Am not sure exactly how badly I freaked out my friend

Post Reply New Topic

Have been puzzled all day about whether or not I really upset my friend.

My very good friend is very ASish.. He is a packrat, but of the sort that usually notices when anything is out of place. He lives in a tiny cluttered apartment that is so full of stuff that it is sorta like a burrow.
On his bathroom sink, he has many empty tubes of the exact same kind of (fancy health food store)toothpaste stacked one on top of the other, as if in the whole time he has lived there, he has not bothered to throw any of them away...but all of them were empty...I find it to be sorta charming, actually...
Anyhow, I played what I thought to be a semi harmless prank on him by getting a new tube of the same stuff and adding it to the pile. I am not exactly sure why I did it, but I like doing nice things for him and getting him gifts and whatnot because I like him...and my motive was related to that...but the thing is, I didn't tell him that I did it, and it took him over a week to notice it (he happened to notice it on Christmas morning), and when he finally did notice it, he sorta freaked out...
And I feel bad, because I didn't mean to scare him..if in fact, I did..but I can't tell whether he was joking or literally upset by mysteriously finding a new tube of toothpaste, which had actually been in plain sight on his sink for over a week.

So I guess I am seeking insight.. How would you feel if it happened to you? I was just trying to be sorta thoughtful and silly at the same time..i meant no ill intent by it.
Hopefully he was just joking and playing up his reaction... ...hopefully...

seeing as he is a pack rat he was probably deeply disturbed by it i think hording has and ocd quality or is part of ocd so if it interrupted his order of things he probably really did freak out but if he isn't completely delusional about it as some might say and still cares about what people think he'll probably just play it off as a joke later it all depends how bad off his disorder is i hope it doesn't effect your friendship at all and i don't mean to worry you its just my simple hardly informed analysis

I find these kind of jokes hard to understand too. The reason is that i would think that is a way to make me notice a particular weirdness or to laugh about it with others. just make sure he understands that you laugh WITH him, and not AT him. When my friends do something like that, i put all my efforts to find elements that tell me they're not laughing at me, but with me. i learnt also to reply with similar jokes, to "study their reactions" and replicate them when i need to.

I certainly didn't do it in order to laugh at him...Or even to point out a weirdness.
I am a packrat too..I have empty containers of things that I use all the time lying all over my houe, but if somebody sneakily replaced one of them with a fresh one, I think I would be pleasantly suprised..and that was my mentality when I did that to him..I just feel bad that he had such a strong reaction, because that was not my intent.

He's ok...He still brings it up in conversation ..today he said he was still recovering(possibly joke with hint of truth)...but he's fine..he's not mad at me...