u/mossy-echoes

Just curious if anyone else has recently had this experience: Young man comes to my door, says he’s doing “work” for my neighbor, gives neighbor’s first name, pretty convincing. It’s a slow lead up to a sales pitch, which I politely shut down since we already have a pest service. I want to say the company was “United” or something similar — there was a logo on his shirt I can probably retrieve from my security footage but it’ll take some digging. He leaves, it’s all fine.

But here’s the thing: Something doesn’t sit right with me. He shouldn’t have been up our driveway in the first place, ignoring the multiple no soliciting signs. And what he doesn’t know is that I had just driven by him farther down the road on my way home, nowhere near my neighbor’s house, just 20ish min earlier. Replaying the interaction in my head, I have a hunch he just looked up property owners’ names on the Assessor’s site and is using this fake story as an “in”. Probably a legit company, just a shitty tactic. Worst case, an elaborate scam.

I’m a bit stuck on this because I’m still kicking myself over how I handled it. I was wayyy too nice. I’d just gotten home after some harrowing traffic experiences and was all out of sorts, totally exhausted. Part of me wanted to keep him talking so I could sus out his game and make sure he wasn’t casing my place. I’m also empathetic to young folks just trying to make a living. Sales is a rough gig, I know. But in retrospect it should have been an open/shut “see the signs? please leave” conversation. If there ever is a next time, I’ll be much more direct. Lesson learned.

It’s just gnawing at me so I figured I’d see if anyone else has encountered this. I will probably ask my neighbor about it next time I see him, but our houses are pretty spaced out, not exactly an “I’ll just swing by” kind of neighborhood.

I keep seeing posts from that sub on my homepage and they always have the most miserable captions. From what I remember about the “girl dinner” trend a couple years ago, that was *not* the original gist… I never had the impression that “girl dinner” was associated with unfortunate personal life events and loneliness.

I thought it was just a fun “not every meal has to be curated for Instagram and sometimes it’s fun to just have cheese & crackers for dinner”. Sometimes you’re just exhausted or craving nothing but snacks and girl dinner is like a form of self care.

I even recall one woman on TT talking about how the girl dinner phenomenon is actually subtle feminist subversion, like a way of celebrating our ability to straight up reject the idea that we’re required to go above and beyond with our domestic labor. Or something like that. It was a couple years ago now I think.

When did it change? Or did I misunderstand from the start?