Whether you’ve known someone ten minutes or ten years, there’s certain etiquette to abide by when you’re borrowing their things.

Firstly, you give them back promptly.

Second, you treat them as your own – better than your own likely.

And if they get damaged, for sure you apologise and offer to replace the item.

However, the couple in this story have a roommate who seems not to have got the memo on this.

Read on to find out how it’s ruining his relationship with them.

AITA for expecting roommate to replace shovel they broke?

My girlfriend and I (we’re both female and 32 years old) have a friend that lives with us. He’s male and 28, and we let him move in with us last year to help him distance from a bad relationship.

Our roommate works nightshift, doesn’t do much upkeep work around the house (I do trash and recycling, replace lightbulbs, garden work, etc.)

However, there have been a couple issues of cleaning up after himself or using some things like food or objects without asking us first. I am admittedly a little more protective of my belongings and don’t like when things are out of place.

We live in Maryland and recently got hit by the winter storm, so my girlfriend and I have been off work since she has a long commute and I work for the school system.

Let’s see how their roommate situation caused problems during the snowstorm.

The other evening our roommate says our shovel “got chipped”. It had a two inch crack and tear in the middle of the blade.

Of course, we mentioned we’d need a new shovel to be able to get our cars out. Our roommate said he’d check Walmart for a new one – but they didn’t have one, so he told us to get one from our friend across the highway. We pointed out that both of our cars were snowed in.

So he used our shovel to dig his car out more, completely destroying it in the process. He left it on our front step, the metal had twisted entirely and the head had snapped off. The garbage area is maybe 30ft away in the parking lot.

He reluctantly he got the another shovel from our friend, making a couple of snide comments in the brief conversation we had after.

Let’s see how things got worse from there.

The next day, I spent three hours trying to shovel our cars out, since our roommate piled the snow from his car behind my girlfriend’s car, leaving me with a nightmare of snow and ice to try and get through.

A neighbor lent me a metal shovel to use while they took a break, but I had to return it after. I sent a link asking our roommate to grab a metal shovel from Home Depot so that I could finish digging our cars out the next day.

In my mind, this made sense because I wasn’t done digging us out, and he broke ours.

His direct response was, “Instead, I’d like to contribute $10 as a replacement. No hostility here, just saying that the plastic shovel we kept was improper equipment for the task, it’s not my fault it couldn’t handle the iced snow.”

Read on to find out how this comment was received.

The shovel itself was a good one – heavy duty plastic with a metal handle under the plastic. I had been using it for fifteen years in worse winters (I’m from further north) without any kind of issue or significant wear.

My girlfriend advised me not to respond yet, and he has not said anything since. It’s also worth noting that a friend sent us a screenshot of him sending the fully broken shovel to another server, seemingly making light of destroying it as a joke.

My issue with him is that he took something without asking, broke it, and is refusing to replace it. Am I wrong for expecting him to replace it?

AITA?

It could well be the case that after fifteen years of use, the existing shovel had finally given up, and this damage could have happened to anyone.

But it was the roommate using it at the time, and it’s also possible that he was reckless with it.

It’s a tough situation, but whether or not to push the money depends on how much these two women are keen to preserve their relationship with their roommate. And regardless, piling the snow behind one of their cars wasn’t cool at all.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person thought that they should evict the roommate who is taking advantage of them.

While others thought that the reaction was about more than just the shovel.

Meanwhile, this Redditor showed how poor the roommate’s attitude really is.

Sure he broke the shovel, which is annoying, and a good person would have offered to buy a new one rather than needing to be asked.

But the truth is, he’s a poor roommate as it is, taking advantage of his friends’ hospitality.

They’ll be better off without him – even if they do need to buy themselves a new shovel.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.