My older friend is both awkward and annoying!

[Da Lonely 1]

Hi.

 

I have a 52 year old man friend who is really obsessed with vinyl and I am 27. We play pool a lot and I met him in college, back in 2008. My college class for drama was reserved for people with difficulties. He takes blackouts due to a condition he has, but I don't know if he has a learning issue too. He has these signs. I myself have autism.

 

He loves music from the 50s and 60s, but not the bands that people know about, like say The Beatles, The Who or The Kinks. To him, those bands are overrated and he disowns every famous group. He thinks everything released after the 60s is utter crap as well, when this is all just down to his personal outlook or opinion.

 

He has a massive collection of records in his house, which to be quite honest, he adds to very compulsively. He never plays these records, but just collects them. And he hordes them in boxes and is incredibly fascinated by rare 'labels' which not many people know of. He claims in a somewhat weird tale that females told him never to marry and guard that 'case' which started when he was young. He often rambles about how women get used for bait purposes and how they don't dress themselves properly. He repeats this to me over and over again, and talks about banned songs and how he would put them aside for his gain if he worked in a record store and discovered any records related to that 'issue' he claims he is investigating. It's like hearing a really bad joke and you want someone to tell you what the punch line is, but they won't.

 

Many of the records he goes for are highly expensive and unheard of, and this causes him to go overdrawn with the bank. He often claims that he gets an overdraft limit, but since he is not working, I have no idea if this is true and I doubt the bank would allow him to do this unless he had a job. It's singles and EPs he goes for.

 

Anyway, he often comes to me and asks me to look up serial numbers for the records he purchases because he doesn't have a PC and hasn't got a clue how to use one. This is highly boring to me as I am not a lover of his music, but I don't mind helping him out now and then. I'm an 80s fan myself, but he slags me off all the time over my taste, which gets very annoying. Quite often, he asks me to rank him over others and gets angry if I don't present him with an answer he wants, no doubt for bragging purposes.

 

Since I have the Internet at home, he pesters me all the time to do web searches for records he is curious about. Unfortunately, he has problems pronouncing the names of groups or whatever over the phone and often he will state the title of the switch side track rather than the 'A' side of the record, for some bizarre reason. This means that if I go on Google to investigate the newest acquisition into his collection, I cannot obtain any worthy information about the recording as nobody else knows about it.

 

One thing that also annoys me is that he has purchased many, many mobile phones over the years. For whatever reason, he often isn't happy with the handset he signs up for in a shop, so he ends up buying something new and asks me to put music on his phone for him using a transfer cable. Then when he gets a software upgrade, he loses all the tracks and claims the data I added got erased, or something. He asks me to go look up bands on YouTube and convert the tracks into an MP3 using some website in order to save the tracks to his phone. He also bought a special machine that allows you to copy a record into an MP3. Sometimes, he will stand over me as I am on my laptop, just barking out orders and not being patient while I finish the favour for him. I've asked him nicely already to compose a list of whatever records he wants and I'll look them up in my spare time and copy them and back them off, without him being present. Then when he comes up to see me, I can just connect his device and quickly drop and drag them to his phone, and we can go head off to play pool instead of mucking around doing all this.

 

He also is quite sexist. When we are seated on a bus upstairs, he talks loudly about music or occasionally other more controversial subjects about women and asks me my verdict on pointless stuff I perceive as just irrelevant garble. I've told him before that it's tricky to assist him all the time with his music ventures, as his taste in music is just too obscure, then he makes out I'm 'bringing him down to size' when all I'm doing is proving a point. He also said that if he went to a music quiz, he would do a quiz about obscure bands only, which is just crazy talk as no-one would be able to fairly state the answers.

 

Is this guy nuts or what? He's been a good mate over the years, but at times he just gets me so worked up.

Edited September 20, 2013 by Da Lonely 1

[pteromom]

You need to learn how to say no to him, and my guess is he will become a lot less annoying.

 

If he has all this money to spend on old records, he has money to buy himself a computer. And you can show him the basics of finding the stuff he likes.

[Da Lonely 1]

I think his manners are a total disgrace. He is very sexist, like I said. We've been going to a pool group which was formerly run by a gay person and although anyone is welcome, it's primarily aimed at gay, bi-sexual, TV / TS. Those sort of people. The guy who ran it no longer can go there as he works. That guy's sister took over the group and we've been going to it for a while now. My friend called Frank just disagrees with same sex relations. He also used to call our American female teacher from college 'nine-one-one self-inflicted' upon learning she was from that country.

 

He actually did have a laptop once. My mother offered to buy it from him as he often stated how he hadn't a clue how to use it and my mother figured she could make better use of it. Then he sold it to someone else and my mother was furious. A lot of the staff in record shops get so annoyed at him because he'll go in at random intervals, ask for records to be put aside and then won't be back in to pay for them. They've jokingly said to me he is banned, but he mistakes this as him being truly being banned, then moans to me about how they said he was banned.

 

He used to torment me when we went for walks. In Edinburgh where we live, we have a canal with some viaducts and they are high up. I'd sometimes come across one and hesitate to walk on and he'd say I was chicken. I'm autistic and lots of people hate heights, but that bad attitude is not appropriate. It's not going to make me want to be forced into anything I am not happy doing.

[pteromom]

He used to torment me when we went for walks. In Edinburgh where we live, we have a canal with some viaducts and they are high up. I'd sometimes come across one and hesitate to walk on and he'd say I was chicken. I'm autistic and lots of people hate heights, but that bad attitude is not appropriate. It's not going to make me want to be forced into anything I am not happy doing.

 

He doesn't sound like a very caring friend.

 

So why do you continue to hang out with him?

[Da Lonely 1]

Well, I don't really have any other friends of either gender that don't also have difficulties. Besides him, there's only people I associate with through professional means and it's hard to find friends because of not knowing how to be social and also I think people are inclined to be easily bored when I talk about things they are not familiar with or not interested in, so I'm like my friend in a way.

 

When I was in primary school, I had friends who were piss takers towards me too and then it got worse years later as it happened online especially from 2002 onwards, but my autism was only diagnosed in 2007. I'm 27 now. I have support workers helping me every week. I'm living in supported accommodation and now I'm seeing the light, and that I need to make friends elsewhere and also maybe get a volunteering placement.

 

You see, support workers are doing a job. They aren't real friends. They don't ring you up, go on Skype to blether about stuff, that sort of thing. I love my support workers and that's a good thing for productive activities. However, that can be hard to not take advantage of if it's a lady, because then I get 'bright ideas' which are taboo in a working relationship, due to my having autism. Like my key worker is a lovely single lady, but dating her is a no-go. She's merely an example, though.