Inspired by Carly Burn's tale about Albert on the 'colleague' thread, what is the most ridiculous example of tight fistedness you've ever seen?
Non Roland related, the duct tape has been done!!
Has a customer call to chase a 2p underpayment at work once on a payment of £3000-4000. Wasn't to balance accounts etc either, just a private individual who wanted his 2p.
My Dad told me a bloke down his old boozer used to buy postcards abroad but post them when he got home to save on stamps.
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I get half lager and half a lemonade cheaper that way
One of our partners is really right. Once questioned a side order of mushrooms on an expenses claim for several days of work travel.
Older boss was even tighter. I was once made to spend hours haggling over some trifling sum with an associate (bearing in mind my hourly rate rate about £200per hour at the time...). He also expected VAT receipts for pints of milk
Therefore anyone who is the polar opposite in this respect has always fascinated me. My mums partner, they have lived together for 30 odd years is as tight as a drum. I take after my mother so it has driven her garrety over the years. His 12 month deal with British Gas is up soon, where he gets free electric and gas on a Sunday and he is in deep deep mourning. EVERYTHING that requires power or heat takes place on the sabbath, although he does make grudging exception for cooking an evening meal and one shower or bath a day "because that would be tight." The neighbours, who he universally loathes would no doubt be welcome to utilise the facilities and complete strangers would need not ask twice but only on a Sunday. However every other day of the week they sit indoors in overcoats because the heating cannot go on in winter...
Sorry, as you can tell it fascinates me but frustrates in equal measures, how could anyone be like this? He retired from the print on a near full salary pension 25 years ago and is absolutely fucking loaded...
I have a couple of mates who are fuckers when it comes to buying a round which gets up my nose and some friends of me and my wife need physically separating from their cash when we split a bill on say my credit card it will be weeks before I see their share.
When I used to bring a newspaper into work to read at lunch or on the shitter one bloke was always swiping it or taking it to the photocopier in the yard to run off copies and read at home.
I stayed at a digs when working in Leeds and the bloke who ran the place was a weird sod anyway, he asked if I wanted to watch the football on sky whatever the game was on the Sunday and I said I did thinking he was going to direct me to the nearest place that showed it instead he asked if I wanted to watch it on the tv with him and his family in the front room which I agreed to. He asked me to go and get some beers in, which I did, he took them off me when I got back and put them in the fridge (more on this in a bit) bearing in mind I was staying at this place by myself and wasn't bothered about making friends or drinking on my own on a Sunday I wandered down to the front room and saw the rest of the family (him, his wife and two very unusual looking kids) all sat on the sofas and armchairs and he went and got me a plastic garden chair. The tv wasn't on and kick off was upon us so I asked if he knew the gane was about to start and he abdrubtly said he knew so I sat my arse down and looked awkwardly round the room. Now this was about 2000 so over a decade before I owned a nice, convenient, distraction device like a smartphone, So I watched him look at his watch then switch the tv on, at the plug and we got the game. Half time came along and he walked over to the plug again and switched the whole lot off! 15 minutes later he got up and switched it all on, by this time I'd got him to go and get me three beers from his fridge out of the half dozen that I'd brought, he hadn't had any and I'd fucking had enough of waiting in silence to become another victim of a Yorkshire based serial killer so I thanked him for his hospitality and fucked off out on my own to watch the second half in Leeds high street.
As always when I got back the silly prick had locked the door from the inside (This would have been about 8pm) so I had to ring the bell, an actual metal bell for him to eventually come and turn the deadlock to let me in.
This was the end of the first week of me working up there and being plenty of places to stay I decided enough was enough and I'd check out first thing in the morning and find myself somewhere else to stop.
I appreciate I've gone the log way around doing this.
I was presented with a bill that included charges for electricity used whilst I was there (he heard me watch the tv in the morning getting ready for work) a charge for daily servicing of the room (What every hotel and b&b on the planet do as part of the charge) and a charge for, this is the gem. Night porterage for ringing the bell every night to get in after 6pm because he'd deadlocked the door and best of all. He charged me for the beers I'd bought because he'd put them in his fridge the cheeky fucker!
The night porterage charge was minute in case anyone cares. I told him not to be silly and that I wouldn't be paying all of that but paid for the room and breakfast.
