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Louise Thomas
Editor
A woman has sparked considerable online debate after she refused to pick her parents up from the airport, mistaking their request for a joke. Now, the 28-year-old’s mother and father are furious at her.
Unsure as to whether she was in the wrong, the confused daughter took to Reddit’s popular confession forum, Am I The A**hole, to ask anonymous users for their opinion on the situation.
The Reddit user noted that her parents live about 15 minutes away from the airport, writing: “My parents were recently on a month-long vacation.”
The day before her mom and dad were scheduled to return home, she gave them a call. In their conversation, the Redditor’s parents mentioned they had a present for her and that she would need to pick them up from the airport if she wanted to get it from them. Immediately, the Reddit user concluded that they weren’t being serious.
She confessed: “I assumed that they were joking because they live 15 mins from the airport and Ubers are cheap (also my parents have a lot of money), whereas I live about 40 mins from the airport, and an hour from their house, so it would take me about 2 hours to pick them up from the airport and drop them off at home.”
When her parents landed on Saturday at 7:30am, the original poster’s father called her to ask if she could pick them up. Still in her pajamas, the daughter said she had thought their request was a joke, especially because it would take her two hours just to get to the airport.
“It would be a pretty big inconvenience for me to get up at 6am and spend two hours in my car on a Saturday morning just so they don’t have to Uber,” she wrote. “Not even mentioning the fact that I would be paying more for gas and tolls than they would for their Uber.”
Still, her parents wanted her to pick them up. The Reddit user admittedly refused, citing her “home renovation” as a reason why she couldn’t spend the time to drive there that morning.
She noted: “I do try to help them out whenever they ask for it, but in this case I think spending this much time and money just to make their 15-minute drive slightly more enjoyable wasn’t warranted.”
After some time, the Redditor gave her mom a call to ask if she could come feed her cats. The Reddit user claimed to have forgotten about the airport situation and figured she could ask for the favor since she had in the past. Unfortunately, her mom was still upset over what had happened and took the opportunity to scold her daughter for not picking them up.
Her mom called her a “hypocrite,” according to the Reddit user, and said she’d need to pay for their taxi over to her home to feed the cats if she wanted them to do so.
The Redditor admitted: “I have been feeling pretty bad about the whole situation, but I know they never would have picked me up if the roles had been reversed.”
The daughter asked if readers thought she was the “bad guy” in the situation, to which many Reddit readers argued her parents were being “unreasonable.”
“NTA, your parents are unreasonable. They wanted to turn 15-minute drive for them into two-hour inconvenience to you, which basically tells that they feel entitled to your time and effort,” one passionate correspondent wrote.
Another commented: “If they wanted you to pick them up it probably should have been arranged before the holiday.”
“NTA for not picking them up at the airport, and weird that they would assume you would be there unless they had given you their specific flight information and you had confirmed you’d be there,” a third insisted.
One less sympathetic Reddit user argued: “I mean, technically NTA but I would always pick my parents up from the airport if they had been away for a month. It’s a thing in my family.”
