The Loudmouth
A was randomly assigned to me in my freshman year of college, and I could tell on the very first day of school that we were not going to be best buddies.
As I began to settle into a group of friends, MVWR usually tagged along with us wherever we went, generally alienating everyone in the group with backhanded insults. For example, my friend K mentioned that she was considering rushing a sorority, and A asked, “So you can be, like, a dumb sorority girl?†in a valley girl voice.  She also asked awkward questions, like whether we thought sex outside of missionary position was sinful. Whenever someone said “fuck you†to anyone, she would respond with, “Right here, on the table?â€
One night about a week into school we hung out and drank in a guy friend’s dorm room. I left early, and A ended up staying the night. When A arrived the next morning, she looked as though she’d been strangled. Her neck was covered in about 30 hickeys, which she had received from our friend’s roommate, who’d been passed out drunk when I left. The guy later reported that at some point during the make-out session she told him, “I think I’ve just been bitten by a vampire!â€
All of her weirdness might have been tolerable, had it not been for the smell in our room. A loved to eat salmon-flavored cream cheese, which she would spread on crackers with the same crusty knife that she never washed. The knife would sit out on a cardboard box that she used as a table, which was also covered in crusty salmon dip and made the whole room smell like fish. The smell was so bad that my friends refused to hang out in my room at all. To counter the stench, I went out and bought some air freshener.
One day, I came into the room and was met with a particularly pungent odor, so I sprayed some air freshener, and A poked her head out of her loft bed and looked at me like I’d just killed a puppy. About 20 minutes later she posted a note on Facebook titled “Air Freshener,†which never specifically mentioned me, but discussed how she generally felt unwanted (I’ll admit that by this point I had stopped inviting her to hang out with my friends and me), and friends posted comments saying things like “Don’t let her get to you!†To this day I have no idea why my spraying air freshener was so offensive to her. It was a very long rest of the year after that incident.
I would have sprayed her spread. Yuck.
Meh, your worst roommate was someone who was different from you? A lot of her weirdness is something I found attractive in my friends (at that age because those juvenile comments would have me slapping someone quick fast). It also sounds like she was eating Lox and cream cheese, which is fairly common for someone of the Jewish faith to eat.
The OP sounds like a spoiled college girl that was suddenly shocked that there was someone who despised some of the things she did while wanting some of the flippantries of college. Trust me, I mocked plenty of people who joined sororities while still wanting to be asked to join. The roommate was just trying to fit in, felt awkward, and was eating offensive Lox.
I wonder how the OP’s McDonald’s McRib is doing.
a) Not washing silverware is fucking nasty.
b) Sounds like you both mightily sucked at communication. Did ever you ask her to clean up after herself? Like, with words and stuff? To her face? Spraying air freshener doesn’t count. PA Facebook notes are equally as lame.
c) Backhanded insults are pretty fucking rude, but the “immaturity” of her humor just sounds like she was bad fit for your social group.
Aside from the not washing the knife she used she doesn’t really sound all that bad. A little strange, maybe socially awkward, but not horrible like some other posts on here.
I don’t think she was so bad. Not washing up is irritating but the OP should have just asked politely before it built up into such an issue. The OP probably had no idea that she was just “tagging along” with the OP’s friends, as far as she knew she’d got to collage met some friends everything was going fine, then suddenly her roommate became increasing hostile, and she never got invited out anymore. It probably wasn’t a sudden reaction to the air freshener, she had probably already got the impression already her roommate had gone off her and it was just the final straw. It was PA to write the facebook note, but then again so was the air freshener move.
Yeah, to me it just seems like a massive amount of lack of communication. She seems pretty irritating but mainly in an awkward way.
But that knife shit sounds nasty.
Meshell, as the OP I take offense to the suggestion that I was a “spoiled college girl.” I myself did not join a sorority, nor did I have any desire to, but I was friends with enough girls in sororities to know that they are not all the stereotypical bimbos that you generally see in movies. I found it extremely arrogant of my roommate to assume so, especially when she went so far as to mock my friend for wanting to join one. I guess I did not do a good job of explaining how arrogant my roommate was- her taste was the only good taste, be it in movies or music or whatever, and she generally acted as though she was smarter than everyone around her.
I will admit that I was not good at communicating my problems with her, and she might not have realized how offensive the fish smell was, especially since I am also messy (though I think there’s a big difference between messy, which I am and dirty, which she was). But I should have said something to her- my only excuse is that I was an 18 year old who was terrified of confrontation.
I will admit that she wasn’t actually my very worst roommate- my actual worst roommate slept with my boyfriend, but that story isn’t really funny and I felt that the Facebook note and the nasty knife were much more fitting anecdotes for this site.
i think the worst person in this story was the vampire dude…she turned up looking ‘as though she’d been strangled’ and he reported on a comment she made while he was mauling her neck like she was the freak…?
What’s so difficult about saying “Hey, your lox spread is stinking up the room, would you mind cleaning up properly after eating it?”
It’s a shame that so many of these “bad roommates” could have been solved with a few simple and polite comments. I’ve had the passive-aggressive roommate who bitches to her friends and posts comments online about how annoying I was instead of asking that I stop whatever it was that I was doing to bother her. I’ll admit that it’s really hard to live with someone who has a completely different sense of humor and tastes in entertainment, but I think it’s possible to get along as college roommates as long as you don’t spend every waking moment together (i.e. trying to hang out in the same crowd when you’re not really socially compatible) and you communicate your problems when you have them. I think you could have dropped the hint that you didn’t want to hang out all the time by just letting her know a couple times that you’d like to spend an evening or two without her (not because you don’t like her, but because even happily married couples need some time apart now and then). Most people would get the hint, and it would be a lot nicer than spraying air freshener.
OP…you might as well be MVWRM…acting like we’re friends until suddenly we’re not
@Meshell
“It also sounds like she was eating Lox and cream cheese, which is fairly common for someone of the Jewish faith to eat.”
It’s fairly common for ME to eat (not, however, my Jewish father-in-law who loathes smoked salmon; leave it to his Christian daughter-in-law to love it, eh?), but not without washing the cutlery or making sure that congealed, stinking crustiness doesn’t pollute a communal space.
I too thought the OP went a little over the top on some of the ‘weirdness’ – just sounded a fraction socially awkward, and I kinda like some people like that; perhaps I am one – but there’s no social or religious exemption from being clean and considerate in a shared space.
I’m sort of with A on the anti-air-freshener bit. They don’t smell good, they just add another, slightly less offensive smell to the mix. Of course, the way that problem should be solved is cleaning up the source of the stinkiness and air the room out.