MVWR is Moving Out

We have some irreconcilable differences. We simply haven’t had the time to properly dedicate to MVWR for the last year, so we are giving notice and moving on out. Even with the help of our wonderful Admins we just don’t have the time and energy that it takes to run this blog. However, we are leaving the site up for now, so that people can still enjoy the stories or check out the funny and disturbing Best Of section. Our sincere thanks for reading and here’s hoping to better living situations for all!

Jessica & Victoria

The Sex Pest

 MVWR wasn’t actually my roommate but we lived in the same hall and she was around enough to annoy me and everyone else in the building. She asked multiple times to move to the room next to mine - which was connected by a bathroom – luckily she wasn’t allowed to! Anyway, Lets call her CR. She was a international student from Russia. I met her when my roommate and I borrowed some milk from her and we thought she was pretty nice so we all started hanging out together. We soon realized that CR wasn’t the nice girl we thought she was, however, and she ended up being an attention seeking, braggy, creeper!

CR was pretty boy/girl crazy and would have sex with anyone who gave her the OK. Every time I talked to her there was a different guy and she even tried flirting with my boyfriend… while I was holding hands with him! Another girl had also told me that she felt very uncomfortable around CR as she had tried to convince the girl to shower with her. As this seemed nothing more than a rumor, I didn’t really worry about what I had been told. This changed the day my roommate and I went to dinner with her and I found her trying to play footsie with me, while leaning her head on my shoulder, however! I tried to ignore this but the expression on my face was probably one of sheer terror. I don’t have anything against same sex relationships, but this wasn’t something I was personally comfortable with. Things got worse and she would sometimes make sexual remarks to me and my roommate and she even once tried to pet my roommate while she was sleeping! We started to avoid her after this but one day she asked if we could talk so I agreed. I found her in the hall where she started crying, explaining to me that she wasn’t interested in women. I felt bad for thinking that she had been trying to hit on me until months later she admitted that she did like girls and that she had had sex with her best girl friend in Russia.

CR constantly bragged about her high end make up, fancy purses, and designer clothes. She doesn’t have a job but mooches off people whenever possible and her parents give her a monthly allowance of about $300. She sometimes dresses up as her favorite singers/book characters and takes pictures of her outfits then brags about them on Facebook. She also brags all the time about the guys she’s hooked up with. One night that I was out for dinner with her she told me all about how she had lost her virginity to a boy she had met 4 hours prior. She spoke loudly and in detail, completely disregarding the family with young kids sitting two feet away from us.

CR constantly made me take her places because I drove and she didn’t. Even if I said no she would come by every day and continue to ask me! When in my car, she would put her feet on the dashboard and change my radio stations and even had the nerve to complain about my driving. She once left her laptop in my room and since my roommate and I both had our keys I gave her mine so she could retreive it. We went back to the room 45 minutes later to find her sitting on my bed Skyping with her mother!

I finally decided that my friendship with CR wasn’t worth it when I visited her in the dorms (where she had decided to stay for summer courses while I moved home for the holidays) this summer.  At first it was pretty good, we went to the movies with some friends and had a nice dinner but things went downhill when we went back to CR’s dorm. She was a big drinker and drug user and though she would often tell me that she had decided to quit this only lasted until someone gave her some for free. That night she asked me to split what was apparently a pot cookie with her. I agreed as I had tried pot a few times and didn’t have any problems with it. I don’t know what was in that cookie but it made me feel very sick and panicked. I blacked out several times and couldn’t find my sense of reality. I told her I was really scared and felt really sick and she told me that I was fine and not to worry about it. I tried to calm down but after blacking out several more times I decided to go to some friends for help. After violently puking up all the contents of my stomach I felt better but still refused to go back to her room. The next day I still felt sick and told her that I just wanted to lay down until I felt better enough to go home. She convinced me that going to the movies would make me feel better but instead I ended up driving her to the mall so she could spend hours window shopping! I decided I didn’t want anything to do with her after this. I recently found out that she  had started dating a boy she met on the plane over from Russia. He lives 8 hours away and she hopes to move in with him next semester, living there and eating his food for free of course!

Nazi Landlady

I had just moved to a new town and didn’t have a lot of money so I decided to rent a room. The place I chose was a room in a four bedroom house owned by a middle-aged single mother of two. I’d had roommate problems before so I made sure to discuss a few of the most common issues with her before moving in – things like cleaning, the etiquette of using each others food or other property etc. She seemed like a sensible lady with well-behaved children so in I moved.

The second morning after I moved in was when the problems started. She very angrily informed me that I had been very loud the night before and that if that continued she would throw me out. Confused, I said that I had done nothing the night before but go on the internet, talk to a friend on the phone, and then go to sleep. Apparently, she had problems with migraines and insomnia and needed total silence between the hours of 9 PM and 7 AM. I told her I understood and would try harder to keep my volume down.

