Key Shenanigans

The engineer I live with seems to have book smarts, but not a lot of common sense.

The weekend I moved into my apartment Odd Guy was gone. He left me the key by hiding it on the balcony. My boyfriend had to hop the fence to get it.

A couple nights later I got a call from him asking if I was going to be around the next morning at 11:30 AM.

"Well, I was planning to go to campus, but why?"

"I don't have a key. I gave you mine."

His suggestion was for me to hide the key so he could let himself in.

"You want me to climb the fence with a bad knee, go to work, then hope you are around when I get back home tonight? Then we can repeat this tomorrow if you forget to make a copy again? No."

I told him I'd wait for him to show up, then we'd go make a copy of the key together. When he arrived, I got in his car, and he drove us to the local grocery store.

Then he said, "We can ask the people here where to make keys."

"Why don't you just go to the hardware store?"

Odd Guy didn't know where it was, so I gave him directions. We went into the store, and he immediately stood in line to pay at the cashier. I told him we had to go to the key grinder in the back of the store first, so he reluctantly followed me.

While the duplicate key was being made, he said he left his wallet in the car, but would pay me back.

I thought that was fine, but he then decided to do a bit of shopping in the store, while I was waiting, although he had no cash with him.

When we went to pay for the key and his coil of wire (which he said was going to be used to "make curtains") I pulled out a $20 bill. He took it from me and handed it to the cashier.

My friend's reaction when I told her was, "What? You don't get to pretend to be manly when you left your wallet in the car!"

Odd Guy then also pocketed the change the cashier handed over as I reached for it.

WTF? It took me a moment to realize that he thought it would be easier to just give me $20 later, instead of fumbling for the right number of coins, but couldn't he have said something? I was standing there thinking, "Wait, that's my money!"

He paid me back when we got into the car, but I've realized that he has a habit of performing actions without commentary, without realizing they require some sort of explanation.