r/AITApod

i joined a team at work about eight months ago. and theres one guy on the team, ill call him R, whos kinda made it subtly clear since i got there that he doesnt really consider me a core part of the group. not openly hostile or anything. just little stuff. not copying me on things. referring to the team in ways that exclude me. you know the type. that drip drip kinda thing that adds up over time

then like two weeks ago during a tense moment in a meeting he said something that landed harder than usual. basically implied that i wasnt really one of them and the team had its own way of doing things before i arrived

i didnt say anything in the moment. just let it go. figured he was frustrated and probably didnt mean it the way it came out. i actually really tried to be gracious about it

so fast forward to yesterday. were all in the break room. and R goes, dramatically, to the group at large, "i am exhausted, i need coffee desperately"

and without thinking i go "hi exhausted i need coffee desperately, im not really part of this team"

one of my colleagues laughed SO hard she had to physically leave the room

R went quiet

=

my manager was also there and she pulled me aside afterwards and said she appreciated that i hadnt escalated the original comment two weeks ago but that maybe i shouldnt have said what i said in front of the whole group

and i was kinda like. ok. but in my defense. it was funny. like objectively. the woman who laughed is still bringing it up

AITA?

so my coworker and i sit near each other in an open plan office. we've never had a particular issue beyond the usual desk proximity stuff

then about three weeks ago i noticed she had started slowing down when she walked past my desk and holding her phone at an angle that made it pretty clear she was taking photos of my screen. and not just glancing, like actively stopping and filming. i do client work and my screen often has sensitive information on it

i asked her about it once and she said she was just checking her phone and i was being paranoid

so i went to my manager and my manager said she couldnt see evidence of anything and without proof there wasnt much she could do

so i bought a small desk camera, one of those ones that looks like a plant, and pointed it at the area around my desk including the path she walks past. i didnt hide the fact that i had a camera. i just didnt announce it either

two days later i had footage of her stopping at my desk while i was away from it and photographing my screen directly

i brought the footage to my manager and my manager addressed it with her

but now my coworker has gone to HR saying i filmed her without consent in the workplace and she feels surveilled and uncomfortable. HR is reviewing the situation

i installed a camera at my own desk after being told i needed to get evidence. and shes now using the existence of that evidence against me

AITA?

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over the past two years there have been repeated incidents of dishonesty that crossed lines id communicated very clearly. not one mistake. a pattern. each time i raised it i was told it wouldnt happen again and it happened again

i finally ended things about a month ago

her family has since been telling people in our shared social circle that the reason i ended it was something else entirely. like something that has nothing to do with the actual reason. theyve picked a narrative that makes me look bad and theyre running with it pretty aggressively. i think they either genuinely believe it or theyre choosing it because its easier than acknowledging what actually happened

ive been getting messages from mutual friends asking me about this other reason.

i dont want to air everything publicly because it involves things that are private and would embarrass her. but staying quiet is letting a false narrative about me take hold

i just ended a relationship because i was repeatedly lied to and betrayed. that should be enough of a reason on its own without having to defend myself against a story that was invented to replace it

AITA for ending it, and am i wrong for not correcting the record more aggressively?

TLDR: ended a long term relationship after repeated betrayals. her family is telling everyone it was about something unrelated that makes me look bad. ive been defending myself privately but not publicly. wondering if i should correct the record more forcefully or just let it go

about eight months ago this woman i had met briefly at a conference started telling people in our professional community that i had lifted ideas from her unpublished work for a project id been developing independently for over a year. i found out through a mutual contact who felt i deserved to know

i had never seen her work. i couldnt have plagiarized something i had never accessed. my project had a paper trail going back fourteen months before id even met this person

so i reached out to her directly. she stopped responding after two messages. i reached out to the mutual contact to ask if there was any way to address it and i was told it had kinda faded and not to make it worse by pushing it

so i let it go.

i didnt want to look defensive and i was told it had died down

it had not fully died down. i kept getting slightly cool receptions from people in certain circles and i knew why even when nobody said it directly

then three weeks ago i was at a large industry event. i was mid conversation with someone whose opinion genuinely matters for my career when this woman walks over and inserts herself into the conversation with a big smile and introduces herself like we had never met

i said actually we have met, and then i said directly and calmly that this was the person who had told people in our community that id plagiarized her work, work id never seen, for a project id been developing for over a year before we met

she went completely still

the person we were talking to excused himself and i saw him speaking to her separately a few minutes later. she left the event early

my husband says i embarrassed her unnecessarily because it was months ago and mostly over. and i told him it wasnt over for me and i hadnt had a chance to say anything when it was actually happening

AITAH?

