An Unenlightened Experience

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.