He sent a small claims letter to my employers chasing a final payment of an unsettled bill from one of their finest for......
£3.53 and he'd itemized the lot! My boss at the time laughed his bollocks off and never let his counterpart in Yorkshire forget about it and how amazingly tight Yorkshiremen are. My boss told me to pay it and he'd give me 2 hours overtime gratis which I gladly accepted.
Phoned up to pay the old bastard by card.... Nope need to send a cheque!
He never did get his £3.53 and he sent some letters and I assume is still posting them to the address of the old yard which is now a housing estate and school
Whenever we would order food for a meeting his policy was always to only order it for half the amount of people attending the meeting eg if you have 10 people attending a meeting only order food for 5 people. The portions were never anything special either and were only sandwiches, crisps etc!
He once did an audit of all our car parking expenses we had claimed, again not his money but the company's but it still got to the point where all of us who had claimed car parking expenses had to produce the actual tickets long after we had claimed on them! Of course we didn't have them anymore and not even photocopies would suffice, he wanted the actual hard copies of the tickets from the machine! Of course HR had the tickets and most likely binned them eventually so eventually the head of department had to settle for a letter from the head of HR to confirm parking tickets had been physically received and aligned precisely to the amount ever claimed. I gave up driving to work at that point it just wasn't worth the hassle anymore to go through this again.
But potentially the one that really sticks out is when our team went to an internal awards evening to support another team of ours. For some reason or another the team we were there to support were given the award by mistake and all of us even only there to support them were given £100 gift vouchers each, we were all surprised but accepted them anyway. A few days later our head of department informs us of the mistake made, says another team should have won them and asked us to hand back our gift vouchers! Problem was some of us had already spent some if not all of them. Eventually he backed down and the company gave extra vouchers to the team that should have rightfully won them. But the fact we were asked to hand back our gift vouchers is the one and only time I've ever been asked to hand gift vouchers back!
Only thing I can add is a mate of mine that I used to play golf with & with whom I'd often stay away with at weekends playing golf. Usually we'd watch us play away somewhere, stay overnight in a B&B & play golf on the sunday before heading home. I lost count of the number of times we'd be trawling up & down streets at 9pm on a saturday night looking for the best deal going at the only places offering single rooms (we'd never share a twin room, mainly because of my snoring). £20 a night would be turned down if we could find one at £18......and then even £18 was turned down if he thought we could find one at £16. Once I stayed at a place in Southampton where it cost £15 & which the owner wanted cash upfront. I paid the owner £20 but he said he didn't have any change & that he would give me my fiver the next morning at breakfast. Morning came & I went down to breakfast to find the 2 other guests just finishing. They told me to help myself to cereal as the owner wasn't doing a cooked breakfast, had gone out & wasn't coming back. Didn't get my fiver back & cost me £20 for bed & cereal. One other time my (tightish) mate found a place charging £10. (after the Villa 4-3 game) on the basis that the bloke was still doing the place up & there was no breakfast (but there was a MacDonalds opposite). I'd happily pay £25-£30 (and often did) - making sure I got en-suite where my mate would be sharing the bathroom facilities with the other detritus staying there.
Currently under the cosh at work but have a couple of crackers regarding my detested brother-in-law who has to be the tightest bloke on the planet by a country mile.
One of them involves a lesbian encounter and lingerie, so stay tuned.
Chicken Shish £5.20
Chicken Shish + Chips £6.70
Chips £1.40
Also in some pizza restaurants you can play games with the toppings - for example if a Funghi pizza (just adds mushrooms) is 80p more than a Margarita but an extra mushroom topping is £1 then you can ask for a Funghi without the mushrooms and insist they charge you 20p less than the Margarita you actually wanted.
At 10.55 and two or three rounds later he would make his apologies and say that he had to go - without getting a round in. After a couple of months of doing this it was explained to him that this was not particularly good form.
We haven't seen him since.
This year's Christmas card arrived with a decidedly dodgy look. On closer inspection it was the red border, which he'd obviously retrieved from a red envelope. In recent years he has stopped sending birthday cards, I can only surmise that his (used) stamp supply is drying up.
One week later I got a letter saying I owed one pence as I paid in short. This was in an envelope with a first class stamp on it.