I 40 female have gone no contact with my 65 dad for a year now. Last year, I got an email from this 50 female saying that my dad had lied for several months to her about a shit ton of things, like his work and family. She sent me an email with what he has told her, which is pretty crazy stuff. So I went on a stealth mission to my dad's apartment while he was asleep and linked my phone to his email to I could also check it from my phone without him knowing. I searched his emails in trash and not in trash and finding every single thing he wrote to her plus things he wrote to other people that 2 of which were supposedly sent by me through dad's email to this other person, which of course I never wrote. Anyways, so I found the emails exchanged between this women and my dad and he had lied to her soooo much and so elaborate that I was shocked! He told her in one email that I was not his biological daughter (which I am his bio daughter by the way.) That my mom had died from an std (she is alive by the way) and to not to tell me that I'm not his bio daughter......he also at one point, sat me down all serious and told me with a straight face that with his health which is crappy that his doctor only gave him 2 years left to live which was devastating at the time UNTIL I went to a doctor's appointment with him and asked his doctor if he said that, which the doctor replied that he did not say that! My dad also told me that he was being admitted to this long-term covid clinic in California. So I dropped him off at the airport and picked him up, both times in 3 months. This was before I knew all about the lying. Apparently! Those trips were in fact not to California but to Arizona to meet the 50 y/o women that later sends me the email. There was soooo much more that happened, which really fucked with my mental health, that I sat down with him and talked about how I know what has happened and that he needs to talk to a therapist and that I am going to step back for my mental health until he also gets help. Side note, he only ever reaches out to me when he needs something or it's a holiday or birthday....never just to talk about how I'm doing and that's it. So, AITA?

ok so my grandmother has been in memory care for about a year now. she has moderate to severe cognitive decline and isnt capable of making sound decisions about her assets. her estate has a named executor, a family friend who's also a lawyer, and the understanding within the family was that nothing from her house was to be removed until the estate was properly handled

then about three months ago i went to check on the house and noticed things were missing. not small things either. furniture, some artwork, a few pieces of jewelry that i knew had been discussed as part of the estate

i asked around and my uncle said my grandmother had told him he could have those things and he had simply collected them

i asked when this conversation happened and he said a few months ago when he had visited her

my grandmother cannot reliably remember what she had for breakfast. shes not in a position to make valid decisions about distributing estate assets

so i contacted the executor. he took it seriously, sent a formal letter to my uncle requesting the items be returned pending proper estate process. my uncle refused and said the letter was insulting and that he had his grandmother's blessing

the executor escalated. i wont go into all the details but the items were eventually returned

my uncle is furious now and saying i should have come to him directly first and handled it within the family. said i went nuclear over something that could have been resolved with a conversation

i did have a conversation with him. he told me my grandmother gave him permission and that was the end of it

AITA?

i hired a contractor to do some work on my apartment. specific stuff, nothing major, we agreed on a price, i paid half upfront like you do

he did maybe sixty percent of the work. and i know it was sixty percent because i have photos of what was done and what wasnt done and i compared them to what was actually in the written quote

i asked him to come back and finish and he said he'd schedule it. three weeks passed. i asked again. he said he'd been busy and would get to it. another two weeks went by. so i sent a formal message saying i needed the work completed or a partial refund for the unfinished portion

he came back saying the work was done to the agreed standard and if i had concerns i shouldve raised them at the time

so i went to the platform we booked through and they reviewed it and basically said it was a he said she said situation and closed the ticket

then i went to every review platform i could find him on and left honest, detailed, one star reviews. i included the photos showing what was quoted versus what was actually completed. kept them completely factual, no insults, no exaggeration, just here is what was agreed and here is what was delivered

turns out other people had the same experience. my reviews got comments from other customers saying the same thing had happened to them

his rating dropped pretty significantly and he messaged me saying id destroyed his livelihood over a misunderstanding and demanded i take the reviews down

i told him they were accurate and i was leaving them up

AITA?

