There are certain unwritten rules when you live in a duplex. You don’t play loud music at 3 AM, you take your trash out, and you generally try not to be a menace. And then there’s the unspoken, lovely rule: if you see a package, you bring it inside the shared foyer for your neighbor. It’s just… what you do.
Our narrator, a 24-year-old man, is a card-carrying “Good Neighbor.” For years, he lived in his duplex and had a perfect, harmonious relationship with his older neighbors, “Jack and Jill.” They had a beautiful, symbiotic system: if a package was on the porch, whoever saw it first would bring it into the safe, shared foyer. They’d thank each other. It was a utopia of neighborly respect.
Sadly, Jill passed away, and Jack eventually moved out. This left a void, which was soon filled by a “New Neighbor” (NN), a 40-something-year-old woman. Our hero, being the stand-up guy he is, just… kept doing the nice thing. He continued his Good Neighbor Package Service, bringing her boxes inside and leaving them in the foyer.
She never returned the gesture, which he was fine with. She also never said thank you, which is less fine, but whatever. And then, one day in April, the whole thing blew up in his face. He was coming in and saw four packages for her. He picked up the two big ones to carry them inside, as he’d been doing for months.
This is when NN came down the stairs with two of her friends. She asked him what he was doing, and he explained his good deed. As he turned to go back to his own apartment, he overheard the line that changed everything. He heard NN say to her friends, “I can’t believe he tried to steal these. I should call the cops.”
I am… speechless. The sheer, unmitigated gall. This man is doing you a free, kind service, and you accuse him of theft? To your friends? He, understandably, decided to let it go and not start a war, but the message was received. The Good Neighbor Package Service was officially, and permanently, out of business.
Fast forward to a recent day. Our narrator is home, watching TV, and sees UPS drop two packages for NN on the porch. He sees them. He knows they are there. And he does exactly what she accused him of not doing: he minds his own business. He checks his own mail, leaves her boxes right where the driver dropped them, and goes back inside.
He even fell asleep. The sweet, peaceful sleep of someone who is not, under any circumstances, a thief.
Around 4 PM, he’s awakened by knocking. It’s NN. She asks if he has her packages. He, with the calm of a clear conscience, says “no.” She’s upset, saying the app shows they were delivered. And then our hero, with a beautiful, icy-cold delivery, says, “I saw them on the porch earlier but left them alone.”
This is where the hypocrisy reaches a fever pitch. NN got upset at him. She said one of the boxes had something “expensive” in it and that, since he was home, he could have brought them inside.
I’m sorry, what? You want him to do the exact thing you accused him of being a thief for? You can’t have it both ways! You can’t accuse your free security guard of being a robber and then get mad when he stops guarding your house.
Our narrator, having had enough, told her the God’s-honest truth: “I didn’t want to be accused of being a thief again.” Boom. Mic drop. End scene.
She, of course, called him the ahole, repeated that her stuff was expensive, and stomped off to slam her door. But she’s only mad at him because she’s really mad at herself. She’s mad that her “expensive stuff” is gone, and she’s mad that she has no one to blame but the person she falsely accused in the first place.
So, is he the ahole for letting a porch pirate do their thing? Absolutely not. He wasn’t being malicious; he was just respecting her very clear, albeit insane, boundary: “Don’t touch my packages, you ‘thief’.” This is a classic, textbook case of “Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.”