From time to time, advice columnists get trolled. Trolls just gotta troll in this day and age. Dear Abby was trolled not too long ago by someone about “twerking.” Miss Lonelyhearts gave advice to someone who wrote to her about a problem straight out of “Breaking Bad.” And now advice columnist Amy Dickinson (Ask Amy) has given advice to someone who detailed a situation that was the premise of the two-part “Seinfeld” episode, “The Boyfriend” that featured baseball great Keith Hernandez.
Here is the letter:
Dear Amy: I recently ran into a famous local sports figure at my gym.
I didn’t want to bother him but much to my surprise he approached me. Turns out he knew me from my profession. He asked if I wanted to go out for coffee and we exchanged numbers. A few days later we had coffee and I thought it was pretty cool that he considered us friends.
Then everything changed. He told me he was interested in taking out a woman we ran into. She is my ex-girlfriend and we’ve remained good friends. He asked me a couple of times if I wouldn’t mind if he asked her out. I reluctantly said no. I made plans with him, and then after talking to my ex I found out that he ditched our plans to go out with her.
The next day he called me and asked if I could help him move some furniture. I barely know the guy, next thing he will be asking me to drive him to the airport. Two friends of mine warned me not to trust this guy. What’s the deal — am I being too rash or should I dump the guy as a friend?
— Feeling Foolish
Dear Foolish: The good news here is that you won’t have to dump the guy as a friend because he is not a friend. He’s an opportunist who just keeps asking you for stuff. I suspect that when you turn down his generous offer to let you move furniture for him, you’ll likely never hear from him again.
As you can see, the letter writer pretty much had Amy offer advice regarding a situation that happened on”Seinfeld” 20 years ago.
The letter even gets to the line about driving the “friend” to the airport (my personal favorite moment). Dickinson is not one without a sense of humor and responded to the joke via her blog, saying “I can’t believe I missed this one, because I have absorbed enough Seinfeld episodes to power a parallel universe of columns based only on Seinfeld plotlines.” It could have been worse, it could have been a question about the time Kramer turned his apartment into the set of “The Merv Griffin Show.”
The JOE-DOWN 