Dealing with the House Guest from Hell

Summertime brings with it visits from friends and family... and the unavoidable boorish house guest.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, David Eddie offers advice to a reader trying to handle a boorish house guest.  Eddie writes:

I’ve been getting a lot of “house guest from hell” questions lately … must be the season.

It’s a source of perpetual puzzlement to me why anyone would contrive to be a bad house guest – especially someone like your friend, who’s clearly hoping for numerous repeat performances.

Growing up the son of a modestly compensated assistant professor, I became used to being the least well off among my friends. In high school, all my friends’ families had cottages, and we didn’t. Then I, Scholarship Boy/The Student Loan Kid, went to a university that was a Gatsby-and-Daisy-filled playground for the offspring of American captains of industry.

(Those Saab-driving, cocaine-sniffing kids were always saying stuff like: “You know the drill bit they use for oil wells? My grandfather invented that.”)

Some of their families had their own islands. I, wily, conniving, teenaged David Eddie, knew that if I would like to be re-invited to their fantastical, Xanadulicious country homes, dachas and estates; to continue to play tennis on their courts and water-ski behind their boats; I would have to be a good house guest.

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