Pragmatic Friendship

In the past, I used to have very good impressions of my buddies, believing that I could always rely on them whenever I needed help. My experiences however have convinced me that those were just wishful thinking on my part.

Here's the first one: While working as a research officer about 2 years ago, I thought of switching to another job to widen my exposure. I told a good friend of my intention during a weekly dinner and he mentioned that his company was looking for people. He asked me to pass my CV to him and promised to forward it to the HR department. A month pass and when I enquired about it, he said that due to a policy change, the company was no longer interested in hiring people with my background. I trusted and thanked him for trying to help anyway.

Approximately 2 months ago, I discovered something unpleasant during another weekly dinner with him. Then, our conversation was about his ex-housemates. According to him, they had asked him if his company needed people. He said that although not keen to help, he tried to show his kindness and suggested that they passed him their CVs. He however did not pass their CVs to the HR department as he was afraid that if they managed to get employment offer, they would be a threat to him. Naturally, that kind of tell me what he did with my CV 2 years ago.

The second one happened more recently than the first one. Another good friend had asked me if I was interested to join his company and promised to get back to me only to conveniently and selectively forget that such an episode had occurred.

Having shared these 2 experiences with all of you, let me just say that it is not my intention to stop you from making friends because we are after all gregarious creatures and life will be more colourful if we have wide social circles. The objective of this post is to tell you that in this pragmatic world, true friends are extremely rare and therefore, let's not hope for too much from our friends (even those we classify as best of friends), especially if they deem those requests as threats. Usually, money (wealth) is one of the main reasons. In my case, it is employment.