i rent a small storage unit thats attached to our building. i pay for it separately, its in my name, its mine. and my roommate knows this. we talked about it when i first got it and he said he understood it wasnt shared space

he has used it without asking like four times now. just helped himself to the space to store his stuff temporarily, usually sporting equipment or things he doesnt want in the apartment. and each time i found out because i went to get something of mine and his stuff was in the way

i asked him about it the first time. he said it was just for a day or two and he wasnt hurting anything. i told him please just ask first. he said sure

three more times after that

then last friday i came home to find his stuff in there again. a bunch of it this time, like he had done a seasonal swap of his gear. and i was heading out of town for the weekend in about an hour

so i moved his stuff to the hallway outside his bedroom door. put my things back where they belonged. locked the unit with the new padlock i had just bought that week. left for the weekend

he called twice that night. texted three times. something about his stuff being in the hallway and the unit being locked

i didnt respond until sunday evening when i was on my way home. told him the unit was locked because it was mine and his stuff was in the hallway because thats where it belonged

he said i couldve just talked to him before leaving

i told him i had talked to him three times before and nothing had changed

roommate situation is now pretty tense

AITA?

I provided after-school care for an 8 year old boy. First note is that I am Autistic, so this isn't against kids with the tism.

This was Monday-Friday from the time he got home from school to the time his mother got off of work, usually 3-4 hours a day, all school year.

He is a higher support needs boy who has to take a transport service home because he can't take the bus. Nearly every day I got an earful from the transport service about how difficult the boy was (wouldnt buckle, throwing things at the drover, screaming the entire ride, wouldnt get in/out of the car, etc). Sometimes after he got to my house he would be fine sitting and having a snack while reading or playing with toys. Most days though he would go sit on the hill behind my house and scream. Blood-curdling scream. I got reports from neighbors constantly. If you touched him at all, or of he thought you were going to, he would fly into a fury and bite, kick, and scream.

My whole family, and even my dogs, were miserable with him at our house.

He ended up causing me to have a mental breakdown. I told the mother that $300/month was not enough to be able to keep doing the job as I needed to be able to buy more supplies to care for him, and me, properly. She insulted me and went no contact and I haven't seen or heard from her since.

AITA for asking for higher pay, or should I have sucked it up and watched him anyway?

This happened years ago and it still preys on me.

my neighbor and i got off on a bad start about four months ago over something minor, a noise complaint during a house gathering that i thought was handled. i apologized and we talked briefly, i thought it was done already but apparently it was not done

over the following months shes reported me to our building management twice for things that either didnt happen or were completely within normal living parameters. building management investigated both times and found nothing to act on

then she contacted my employer claiming i had behaved aggressively toward her. my employer called me in, i explained the situation, they said they had no concerns but needed to document the call anyway

then like two weeks ago i got woken up by a knock at my door at an unreasonable hour. two people from a community mediation service she'd contacted showed up saying she had filed a complaint and they were required to attempt contact

i was asleep. she had filed a complaint about noise

the mediation people could clearly see i had literally just been woken up. they were apologetic about the timing and said they'd note the circumstances

so i finally filed a formal harassment complaint with our building management citing the pattern of behavior with dates and documentation i'd been keeping

shes now saying im retaliating against her for trying to address legitimate concerns and that im the one creating a hostile environment

i dont know if i escalated something i shouldve let die or protected myself from something that was just gonna keep going

AITA?

someone at my job has been taking my lunch out of the communal fridge and I know exactly who it is. I have literally watched him walk to the fridge on days my food goes missing and come back to his desk eating something that looks exactly like what I packed that morning. I said something to him directly twice and both times he acted completely baffled, like he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

so I just stopped bringing it up and kept packing my food.

