After being someone else’s Very Worst Roommate (by not paying the utilities when I was supposed to, and her boyfriend hating me), my very best roommate and good friend moved out. I could afford the rent and utilities (now turned on again) on my own and lived alone for a while.
Then, I learnt that a guy I knew in the neighborhood was losing his place because his roommates were leaving for a different state. Since I had the extra room, I told him we could give the roommate thing a shot. He arrived on the first night with a duffel bag containing all his belongings and a jug of cheap wine.
He planned to sleep on the couch until he could move his bed. That first night, after I went to sleep, he apparently drank half the jug of wine, and apparently peed it all out onto my couch.The next morning, he was gone without a word, leaving his half jug of wine behind. He called a few days later to make plans to come back. I told him it wasn’t going to work out and not to bother coming back. He never mentioned the couch or his jug of wine, which I gave to my next roommate as a welcome gift.
I went to a small private Bible college and we were given two room apartments instead of the usual dorms. With “all that room” as the teachers put it, came five other roommates besides myself. Six females under 20 so you knew it was going to be an interesting year. I was the first to arrive and then my parents and I went out to see the city. As they only had one day in town before going home, I stayed at their hotel the one night. I did leave a little note on my bed, giving my name and contact info should some unforeseen emergency come up with my room. Arriving back at the apartment the next morning, I walked in to find what I can only describe as “Doily Hell.” I opened the door and was greeted by a five foot tall poster of two little kids dressed as adults kissing. You know the kind. Not my thing, but okay. The fact that it was so HUGE, and right in the living room, is what threw me. Then I looked around. More photos of cute little kids and bunnies and kitties and doilies. Doilies everywhere. On the table, under the dozens of scented candles that were all lit at the same time, on the kitchen counter, under the phone and on the arms of the couch. It was a look that even my 86 year old grandmother had never chosen. It smelled like a gas station bathroom. It was a serious fire hazard.
I walked into “my” room, and looked at my bed. My things were not on it. There were doilies and pink kitties and bunnies. My things were balled in the bottom of the closet, my dresser drawers emptied and taken up completely by this doily queen. She had covered every square inch of the dresser with doilies, heart shaped frames with pictures of little kids dressed like adults and pictures of what I had to assume was her boyfriend. Large bowls of dry potpurri were on every flat surface. I couldn’t imagine who was going to walk through the door. Either a 90 year old college going granny or the strangest 18 year old girl I could imagine.
She was the thinnest woman I’d ever seen, was 18, from Colorado and was going here because it was “totally” where she was supposed to be. Oh, and her boyfriend was going here. Oh, and she used to do drugs, but he “saved” her from that. Oh, and prostitution too. But then he went to college last semester and yeah, she may have not eaten at all while he was gone, but she didn’t have an eating disorder. She just didn’t eat when he wasn’t around. Or if she didn’t speak to him in a few hours, or if he went out with friends or if she called and he didn’t answer. And he was coming over right away, because they hadn’t seen each other in like…three hours, and she was going to ask the RA’s if they could make an exception and let him sleep there for a few nights till she got settled in, and we understood, right?
Several years ago a close friend of mine and her husband split up after moving to his home state. She called crying and asked my husband and I if she could stay with us for a couple of weeks until her brother could make room for her in his home. The first few days were fine: she helped clean the house, cooked dinner a few times, etc. Then she ran into a old high school boyfriend and was gone a lot. Not a problem since it gave us some privacy back. But then she was now just coming back just to take a shower and dump dirty laundry in the bathroom before jetting off again. Then food started dissapearing along with my clothes and makeup (which I later found in her bags).
