Multiple Dorm Worsts

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During my freshman year of college, I was placed in a double with a random roommate, A. We started emailing each other before school started, and at first it seemed like a good match. We had similar taste in music and we generally agreed about what we would and would not have in the room. She was a little bit of an oversharer, telling me all about her experience skinny-dipping on a hiking trip with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend (“you feel so free in nature!”) but I was willing to overlook that.

When we met at the beginning of the school year, she wouldn’t speak more than one or two sentences. She was perfectly nice and polite and sociable with other people, but I was lucky if I could get more than two words from her. An above average conversation would go as follows:‬

Me: So, how’s it going?‬

‪A: *shrugs*‬

‪Me: Do you like your classes?‬

‪A: *nods*‬

‪Me: What are you taking this semester?‬

‪A: Some philosophy classes‬

‪Me: That sounds like fun. Are they interesting?‬

‪A: *shrugs and turns to face away from me*

I’m a quiet person myself, but this was ridiculous! I spent over a semester living in a room with a girl who would barely deign to speak to me. She also had some quirky and annoying habits. I tended to go to sleep at 2 a.m., which was when she would arrive, turn on the light, start typing, and rock her chair back and forth on top of a plastic bag. A plastic bag which she would not remove. Every night, I went to sleep to the sound of tapping keys and crinkling plastic.‬

‪She also wouldn’t clean her part of the room. She would occasionally pile wet laundry on her bed, which would start to mildew and smell, but the worst was The Pile of stuff by the side of her bed. It started with an open box of dry spaghetti that had fallen. Over time, The Pile acquired various items of clothing, a multitude of books, office supplies, and the contents of care packages.

I moved out of the room when literally thousands of ants made The Pile their happy communal home and started sending ant expeditions out to my side of the room. It took a month for housing to place me in a new room, and for that month I removed all edible items from my side of the room but continued to find ants on my desk and in my bed and in the keyboard of my laptop.