Moochers

When I was a kid, there was a woman living just a few houses down from us that dropped by regularly – at least once a week; sometimes more - to ‘borrow’ food from my mother. An onion or two. A couple of potatoes. Celery. Some rice. Pasta. A few tomatoes. A cucumber. Salt. A cup of milk. Butter. Three or four eggs. And so on. This chronic ‘borrowing’ went on for ages, and she’d always promise to pay my mother back. She never did. Not one onion’s worth. But she still had the nerve to show up regularly for her borrowing mooching sessions. My mother was too polite to say no and kept handing out food. I’m not sure exactly how long this went on, but I do know that it lasted for quite some time. And I’m not sure if my mom was the only person this shameless woman mooched from. It’s possible there were others who helped trim her grocery bill.

In an apartment in a building next to the one we lived in, we suspected a family of mooching toys. If you left toys unattended outside, and the brother or sister in that apartment were around, they disappeared. The problem is that we never caught these kids in the act of ‘borrowing’ toys. We were certain that this is what was happening because the sister (5 or 6 at the time) would say something like “we put the toys we find in a box so we can take them to our new house”. And when you asked her what toys were ‘found’, she’d mention something you – or another neighbourhood kid - had ‘lost’. Coincidence? I think not. So we were certain that our stolen lost toys were in that home, but just couldn’t prove it. What bothered everyone the most is that the parents of these kids encouraged this behaviour. Instead of drilling their kids to find out where these toys came from in order to return them, they kept them! Not long after, this family moved away --- and so did all those mooched toys.

These are just a couple of examples of mooching I witnessed as a child; a behaviour that grinds on my nerves. Fortunately, I haven’t been targeted by people like this in my adult years, but I imagine it wouldn’t last long with me. If the recurring “sorry I don’t have any” response wouldn’t clue a mooch in, I’d just ignore the doorbell when they dropped by for their weekly goodie bag. I’m an introvert, and introverts are experts at ignoring doorbells and telephones when they don’t want to hear from a particular individual, or when they just want to be left alone.

Have you ever had to deal with moochers?