I eat pretty specifically, just personal preference, and whatever I bring tends to be more interesting than the average desk lunch. I think that is why he started taking it in the first place.

last week I had leftovers from a dinner I made at home. genuinely very spicy, like I have spent years building up a tolerance for this stuff and it still gets me a little, the kind of thing that would wreck most people who were not expecting it. I packed it in my usual container, wrote my name on it like always, put it in the fridge. no ingredient list because nobody does that, it is just a fridge full of containers with names on them.

lunchtime. my food was gone again. I walked to his desk and sure enough there he was eating it and already looking like he was having a bad time.

I just said I hoped he enjoyed it and went back to my desk.

twenty minutes later he came over with watery eyes telling me I should have warned him it was that spicy and that I had basically set him up on purpose.

I said I brought my own lunch in my own container with my own name on it and he took it again after I already asked him twice to stop so I was not sure what warning he thought he was owed.

he went to our manager about it. manager told him taking other people's food is a policy violation and that people do not need to label ingredients on their personal meals.

AITA?

I love this friend. we have been close for seven years. I want to celebrate her. I genuinely mean that.

she announced the bachelorette last month. four nights, a city neither of us lives in, the kind of trip where the activities alone are going to run several hundred dollars before flights and accommodation. the maid of honor sent a preliminary budget breakdown and my share comes out to somewhere between fourteen and eighteen hundred dollars depending on how some of the shared costs land.

I am not in a position to spend that right now. I had some unexpected expenses earlier this year that wiped out what I had saved and I am still rebuilding. fourteen hundred dollars is not a rounding error for me at this moment.

I told my friend privately, just her, before I said anything to the group. I said I loved her, I wanted to be there, and I was looking at the numbers and did not think I could make it work at that cost. I asked if there was a way to participate in some parts without the full trip or if she wanted me to step back from the planning group so I was not a complication.

she got quiet. then she said she had really counted on me being there and it felt like I was choosing not to prioritize her.

I said I was not choosing anything. I do not have the money.

her maid of honor texted me the next day saying the group was disappointed and asked if I could maybe put it on a card and deal with it later.

I have been dealing with stuff I put on a card and dealt with later for six months. that is why I am in this position.

AITAH for telling her early instead of just not showing up?

Bf(21) (let’s call him Jake) knows I’m posting this and wants to see who people think is the asshole.

Context (it’s important): My sister and I have been friends with Jake’s sister (let’s call her Jane) for a long time (before I even met Jake). About 7 years ago, my sister had a slept over with Jane at her (and Jake’s) mom’s house. She had a really scary “supernatural” experience. Her relaying this to me was terrifying, she was quite traumatized by the experience.

His mom has told him that when he was little, he had seen things there, even though he doesn’t remember it now. His sister has also said she’s seen things. I’ve been dating him for almost 5 years, and I genuinely love his mom, so this has nothing to do with not liking her or judging her house.

I’ve gone to the house plenty of times, but I’ve never slept over or stayed later than like 1am. There was one situation there that I still can’t explain, and it has stuck with me.

I have never and will never sleep at the house, I explained this and my reasoning in the very beginning of our relationship, and he has never understood why I feel the way I do.

I believe in demons, so stuff like this affects me deeply. I’m already the kind of person who gets scared of horror movies and holds onto those images for ages, so I feel like staying there overnight would make me anxious and maybe traumatize me if something happened.

Also, I sleep over at his dad’s all the time since that’s where he actually lives.

Now for the issue at hand: My boyfriend is house sitting for his mom for 2 nights and is mad at me because I don’t want to sleep over.

He’s also upset because he feels like if I think it’s too scary, then why would I “let” him be there alone. But I’m not trying to tell him not to sleep there, that’s his mom’s house, I just personally feel uncomfortable and scared. Plus anyway, when I ask him “aren’t you scared”, he says “it’s just a house”.

He says that I never bring up demons in other situations, like if we stay at an Airbnb or somewhere else, and thinks it doesn’t make sense that I’m only like this about his mom’s house.

Am I being unreasonable here, is he being unreasonable here?

Edit: the experiences weren’t just hearing the wind rustling or a few squeaky floorboards or whatever. They SAW things and HEARD things that weren’t physically there to make that noise.

