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A woman has sparked a huge debate online after refusing to pick up her parents from the airport, believing their request was a joke. Now, the 28-year-old's mother and father are furious with her.
Unsure if she was wrong, the confused daughter took to popular Reddit 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 from the airport, writing: “My parents were recently on vacation for a month.”
The day before her parents were due to return home, she called them. In the conversation, the Reddit user's parents told her that they had a gift for her and that she would have to meet them at the airport if she wanted to receive it. The Reddit user immediately concluded that they weren't serious.
She confessed: “I assumed they were joking because they live 15 minutes from the airport and Ubers are cheap (plus my parents have a lot of money), whereas I live about 40 minutes 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 at 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, the father of the person who posted the original message called her to ask if she could pick them up. Still in her pajamas, the daughter said she thought his request was a joke, especially since it would take two hours to get to the airport.
“It would be a huge 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 use Uber,” she wrote. “Not to mention the fact that I would pay more for gas and tolls than they would for their Uber.”
Still, her parents wanted her to pick them up. The Reddit user admitted she refused, citing “home renovations” as the reason she couldn’t take the time to drive there that morning.
He said: “I try to help them whenever they ask, but in this case I think it was not justified to spend so much time and money just to make their 15-minute trip a little more pleasant.”
After a while, the Reddit user called her mother to ask if she could come feed her cats. The Reddit user claimed that she had forgotten about the airport situation and thought she could ask her for the favor since she had done it in the past. Unfortunately, her mother was still upset about what had happened and took the opportunity to scold her daughter for not picking them up.
Her mother called her a “hypocrite,” according to the Reddit user, and said she would have to pay for a taxi ride home to feed the cats if she wanted them to do it.
The Redditor admitted: “I’ve felt pretty bad about the whole situation, but I know I would never have been picked up if the roles were reversed.”
The daughter asked if readers thought she was the “bad guy” in the situation, to which many Reddit readers responded that her parents were being “unreasonable.”
“NTA, your parents are irrational. They wanted to turn a fifteen-minute trip for them into a two-hour inconvenience for you, which basically shows that they feel entitled to your time and effort,” wrote one impassioned correspondent.
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 it’s strange that they assumed you would be there unless they had given you their specific flight information and confirmed you would be there,” a third insisted.
A less sympathetic Reddit user argued: “I mean, technically it’s not a problem, but I would always go pick my parents up from the airport if they had been away for a month. It runs in my family.”