The straw that broke the camels back was one day when my husband and I left early to spend the day with family. When we got home late that night our new roommate was long gone, but left on our stovetop a giantic pot of spagetti noodles and sauce, which was enough to feed at least 15 people. She cooked and cut up five top sirloin steaks and threw them in the spaghetti and left the pot sitting on the stove. Mind you this was on a hot summer day and the stench of the rotting food was gagging us. When she returned the next afternoon we confronted her. The excuse was that she cooked it that morning after we left so we would have dinner waiting for us when we got home. She knew full well we were going to be eating dinner with family that night and even if she had forgotten, why would you leave it on the stove and not in the refridgerator? Why did she cook every spagetti noodle in the house for just two people and what in God’s green earth posessed her to cook five steaks and put in it?
I just recently broke up with my boyfriend and for some reason I thought living with a guy roommate would be fun and drama free. Everything was great for the first six months, despite the fact that most of the apartment aside from my bedroom, was decorated with Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia. I liked his friends, we enjoyed going to bars together and he seemed like a great roommate, that is until he met my best friend. I didn’t have a problem with them dating and I knew he was really smitten with her. She did eventually break up with him after a few weeks and that is when things went sour. He started working out a lot (but only for a week) and behaved like a big baby. He pretty much stopped speaking to me altogether. A few months later he told me he was going to move out so we switched the lease over to my name and things seemed to be going smoothly. That is until I came home to find his key under the mat and most of his stinky dog furniture in my apartment. My boyfriend had to come over and literally take apart the couch with a buzz saw so that we could throw it in the dumpster. He left me with a bunch of bills to pay too. Ironically, the girl that moved in to replace him was awesome and completely drama free.
I was doing a three-week summer program at a college. When I arrived, my roommate’s stuff was already there. Her purse looked fashionable, so I was afraid that she was going to be some cool blonde girl who’d think I was lame. Thus when she lurched in and was stumpy, brunette and odd, I was more relieved than anything. The next day I began noticing things. Every time she entered the room, she would throw herself onto her bed and lie whispering and giggling to herself or her iPhone for the next 15 minutes. The random fits of tears and constant mouth noises didn’t help. Squish, squish, squish. I think she was playing with her retainer. Then one day she couldn’t find her towel.
“I don’t know where to find your towel. Good luck! I’m going to the library,” I said.
She let out a blood-curdling shriek of anger, just two feet behind me. Talking to our RA about it later, my roommate said that there was a precisely 1.5% chance that she had some sort of mental disease. Needless to say, I pretty much then lived at the library.
My Very Worst flatmate experience was in Dublin. It was myself, two other men and a woman. The woman was a peculiar character and I had been pre-warned before I moved in. Little did I know that MVWR was all types of crazy. Another male and me moved in at the same time. Let’s call him John. My experience with MVWR was tempered. His experience, however, was quite the opposite.
It all began when John brought his girlfriend home. The house rule on partners was three nights per week. Whilst the guys in the house were fairly relaxed about this rule, MVWR was not. Initially, John’s partner did not stay that often but after a couple of months there were a few instances where she stayed for four nights in a week. This would be followed by weeks of absence so I was not perturbed, nor was the other male roommate. Then one Saturday morning, I awoke to screaming, intense sobbing and angry snarls. John had a few friends around the night before and had left a modest mess of a 6-pack and some BBQ in the yard. MVWR ranted about John breaking the rules and then stormed off to an email full of exaggerated accusations to our landlord.
This was only the beginning. Later in that week, MVWR came to discuss the issues she had with John in the kitchen. It seemed that her main gripe was with John’s partner staying over too often. This was evident when she produced an analysis of John’s partner’s movements – detailed down to the time John’s partner came and left the house and whether or not she used the shower or any other facilities whilst she was there.
This was when it became clear how many types of crazy MVWR was. You see MVWR was religious. She believed in a form of Buddhism that I think she had misinterpreted. She believed she could pray for things to happen in her life or for material things. We would often wake to her chanting things to a statue of Buddha in the morning. She would sometimes chant for up to three hours a day. So MVWR proceeded to tell me how John’s behaviour was a result of negative karma from her past life and the only way she could solve the problem was to chant.
