This almost feels like it could be a jumping off point for an episode of Curb but here’s the scene:
So my preschool daughter gets invited over to her bestie’s house for a play date along with some other kids.
We show up at like 2:30, fully expecting to stay for a couple hours then leave. Well the kids are having a great time and suddenly it’s like 6:30 and they ask if anyone wants to order pizza. Mrs BAC is celiac but she is also very particular about restaurants she is confident truly understand how cross contamination works, but she didn’t want to be the stick in the mud so it was just made abundantly clear she wouldn’t be eating, and it’s fine this happens all the time it’s no big deal.
So our hosts order some ‘za — a large cheese, a large roni, and then a large vegetarian like mushroom and ricotta thing that nobody else was interested in and was clearly just for them.
So end of the evening and my wife says to our hosts “let me know what we owe you for the pizza and we’ll Venmo you” to which our hosts then send out a group text requesting $25/ea.
So I’m thinking like holy crap, I had 2 slices, my daughter had 1, wife had 0, how fancy of pizzas did we order?!?” I go to the webbed site of the pizza place and the price of a large pie is $23 (obvs that doesn’t include tax or delivery) but damn we’re like picking up ~1/3 of the tab.
So like, I get the basic math…3 families, 3 pizzas, split it 3 ways. But like…the other family was mom,dad, and their twin girls eating, so like 4 ppl vs 2 from my fam.
I didn’t protest and promptly Venmo’d the $25, but I was like damn, first off nobody else but our host family wanted that mushroom pizza, they were the only ones who ate it, they even said before they ordered “oh good we’ll have some leftovers for tomorrow” and also 2 pizzas would have been plenty for everyone there, as they had a full pizza leftover with the shroom + roni + cheese.
So not only did we treat our hosts to a pizza but also we ate literally half of what the other family did. And to be fair to the family with twins they did not suggest the even split of the tab.
I dunno was this tacky of our hosts or am I overreacting? Like it honestly wasn’t about the money at all, it was about the gesture. We were happy to chip in, especially bc dinner was not really in the original scope of the playdate since things ran long. But I dunno if I was the host I would have been like “well for starters, nobody else wanted the mushroom pizza nor was the 3rd pizza even necessary to feed everyone, so maybe we don’t ask our guest to subsidize that cost. Second, clearly the BAC family only consumed half of what the other family with twins had, so rather than send out a group text you could text everyone individually to ask them to chip in a more representative amount”
The more I thought about it, I was like man if they would have asked for like $7 less dollars I don’t think I even would have given it a second thought. Like $18? Sure whatever. But man this was definitely one of those times when I had the proverbial bowl of soup but was expected to pay the same as the guy who ordered the filet. Gears thoroughly grinded.
Oh and not that it matters…but our host’s home…I would conservatively estimate is worth 3-4x what our house is worth on the open market right now.