The next night I went out to dinner and a movie with some friends and came home around midnight to a door that wouldn’t open. She had deadbolted it from the inside so I couldn’t get the door open with my keys. Figuring that she had just forgotten about her new roommate, I banged on the door until she came to open it. I was immediately yelled at for coming home so late and she asked me what it was that I didn’t understand about her need for total silence. She explained that the sound of the door opening and closing was too loud and that she would be deadbolting the door at 9 PM from then on. If I wasn’t inside by then and woke her up to let me in, she would kick me out. I effectively had a 9 PM curfew at the age of 22!

Two days later I was yet again angrily yelled at in the morning. Apparently, I had kept her from falling asleep again. The culprit? The sound of me getting a glass of water and flushing the toilet at around 10:30 PM. Yes, even flushing the toilet was too loud. She recommended that I change my eating and drinking schedule to avoid needing to use the toilet past 9 PM and that, in fact, it was best if I was in bed with the lights off by that time to avoid any unnecessary movement.

She also managed to make my life hell during the day. She had an obsessively strict cleaning regiment that she expected the entire household to take part in – including me. I love having a clean house, but this lady would demand that I do the list of assigned chores on the exact day they were listed or she’d kick me out. Of course they also had to be finished before curfew fell. On top of that, if the chores weren’t done to her satisfaction she’d make me do them again. For example, one time I was mopping the kitchen and hardwood floors while she was sitting in the living room half-watching me. When I had finished she yelled at me to start over from the beginning because I had not put enough cleaning agent in the bucket of water,thus making the cleaning not good enough. Apparently she waited to tell me this at the end of the task so that I would “learn my lesson”.

On top of the curfew and the excessive cleaning requirements, she was just about the rudest person I’d ever met. Apparently she had never heard the phrase “if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. She had criticisms about my choice of food, clothes, job – everything! And of course, she had no problems with yelling at me and threatening to throw me out every week.

Looking back, it was pretty obvious why her house was so clean when I first visited, and her kids so well-behaved. Unfortunately for her, I was not one of her children and could not stand the rules and the yelling, so I moved out within a couple of months. After that I gladly took roommates that were a bit messy over the fear of living under similar tyranny ever again.

Image by Quentin Blake

Food Fighters

This is a story about my eight months in hell.

I decided to move into an apartment with my long time friend and co-worker. She said she didn’t have money for the first month’s rent but that she would pay me back on pay day. This went on for six months. I couldn’t kick her out because I had to work with her so I had to deal. She told me I was not allowed to tell anyone about her not paying rent; I didn’t want to start fights so I didn’t say anything.

My things went missing on a regular basis and as I didn’t have friends over very often I knew it wasn’t them. My food was one of the main things to go missing because it was constant – I would go to eat something and my food would be gone. When I asked her about it she said she offered it to “friends” of hers or “dropped” it. So one day I got angry and put signs all around the kitchen in capital letters “DO NOT TOUCH MY FOOD” and labeled everything. She broke and threw out some of my kitchen items, including my mixer and measuring cups and spoons.

Another thing that went missing was my work float (cash for giving change). The worst time was while her brother was staying with us (She had simply come home one day and told me that he would be coming to stay with us the next day. She did not ask me. He also did not pay rent and ate my food). I was out of town and left my float and my apron in one of the drawers in the living room, when I came back bothwere missing. I black out raged on them – when I came down from the rage I realized that her brother was crying and I had the broken drawer in my hand (it broke from me shaking it at them with things still in it). I screamed at them to get out but she refused and said I had no right. She  also had the audacity to claim it was ghosts, I should have called the cops then. She also stole food from work on a regular basis. On more than one occasion she texted me asking me to help her carry home some of the food because she had so much of it – I would tell her I was busy.

I once came home after a night of drinking and had obviously had too much but I went straight to my room. When I got up the next morning I was very hung over and got sick a few times – she came into my room and threw food at me!  When I was finally feeling well enough to leave my room she turned up the volume on the TV and was talking very loud and making fun of me for not feeling well. I don’t drink very often and she would get mad at me for making any noise when she was hung over.

She would also move  furniture around all the time, I would find the whole apartment rearranged on a regular basis. All of the furniture was mine and she would not ask me if it was okay, she just did it.

She threw a really big fit when I said her younger sister could spend the night with us because she had been behaving a little better than normal (she was a problem child). My roommate came down to the park where her sister and I were (we didn’t want to go back to my place because of her) and started yelling at us saying that her sister was not allowed to stay. I yelled back that I paid the rent and bills so she could suck it. I was on the phone with her sister’s care taker (who also worked with us) at the time and she heard all of this and told our boss. That was when I stopped hiding my roommate’s secret and told everyone that she never paid rent.