When I went to the W/E to pay in the penny they said they couldn’t adjust it themselves as it would amount to a loan.
He used to live in the Medway towns and one Saturday afternoon he phoned me, told me he was bored and asked me to meet him down his local for a pint.
I lived in Eltham at the time and when I looked at trains they were naused for some reason or another (see SE Trains thread for further info).
“No worries - just get a cab down” he says.
I begrudgingly get a cab down there which cost me about £40 at the time....and when I met him in the pub he says (without any hint of shame) - “I’m a bit skint - you couldn’t lend me a bullseye could you?”
My BIL is the tightest fucker on the planet bar none - cannot stand the big nosed prick.
To avoid confusion this bloke is my wife’s brother!
The only saving grace he had was his missus, she was a real girl next door type who had a real natural sexiness about her, although she was quite shy and a touch conservative, but never the less a very fine looking young lady indeed which REALLY FUCKING PISSED ME OFF.
They got together when they were both 17 whilst working at a fast food place and each was the only person the other had been with.
He was earning a fucking fortune as a programmer - earning well into six figures and had over $150,000 in the bank - but he did not spend any of it and lived in a shitty house in an area full of pensioners and the unemployable.
Anyway, they were celebrating their 10th Anniversary and he decides he is going to ask her to marry him. Lucky her.
How does he stage this proposal to his true love? How does he frame the moment in which he asks the girl who has devoted herself to him for the last 10 years?
Here’s how - it’s un-fucking believable.
Firstly, he goes to a local chain store called Lowes, the UK equivalent would be something like Primark, and buys himself a new lounge suit for $50 fucking dollars on sale.
Secondly, he goes to Coles (like Tesco) and buys ingredients for a fucking HOME MADE ROAST DINNER.
Thirdly, he goes to the cheapest fucking chain store jeweller on the planet called Michael Hill - think Ratners, but much, much worse - and buys, wait for it, an engagement ring on sale for $100.
Fourthly, on the way home he comes round my house and asks my missus if we’ve got any champagne “he can borrow” because he’s going to pop the question and doesn’t have any of his own. She gives him a bottle. FFS.
So, later that night his missus puts her key in the front door and much to her puzzlement finds the big nosed fucking gimp greeting her at the front door wearing his $50 lounge suit - INCLUDING A FUCKING TIE - and brandishing my fucking champagne like he’s Frank Sinatra.
He takes her to the table where he has the fucking home made roast dinner already served up - no wine to be seen, naturally - where she must have been wondering what the fuck was going on before he finally pops the question and she - probably just to get the whole thing over with - said yes.
So, there you go folks, she puts in 10 years loyal service and get a fucking home made roast dinner and a $100 engagement ring for her troubles, fucking hells bells as the great Graham Taylor would have said.
Next episode: The honeymoon from hell.
We picked one of the events to go all out at; VIP cabana by the pool, drinks package and table service all day/night. It wasn't even expensive, I think it came out at about $1200 between 6 of us and it was a substantial amount of booze included.
So the final bill is put in the whatsapp group and everyone is keen, but we get radio silence from one of the tag alongs. Later that eve, he sends across an excel spreadsheet to all of us with the prices from the bar menu and a detailed explanation about how we could get more units of alcohol per dollar if we just paid entry and bought our own booze.
Wrong type of tight fistedness anyway mate.
" Let me see I will have one hash brown, two sausages............." The manager intervened and said that is not the way it works in more colourful terms it has to be said.. Hence a bollocking for the poor member of staff.
After the first parade the girl went round with her pint glass, and everyone put their 50p (you can tell this is an old story!) in apart the bloke whose suggestion it was, who stood primly with his hands in his pockets. She said something to him and he come out with the legendary line “love, I’ve just popped in for a quiet drink after work. If you want to take you clothes off then that’s entirely up to you”.
That reminds me of one of our groups response at the pub in High Wycombe, beautiful girl wearing a cheese cutter of a thong came over with the pint glass and someone, I can't remember who exactly it was but they said something like "I'm staying this side of the post, not for me thanks babe"
"Yeah but you can still see me minge so it's a pound" hahahahaha
The guy I'm talking about isn't tight by any means at all he was just genuinely, innocently not taking part in the strippers and still got collared for a nugget