A man celebrated his birthday at a restaurant but was stuck with the bill after his friends ditched him.
In a post on the Am I the ***hole Reddit forum, a man said that his friends had offered to take him out to celebrate his birthday, and thinking that the meal was his birthday present, he assumed that his friends would all chip in for the meal.
A few days before his birthday, five of his friends asked him if he wanted to go out for his birthday, according to the post. After one of them – who the post referred to as Mike – told him they could go anywhere he liked, the original poster suggested they go to a nearby steakhouse.
He said they all met up at the steakhouse, and when they began to order for themselves, he noticed that Mike ordered a drink and suggested that they get appetizers. Not thinking much about it at the time, the original poster said that he was open to ordering some. They had also ordered steaks for the main courses and another round of drinks.
At this point, one of his friends named Adam ordered a bottle of champagne. The original poster protested, telling them that it was only his birthday and they didn’t need to do anything “too special.” Mike allegedly replied, “Lighten up birthday boy have some fun.”
Since he figured that he was being treated, he didn’t think much of it at the time. But then his friends’ rowdy behaviour escalated when they began to pick a fight with a nearby table. Mike cursed out a family with a three-year-old child over getting a french fry thrown at him. This led a waiter to intervene and inform the group that some complaints had been made against them.
Adam began to argue with the waiter claiming that the other table “started it,” but the waiter was having none of his excuses, so he told the group that they needed to “pay up and leave in the next few minutes before there was a problem.”
Things took a turn for the worse when the original poster turned to his friends, asking: “Thanks guys, do you want me to help pay?” To his surprise, none of them stepped up to the plate.
“You’re the birthday man right? You got money,” Adam allegedly told him. Shocked, the original poster replied, “I thought you were inviting me because it’s my birthday as a present.”
“Weren’t you the one that chose where we were going bud?” Adam laughed before suddenly getting up to leave, telling the rest of their friends, “Let’s go boys.”
The poster wrote that he wasn’t sure if they were being serious, and wondered if maybe this was all a part of some elaborate prank. He said that he got up to follow Adam and grabbed his arm. Adam looked at his hand and said, “Get your hand off me pal.” Deeply confused, the original poster looked at him and said, “Why are you acting like this man?”
The group left him there, and although the original poster said he tried to explain the situation to the waiter, he was forced to pay for his birthday dinner all by himself. He said he spoke to his friends after the incident, but they all brushed him off.
“You guys need to pay me back,” he told them, according to the post, but they replied saying that he should get over it and move on. After he hadn’t spoken to them days after the incident, he wrote that his friends messaged him asking if he was “still crying” or if “I grew up yet?”
“I haven’t replied and I want to know if I was wrong to assume that I wouldn’t be paying,” he wrote on Reddit. “The whole situation had me feeling weird.”
The original poster received an outpour of support, telling him that those people were not his friends and that he deserved better.
“Time to move on and find new friends,” one person wrote. “Friends don’t invite someone out on their birthday and stiff them with the bill. Friends don’t invite someone out on their birthday and start a fight…”
“These are NOT your friends,” another person added. “These are not good people. It absolutely sucks that you had to find out the depths of their suckiness on your birthday, but at least you found out now. He was willing to terrorize a child over a French fry. They stuck you with the bill – and fully intended on doing so from the start. They were using you.”