The next three months were hell. MVWR began to chant in order to deal with the issue of John living in the house. We knew this because we could hear her chanting from her room “John leave the house, John leave the house” ad nauseum. MVWR did not speak a word to John and if they were in the kitchen at the same time, you could have carved the ice into statues of Buddha. At first, John stood his ground but after about three months of this, he couldn’t take it and left.
This had the unfortunate effect of only reinforcing MVWR’s belief that she could chant in order for things to happen. I left a few months after. Luckily, the only chanting that came my way was for leaving my breakfast dishes in the sink and not washing them before I went to work for the day.
My Very Worst Roommate was D. She seemed fine to begin with, even if she was a little old to be living on the university residence. My first impression was so very wrong. There were multiple times I came home after class and she’d be sitting on the couch with nothing but a white sheet covering her. I tried to stay away from the couch from then on. She had very poor personal hygiene. She only had two sets of clothes (which she washed in a bucket) and had a habit of leaving dirty sanitary pads around the bathroom.
If this wasn’t enough, she’d steal food and completely deny it. Then the foodstuff would magically turn up later with half of it missing. Later on, two new girls moved in with us and they had trouble getting along with her. D would say we were all unclean and complained to the reception about us stealing food and being dirty! I had to tell her to open her windows because every time I’d walk past her room, a waft of the foulest smell came from her room. I eventually couldn’t handle her anymore and moved to a different apartment on campus.
I later found out the other two girls followed my lead and moved out too. D was there all by herself. She succeeded in driving everyone away with her nasty smell and bad manners. I also heard that she was arrested for drug dealing, which made me glad I got out of there when I did. The weirdest thing about her, however, was that she was living on university campus, but wasn’t actually enrolled in any courses.
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In my second year of university, I moved into a stereotypical student house: 8 occupants (6 guys, 1 girl other than me), all of whom were stoners and seemed to despise cleaning up after themselves. Although this house was full of that special breed of stories that are only funny after you’ve long moved out, one in particular takes the cake.
I was in my room going to bed one night when I heard girls giggling and running around the house. This was not at all unusual in our house, so I went to sleep. At about 2 a.m., I heard someone pounding on the front door. When I went to answer, I saw two police officers.
“Where is she?” one officer yelled. When I said I didn’t know what they were talking about, they told me not to play games and tell them the truth. I said, “I was just asleep and I don’t know what’s going on, but I did hear some girls come in earlier and go downstairs.” While one officer went downstairs, the other stood upstairs questioning me, asking how old I was, who the girls were with, how old he was. When I told the officer my roommate was 21 or 22. To she she responded: “These girls are 15 years old!”
It turns out my roommate met these drunk girls at a bus stop and invited them over to our house. One of them drunk-dialed her parents. I’m not entirely clear on what happened next, but somehow her parents got our address and called the police.
The worst part? After the police and the minors left, I said to my roommate, “Perhaps the lesson here is not to bring home random 15-year-old girls we meet at the bus stop.” His response was to laugh it off.
My boyfriend (at the time) and I moved in with his friends, another couple, to save on rent but I ended up losing my sanity.
I think it was the aroma of the place I remember best. The dishes, which never got done unless I did them, were covered in fruit flies and dried food. When the other female roommate did break down and do them, she refused to wash the bottom of the plates, saying, “Food doesn’t touch there.” I know, I didn’t get it then either and I still don’t get it now.
The best part though was that she had two cats that crapped everywhere. One couch was literally drenched in urine. They went through countless bottles of Febreeze, which to the product’s credit, cannot possibly counter the smell of hell and death combined. It was nauseating. The space under the kitchen table was also a favored spot for the cats to relieve themselves. Puddles of urine would dry and stain the floor dark yellow.
One night, I returned from an exhausting 12-hour work shift to the three of them smoking pot, playing video games, and hanging out in urine. Oblivious to the scent. At that moment, I saw Clarity personified and she was sitting in cat piss. I silently packed my things and left the apartment and my boyfriend. So I guess this story is a combo tale of My Very Worst Roommate(s) and ‘My Great Silent Breakup.’
