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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/ThreeFifthsOfABrain on 2024-05-23 23:26:57+00:00.

Kind of a small one, but lately my Dad and older brother have been trying to push the job of making the shopping list onto me. Of course, because I don’t know how much they need since I’m the least food-interested person in the house, I need someone’s help with making the list. As dad had gone to bed, my brother helped me.

Well, he… “helped” me.

He would sit there and tell me which item I needed to check, one at a time, and give me a vague or stupid answer as to how much we needed of something - for example, we needed “35” tubs of mint ice cream, or the amount of beer we needed was “a fridge” - and I was getting annoyed. Especially because he was trying to watch a movie at the time, and kept pausing and unpausing it between items, so I had to deal with him always telling me to shut up and wait for the end of the scene or a good time to pause, which took several minutes per item. For a full shopping list for three people and a cat.

Did I mention it was like 11:45 pm when we started doing this, and this is after he had dragged his feet on helping for three days?

Eventually, I got sick of it and started writing exactly what he said when it came to his foodstuffs. So we needed “an amount” of veggie burgers, “just guess” of tuna, “shut up this is a good bit” of dark cooking chocolate and “look at the silly moggy” of butternut squash. And so on.

By the time we were done, it was past 2:00 am, and I was knackered, stressed, and satisfied with my work. I took the list upstairs to my dad, left it on his bedside table with a sticky note that said “if anything looks wrong, just don’t get it.”

In the morning, Dad went to do the shopping. He came back with everything I eat and he eats, but my brother was missing about 85% of his food items. When my brother asked WTF happened, my dad said that he “couldn’t tell” whether we needed to get some things because the amounts of those things seemed “unusual” or “costly”, and felt that it was safer if he didn’t buy those things. It turns out Dad had been kept awake by my brother’s movie for two and a half hours last night and was as sick to the back teeth with it as I was.

My brother had to walk up to the local shop and buy as many of his things as he could from there (they didn’t have everything) out of his own money. He even had to make two trips because he couldn’t carry everything the first time. It’s a mile walk there, meaning he had to walk four miles in total to buy his food out of his pocket, Dad wouldn’t drive him because he had a long run to do, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to help. I was too busy eating my Pringles. That I forgot to put on the list.

I’m still going to have to help make the list in future, but when I do, something tells me my 27-year-old brother will help properly next time.