Story Time

I thought for this blog today that I would tell a story of a funny thing that happened to me last year.

We were living in Germany and my Relief Society President called or we were talking and she mentioned that there was a family moving in from Mannheim. She said that they lived really close to us, and so I thought it would be nice to call her and say hello. Maybe meet at the park or something like that.

I ended up being friends with her. She and her husband had two little girls, and one was just older than Andrew and the other was just older than Lucy. The kids played really well together, and we all hung out a few times together, parents and children. She is Swedish, and has an accent, and I always enjoyed talking to her because sometimes she would put words in the wrong places in sentences, but it never bothered me. I liked it because the sentence structure in French seemed to be similar.

Since they were only going to be there a short time, they decided not to get a land line, but stick with their cell phones. Her phone got really really bad reception in their apartment, and she had to stand in a corner of her bedroom or living room to even be able to connect. It was a nice day outside and Andrew was asking to play with Megan and Ashley, their daughters. So, I tried calling her. I don't think she knew how to get messages, so I didn't leave one. Since I knew that she got horrible reception in her house, I tried probably more times than I would normally. Found out later that in one day I called her phone about 7 times. Yeah, a little excessive, BUT (notice how big that but is) I knew about the bad reception, knew that she didn't know how to get her messages. Had she been able to, I would have left a message saying that we wanted to play with them at the park, and then waited for her to call back.

So, because I called her 7 times that day, she stopped being my friend. She would avoid me at church, wouldn't answer her phone when I called afterwards. My husband was in Poland for five days, and her husband invited us over to have dinner. She purposely left the house so that she would not be there when I was there. He told me that they had arguments about it. He thought Matt and I were great, and that he didn't understand why she couldn't just have called me back and asked why I had called so many times.

So, I lost a friend because I called her too many times. That seriously floored me. I had dropped friends because of several months of behavior that was bad, years even. So, now I'm a little hesitant to call or do things with people too much. I don't want to scare them, or push them away or think I'm taking advantage of their time. I know that the majority of us out there wouldn't stop being friends with someone because of the amount of times they had called that day.

Now, its more like a joke for me and my real friends. My friend Anne apparently called me a lot one day while I was gone because she was hoping that I had something that she could borrow, and really needed it. When we finally talked she said something to the effect that she hoped that my phone didn't show how many times that she had called....

Maybe she didn't want to be friends with me or didn't like me and took the first thing that she could hold on to, to not be friends. Who knows. We never talked about it, and then she and her husband left. Sometimes I wish I did say something, and I was actually planning on it, but I never got the chance to. So, the moral of the story is that if someone calls you a lot, let them have a chance to explain themselves.