I’m 18F and living alone while attending college.
Two nights ago around 10 PM, I opened my front door to shoo a lizard out of my house and found a DoorDash Taco Bell order sitting outside.
At first I thought maybe someone dropped it off at the wrong place by accident, so I checked the receipt. It had someone’s name on it and showed the order had been delivered at 7:32 PM, meaning it had already been sitting there for over two hours.
My neighborhood has a community group chat, so I sent a message saying there was a Taco Bell order outside my place for that name.
Nobody replied.
A couple hours later I was going to bed and brought the food inside because I figured leaving it outside overnight would just make it go bad.
The next day I went to classes, came home in the evening, and realized the food was still there.
I checked the group chat again.
Still nothing.
At this point it had been well over 24 hours since the order was delivered.
I was hungry and honestly didn’t want to throw away untouched food. I grew up in a household where wasting food was treated like a huge deal (not saying that automatically makes this okay, just explaining my thought process). I checked that it seemed okay and ended up eating 2 items out of the 5.
The next morning I woke up to a bunch of notifications.
Turns out the woman whose name was on the order finally saw my message and said it was hers.
I apologized and told her I had eaten some of it because nobody responded for over a day.
She got really upset and started saying it’s rude to eat other people’s food and that teenagers have no respect.
I said I genuinely didn’t want to waste it and offered her the 3 untouched items that were left.
That somehow made her even angrier.
She said she would never take food from a stranger, called me gross, insulted my parents for not raising me properly, and even made a lowkey racist comment.
Now she wants me to send her the full $40 back.
I told her I didn’t think that was fair considering she didn’t claim it for over 24 hours and never responded in the group chat.
She said I made up some random “24-hour rule” and called me a b-tch.
My dad is furious and told me to block her. He even wants to come over this weekend and tell her to stop contacting me.
I don’t want to seem dramatic or like I need my dad stepping in… but I also don’t really want to pay $40 as a broke college student over food that sat outside my door for a full day.
So… AITA? And what would you have done?