I posted a photo on my instagram last weekend. nothing out of the ordinary, just me at a thing I went to, I looked good and I felt good and I posted it. I get maybe forty likes on a normal post so it is not like I have some massive platform.

two days later my friend texted me kind of coldly asking if we could talk. I said sure and she called me.

apparently her boyfriend had seen my post, made a comment to her about it that she found upsetting, and she had been stewing on it for two days before reaching out to me.

she said she felt like the photo was attention seeking and that I should have considered how it might land given that her boyfriend follows me and they had been having some issues lately.

I said I posted a photo of myself on my own account and I was not thinking about her boyfriend when I did it.

she said that was kind of the point, that I was not thinking about how my actions affect people around me, and that a good friend would be more considerate.

I told her I was not responsible for what her boyfriend said to her and that whatever issue came up between them because of my photo was between them.

she said I was being dismissive of her feelings and that she expected more from me.

AITA?

I do creative strategy work and a big part of my job is building decks. not just putting slides together, actual concept development, visual direction, the whole thing. last month I finished a deck for a pitch I had been working on for three weeks. it is genuinely one of the best things I have made, the client loved it, it went really well.

my coworker saw it when I was presenting internally and immediately started asking questions about it. I thought she was just interested in the concept so I walked her through some of the thinking.

then she asked if she could use it for her own client pitch next week. not take inspiration from it, not use it as a reference, actually use it, swap out the client name and present my work as the foundation for her proposal.

I said no.

she seemed genuinely surprised. she said we work at the same company so technically the work belongs to the company anyway and she was not asking for anything unreasonable. she said it would save her a ton of time and the client would love it and it reflected well on the whole team.

I said I spent three weeks on that deck and I was not comfortable with her presenting it as the basis for her own work without any acknowledgment of where it came from.

she said I was being territorial over a work document and that this was not how good teams operated.

AITA for saying no?

my family does this thing every year where we go to this italian place near my parents house for my birthday. it's kind of our tradition and i look forward to it every year.

this time my sister shows up with a guy she's been seeing for like 6 weeks. i had never met him before. fine, whatever. except the entire dinner, and i mean the ENTIRE dinner, turned into everyone interrogating this guy. my mom, my dad, my aunt. asking about his job, his family, where he grew up, all of it.

at one point my uncle asked me how things were going with work and i started answering and my sister literally cut me off mid sentence to tell some story about her boyfriend. everyone laughed and just moved on. i sat there for a second like okay.

i was playing on my phone and chatting to go meet up with friends at a bar after, kind of wanted to make a night of it. instead i just asked the waiter to separate my bill, told everyone i wasn't feeling great and left.

my sister has been blowing up my phone since saying i embarrassed her in front of him and made it "weird." my mom said i should've just been happy she finally found someone good.

i just didn't want to sit there for another hour being invisible at my own birthday. AITA

My friends and I (young girls in late 20’s) have been friends since our earlier 20’s about 8ish years, My friend Kristen and I birthdays are 2 days apart. We only celebrated together like once or twice(she usually doesn’t like to do much and I take trips) So this year I planed on having a Big party since I never really had one, I mentioned it a few times over the last few hang outs. Well Our birthday is 4 months away and she sent out a Invite for a Bonfire for her birthday the day of MY birthday (which is the weekend). I have told her that I was planning to do a party and was really hurt by it and we talked about sharing the day and that was okay with me but just keeping it small, Over the last few days she has changed her mind and wants her own small celebration on my birthday, (she also did something like this last year) So, am I the asshole to still have my own party?

Hello, first time ever sending in but am i the asshole for this, i 28 male still talk to my ex also 28 male, we deeply miss each other, i know that doesn't sound serious but it is. Because he's married to a woman, it all started when he was stationed in my home town doing covid vaccines, we met, fell in love, he left his girlfriend for me (his now wife) and we started dating, we were together for awhile and then he got shipped out to some where else, we started fighting a lot because the distance wasn't working, fast forward 3 years, he starts messaging me again, that he misses me and still loves me, i also missed him and still loved him, we started talking again and started talking about seeing eachother again, fast forward 1 year and he's getting shipped to poland and his family wants him to get married, so he marries the girl he left for me, i know about this, we still talk, say how much we miss each other, he hides this from her and he can't be open about who he is with his family and his job, so all we can do is be states apart and only text.. am i the asshole for continuing to talk to him knowing he's married?