One day I was out at my grandparents house, which wasn’t far from my place, when I got a text that I had been tagged in something on Facebook. It was a picture of my toilet covered in my – very expensive –  coloured duct tape. I came home to find out that while trying to fix the toilet she had dropped the back of it and broke a hole in the toilet. She didn’t understand why I was so angry at her, she thought it was funny. She also neglected to take my things off the back of the toilet before moving it so my makeup ended up in the bowl and she refused to clean it up saying she would do it when they dried off. I ended up cleaning it up.

She would often have friends over without asking me and would invite people to spend the night and not tell me until I found them on the couch the next morning. She would feed them my food and act offended when I told her not to give away my things. She took all of the movies into her room, including mine, then she would tell people to borrow them.

She was a total TV hog. I had to wait until she was asleep or at work to use my TV and Xbox. She took over the living room and complained when I had a little mess in the one corner. I also had a computer in the living room that I didn’t mind her using but she took over that as well. When I moved the computer into my room, changed the password to the wifi I paid for, and moved my xbox back into my room she threw a fit and said she was going to move out. She didn’t and I ended up moving my stuff back because my room was too small to have everything in there.

On top of all of this nonsense she whined at me because I refused to clean up after her. She would post on Facebook and complain to my co-workers about me not cleaning. She also never cleaned out her cat’s litter box, she would just move it around and the cat would kick litter all over the floor. One time she had it in the bathroom and the cat kicked litter, clumped urine and faeces onto the floor where she left it for 4 days before I finally got sick of waiting for her to clean it up. I left a note on her door how I was not responsible for cleaning up after her.

When it finally came out that she refused to pay rent she tried to play the victim and say she was in a lot of debt (not my problem.)

After 6 months of this I went to the landlord and my roommate was forced to pay the full rent. She only ended up paying half a month’s rent before finally getting a ten day eviction notice because her cheques didn’t clear. She had quit her job and had no money. She said she was going to try and give the landlord two more post-dated cheques but I stood up and told her to get the hell out of my apartment. During her last ten days I let out all of the anger that had built up – one day I yelled for so long that the cops were called and they told her it would be best to spend the night at a friend’s place.

This was not the end of it – while cleaning out her mess of a room I found a key for one of my jewellery boxes, a box of crackers of mine that she “never saw” and a few other small things of mine as well. I went to go use my tooth brush but it tasted like hairspray and my saltwater for cleaning piercings had been replaced with rubbing alcohol.

There was a funny smell in my kitchen, I cleaned it a few times and could not find the source, until I pulled out the fridge. There was rotten raw chicken breast that was about 3 weeks old. While I was cleaning it up I puked twice from the smell and I have never had a weak stomach.

She also left a bunch of things in my apartment for over a month after she had moved out. Then after she finally got all of her things out she found out I told my boss that she had been stealing from work so she threw another temper tantrum and started trying to spread rumours about me. Her friends (who hardly knew her) attacked me on Facebook saying I was the one who had been horrible and that she was the victim. I have decided to move out of town and start fresh in another city, no one believes the rumours but hearing about them and about her has gotten to me.

There may have been a few stories that I forgot about but I’m glad this is over.

Communication Failure

My very worst (and current) roommate is a co-worker. We both worked in retail; for me, it was a survival job to support grad school and for him, it was his sole job after getting sacked from an $80K/year finance position. He was professional and we got along great…until we became roommates.

Within two weeks of living together, he admitted that he’s extremely insecure. He’s despondent that at 31, he has no wife, kids, savings, or decent job. Ageing terrifies him, so he compensates by getting drunk every weekend with much younger co-workers and dating language students who barely speak English.

Meanwhile, he’s insanely jealous of me for accomplishing more in my life than his in terms of education, work, finance, looks, travel, confidence and the ability to maintain friendships with sober, mature people.

So, he takes his insecurities out on me. When I’m studying or writing papers, he turns up his rap music or chats loudly on the phone. He uses as many utensils and dishes as possible to cook his ‘Hungry Mans’ and won’t wash anything because he knows that time I have to spend washing takes away from my study time. All this juvenile stuff yet he can’t be bothered to work on his career rut or anything else, but he whines about it all day.

After four weeks I told him that his lease, which is until the end of the month, will not be renewed and that I want him gone ASAP. He now sends me 10-15 texts per day with vile insults and tells co-workers that I’m bossy, mean and controlling. It has got so bad that I have wound up quitting my job and have threatened to sue him for defamation. I’m almost done with school, however, and have job interviews lined up (which ticks him off). We now communicate solely via text.

Just 60 days to go until he’s gone!