have to sue her in small claims court which will more than likely end up in my garnishing her wages. This fucking bitch is living in a dream world if she thinks that she can keep postponing the repayment of this debt!
Whenever someone asks me to loan them money it seems that they all lose sight of reality when it comes to the promises that they make to repay. A good friend that I loaned $1,200.00 to a few months ago so that he could pay his overdue rent, promised that he would repay me within a couple of weeks. He never called me to tell me that the check for some work that he had done designing web sites had arrived. When I sent him an email stating my concerns he took offense to my telling him that he was not living up to his end of the bargain. I quickly muted his objections by saying that he was trying to change our original agreement after the fact that I'd loaned him the money. Since I'm going to be in his neighborhood today when I visit the barber who cuts my hair, I'm going to give him a call to see how much of the $800.00 that he still owes me he can pay today!
Another thing that seems to go with loaning friends money is that their opinion of you takes a drastic change. One would think that they would be grateful to you, even if they still hadn't repaid their debt in full, but it has been my experience that quite the opposite takes place. They don't come right out and say it but they may as well, since their treatment reflects the resentment that they have for me! Somehow, I suppose that they see their inability to repay me in a timely manner, as they agreed to at the time that they received the loan (I always allow them to state this in their own words), as somehow being my fault. They get things so fucking twisted that they can actually justify placing the blame on me and thus, make me out to be the bad guy, for their own shortcomings!
Another gripe that I have about lending money to people is that they are less willing to do me a favor should I need one. For instance, the guy who owes me $800.00 is widely known as a computer geek. He is the best technician that I've ever known and he has walked me through many a problem that I've had to resort to asking him for his help. I'm sure he knows that I will only ask him to help me as a last resort, as often times, through trial and error, I am able to find the solution to the problem that I'm having on my own (which is much more gratifying). It has been over two weeks now that Windows XP Pro SP2 crashed on my PC. I've had this happen before and in a worst case scenario I have always been able to wipe out all the data on my hard drive and reload the OS. This last time, however, whenever I try to reinstall XP Pro the installation process hangs. I've repalced the hard drive and the memory with new hardware and it still hangs. I was able to install Windows ME without a hitch and I've tried to upgrade ME to XP Pro without success. I've made this known to my geek friend and he has yet to offer his help. I mean the guy owes me $800.00 that was supposed to be repaid months ago, although he has offered to pay interest (which I have declined up to this point), but he can't show me his gratitude by offering to give me hand diagnosing why XP Pro will not install. May be he thinks I deserve to have to suffer through my problem since he can't repay me when he promised he would, I don't know, but it seems to me, if he were truly grateful for my helping him out of a jam, that he would be more than happy to help me out with my problem. As things stand at this point, I'm going to ask him to read this blog entry and then wait to hear what he has to say. Who knows, may be I'm missing something? I doubt it, though!
