An Alarming Situation

I lived in an apartment that my campus owned my senior year in college. My best friends “C”, “K” and I decided that we wanted to move in to one of these apartment together, and we asked one of our friends, let’s call them “Sal,” to live in the other half of the apartment.

Everything started out just fine, we all got along well and we set up clear rules and boundaries for community spaces. It wasn’t long until things went south though. Sal was fairly messy, and after the first few weeks of living together, this became a bigger issue. He was constantly leaving dirty dishes (all of which I provided) all over the apartment to sit for days on end until old food was dried, crusted and sometimes moldy. We consistently had problems of mold in our trashcan because he would throw away old rotting food and not take the bag out, causing the apartment to smell. Sal was particularly bad with leaving dirty pots and pans (again, provided by me) on the stove after cooking, and being from the south, he often pan fried things in grease, and left it all out to make the whole apartment smell like greasy fried food for days. We talked about it and he would promise to be better about it, and then go right back to his old ways a few days later. We would try to passive-agressively leave notes about it, or wait until he finally took care of his dishes, but many times one of us would finally get sick of the smell or would need to use a pan and we would scrub pans he had left lying around. He started using our food without asking and promising to repay us for it, but never would. He would mysteriously be very hard to get a hold of when the electric was due (thankfully, that was the only bill that didn’t come directly out of our student accounts)

Occasionally, we would host small gatherings with friends at our apartment (only after hours of cleaning up, largely cleaning up messes Sal had left). One particular occasion included a surprise birthday party for a friend whom Sal did not know, but he joined in anyway. He took the liberty of eating an entire pizza that night, along with partaking in all the other food and drinks we had bought for the occasion. We had bought a family size tub of ice cream and it was hardly touched by guests the night of the party, but Sal managed to finish of the entire tub by himself over the span of just a few days. Sal also took advantage of C’s TV and game systems in the living room, and would leave them on and running when he left the house. We were all consistently picking up after him, and K always had to buy the toilet paper for their shared bathroom and Sal never cleaned it, not once the entire year.

The final straw came when Sal left the house early one morning and locked his bedroom door, apparently forgetting he had set his alarm. His alarm began going off at 7:30am. He did not return home until 9pm. This was just a few weeks before the end of the semester and all of us had tests, projects, and papers. The alarm would have gone off all day if after several hours or beeping frustration, I took matters into my own hands. I discovered that you could open the locked doors pretty easily with a credit card (yes, like they do in the movies) and I went in a turned off his alarm clock. When he returned home, I was upfront about the incident and I apologized for the intrusion, but explained that the alarm was hindering everyone’s work.

Sal was outraged. He immediately searched through everything in his room to ensure that nothing was taken. He then began making wild accusations that I stole some money out of his desk, and that a lighter was missing. He began claiming that we were all conspiring against him and all the passive-agressive notes were attacking him, specifically because we all hated him (which may have been partly true). The fight wrapped up and everyone went to bed. The next day, he had suddenly written his name on all of his food along with messages like “Don’t touch!” and “This is not ‘apartment property’”. He was out of the apartment or shut in his room most of the time (which helped with the TV issue, but only worsened the dishes issue).

At the end of the year K, C, and I spent hours cleaning up the apartment after Sal moved out so that we could get our security deposit back, even going as far as to break into Sal’s room and clean up all the trash he left behind and taking all the pictures of nude women off the walls (which it’s fortunate that I did, because I found two of my cups, dirty, in the bottom of his closet. Ew!). Sal never paid for the last electricity bill, because he had stopped speaking to any of us after the big blow-out fight, but it was worth the extra the three of us paid to never have to speak to him again!