'AITA for telling my friend it’s her own fault that we all hung out without her?'

"AITA for telling my friend it’s her own fault that we all hung out without her?"

I’m part of a friend group of six women who’ve known each other for a long time. We’ve had our ups and downs but we’ve made it. Now that we’re older with jobs and relationships it’s can be harder to find time to hang out especially with our different schedules.

But one friend Sapphire in particular is making it even harder because she always has her notifications silenced. I’m being serious she truly has them silenced all the time. She says that she silences them so she can sleep then forgets to turn them on in the morning.

She’s left her notifications silenced for days at a time before. This has been going on for years and has caused her to either miss hang outs or for us to delay hang outs because no one can reach her. Ex: recently we all wanted to go see a movie that was released recently. It took a bit but we eventually found a day and time that worked for all of us or most of us actually.

This was all planned in a group chat that me, Sapphire, and our four other friends are part of. Sapphire never responded once and when I looked at our individual texts it’s because notifications were silenced again. We all tried calling her instead but it seems she’s silenced calls too.

We didn’t want to skip seeing the movie because we all were going to be busy during the holidays and didn’t know when we’d be able to meet up next. So we bought tickets and went ahead and saw the movie. This was all planned on a Monday then we saw the movie on Friday so several days happened between these.

Well the day after the movie Sapphire unsilenced her phone and was really upset we still went ahead and saw it without her. She says we should have waited or tried harder to get ahold of her instead of leaving her out.

Sapphire and I met for lunch and she again brought up the movie and us going without her. She was complaining we still saw it without her and we should have waited for her. I brought up all five of us tried to call her and text her, but her notifications were silenced.

She said we could have tried harder or gone to her apartment and talked to her directly. Eventually I got fed up and snapped “Sapphire this is your own damn fault. You’re the one who always has her phone silenced and is unreachable. We’ve done this song and dance multiple times.

Stop blaming the rest of us for not putting off plans just because you can’t remember to turn your notifications back on!” She got upset with me and left quickly. She hasn’t spoken to me since and I haven’t really reached out either.

Three of our friends are on my side and agree it’s her own fault that she keeps missing stuff and she should have learned by now to turn her notifications back on. But one is saying I could have been nicer when I explained what happened and that it didn’t have to kick her when she was already down. So AITA?

Here's what people had to say to OP:

SimilarBid2840 said:

NTA. She was looped in. She has nothing to complain about because she didn't read or respond. It's also a bit dramatic for anyone to be this upset over a movie.

carmelfan said:

NTA. Sapphire's an idiot. She doesn't have to even turn her notifications/ringer back on -- all she has to do is check them once in a while. That's what I do, and I haven't missed anything yet because of having my phone silenced.

Caspian4136 said:

NTA. It's her own damn fault, you guys should have called her out on this a long time ago. Also, you can set up to silence your phone at X hour to X hour. Not sure why she's doing it manually at this point. Most of us have our phone on silent overnight so we're not woken by notifications.

Nik-ki said:

NTA Is her phone on silent or is she turning all notifications off? I have my phone on silent or quiet vibration 99% of the time, but I still use my phone during the day and can see if someone was calling or texting me.

MentionGood1633 said:

She can silence all she wants, but why doesn’t she check her messages at her convenience, let’s say once a day? This is ridiculous, if it’s not fake altogether. Maybe she ignores it because she doesn’t want to be part of this group?? NTA.

Crafter_2307 said:

NTA. If it was truly that she wanted sleep, she could schedule her “Do Not Disturb” times. Clearly she’s even disabled the function where calls come through if people ring twice in a row. At this stage, she’s just wanting to make everyone dance to her tune.

After reading the comments, OP updated the post to include:

NOTE: Because several people have asked: Sapphire is not working at the moment. At her previous job she worked in an office with a set schedule and she never had any tasks that took her out of office. She would say because of that she didn’t need to be reachable by phone because her coworkers could just find her in the office if they needed her.

After a lot of comments and my friend Emerald saying it repeatedly, it’s clear I was in denial and just didn’t want to accept that Sapphire was just ignoring us to try and get us to chase after her. Because I’ve asked her about scheduled DND and she doesn’t give me a clear answer.

Also, I didn’t think to include this but I used fake names. My friends aren’t actually named Sapphire, Emerald, and Ruby. My friend group do have names that clearly would have a theme if we were a sibling group (think nature or mythology). It’s actually how we met. At college freshman orientation an organizer put us in small group together because he noticed our names matched.