The Dish Nazi
In undergrad, I lived with two guys, “Al and “Kevin” and one other girl, “Sherry.” The guys were fine, but Sherry was not.
Before we moved in, I volunteered my parents’ extra couch and vacuum. Sherry insisted on bringing her parents’ couch and a vacuum. She got the couch reupholstered and purchased an expensive vacuum. She expected everyone else to split the costs (although she was keeping these). To avoid causing problems, I paid.
Sherry started a chore wheel. She did chores for two weeks. The guys lasted a bit longer, but after a short while, I was the only one cleaning the bathroom regularly while the rest of the apartment was rarely cleaned.
Eventually, Sherry decided that the dish situation (the sink was often full of dishes) was my fault, so she bought some baskets for us each to put our dirty dishes in outside our rooms. I started calling her the dish Nazi. After two weeks, her pile was over a meter tall and we’d run out of clean dishes. I ended up keeping a few dishes in my basket just so I’d have some.
We shared some food purchases and one time I was having a glass of milk when Sherry accused me of never buying milk. I pointed out that I had recently purchased milk (I was buying it about once a month) and started drinking soy milk to avoid having this conversation in the future.
Sherry decided that she contributed more to the house than everyone else, so she waited until she made some communal purchases and then posted a tally on the wall. The contributions from my other roommates and I quickly outpaced hers and the tally mysteriously vanished.
One time, she decided it would be classy to collect wine bottles, but didn’t wash them so they became infested with fruit flies. Al cleaned them up.
At some point, Al decided to do a co-op placement so we were going to split up the next year. Sherry and Kevin didn’t say anything to me, but I heard them talking about new places and Al told me about the co-op so I started looking for a new place and found one before they’d bothered to tell me we weren’t going to live together. The next place had a dishwasher and roommates who cleaned.
It’s interesting to me, that Al was talking to Sherry about getting a new place together. If she really was the worst roommate why would he want to live with her again?
Exactly what I was thinking. Also can someone explain the dish baskets and why they were outside their rooms?
I don’t know, I feel like something is missing. I could blame the word limit, but i’ve seen some pretty long stories on here. Why would someone willingly live with her? I mean, she’s not the worst roommate i’ve read on here, but she’s still not pleasant.
“Kevin” and “Sherry” were good friends prior to moving in so they stayed together. They also had a lot of mutual friends and Sherry didn’t really bother Kevin with a lot of household junk. I didn’t know everyone very well before I moved in and we didn’t really have mutual friends, so Sherry kinda singled me out (she wouldn’t accuse the guys of not buying things for the house, but she’d accuse me of it; the guys never complained to me about my contributions to the house and for the brief period when this was being tracked I was definitely doing my share).
The dish baskets were little plastic baskets that we kept in the hallway outside our doors and filled with dirty dishes instead of leaving them in the sink. In principle we could have kept them in our rooms, but that would have just taken up floor space in the rooms so we didn’t. The justification Sherry gave was that it would keep the dishes out of the sink so it would be accessible. I think she also wanted to shame “whoever” wasn’t washing their dishes. I suspect that she didn’t notice how bad she was at doing dishes regularly before she got the baskets.
I didn’t include quite everything because I was trying to adhere to the word limit even though I’m not sure how much it matters (and I was over by 100 words).
I guess I could add that prior to the dish baskets I was washing all the dishes in the sink every so often whether they were mine or not just so I could use the sink or the dishes (the guys were doing them here and there too for the same reasons). I didn’t really mind doing this even if it was a bit annoying. But this is probably why we didn’t run out of dishes before the dish baskets were instituted.
Other than that there are little things. Early on, she tried to get me to help her with her homework (she was taking a remedial class in my major), but it mostly resulted in her not really doing anything and this stopped after a few weeks because I was too busy and she didn’t seem to benefit.
There was also the time I was gone for a summer and she not only used my room as a pantry, but kept my window open so the entire room was covered in a fine layer of dirt from outside (and crumbs from the food) when I got back and she didn’t help clean it despite this mess being her fault.
She would also occupy the only bathroom in the apartment for two hours at a time occasionally without warning anyone first (there was no “hey, I’m going to be in the bathroom a while, does anyone need to pee?”).
Oh, Al and Kevin were usually taking care of the trash and recyclables after the chore wheel was abandoned so I wasn’t the only one doing things around the house.
Also, before we parted ways her friends managed to spill countless glasses of red wine on the reupholstered couch and at some point I loaned the vacuum cleaner to the downstairs neighbours who apparently hadn’t vacuumed in the three years they lived there so the vacuum cleaner came back kinda gross. So at least some wear and tear went into the stuff she made us help buy before I never got to use it again.
I’ve collected wine bottles without washing them. They don’t grow fruit flies, and if they did the alcohol in whatever drops of wine were left would kill the fruit flies. If you had fruit flies, odds are they came from fruit.
Maybe Sherry was only horrible to the OP? Some girls are only bitchy to other girls, and super nice to guys.
Jeff, I used to have insane amounts of fruit flies reproducing in my sister’s wine bottles. She started putting the half-drunken bottles in the fridge, and the fruit flies would try to crawl into the fridge! I would often find a berzillion dead fruit flies halfway through the seal on the door. They swam around in the alcohol like it was no big deal, so I’m pretty sure alcohol doesn’t kill fruit flies.
I get the feeling the op has a lot of problems directly resulting from their desperate avoidance of conflict.
The Dr prescribes a double dose of Grow A Spine, stat!
i got the dish baskets. i mean why else were they outside their rooms, for decoration ?lol sherry sounds like a real snob biyotch singling u out i pity you op =P and fruit flies grow everywhere not just fruits :\
@ambearpig: Interesting. I guess it doesn’t occur to anyone that corks can go back into a wine bottle if you don’t finish it.
In any case, if one is collecting the bottle, all you have to do is pour out the last few drops of wine. Though I wonder if you guys are drinking really sweet wines and maybe that has something to do with it.
I don’t think the OP was spineless and I don’t think anyone is entitled to diagnose her with problems over the internet…
Sherry sounds like she was quite underhand with her bitching and since OP wasn’t so close with the others it would have made matters worse if she’d kicked up a bigger fuss I think..
@Ellere: I’m not sure what I did that was spineless. Perhaps I should have refused to pay for the couch and vacuum, but that’s a stretch. I mean, I continued to clean the bathroom when the other chores stopped because I like having a clean bathroom and was willing to do it even if nothing else in the apartment was being cleaned, not because I felt like a clean bathroom would avoid conflict or something.
@Jeff: No, she wasn’t drinking really sweet wine, she was collecting wine bottles from regular wine. She would finish the bottle and wouldn’t rinse it before putting it on display. When fruit flies came into the house (probably with fruit), they would find the little drops of wine left in the bottles and hang out/breed there long after all the fruit was finished.
I’ve never had problems with wine bottles that have been rinsed a few times, but without rinsing or capping them I’ve certainly experienced fruit fly issues. Same goes for beer bottles, btw.
@lauren—will they may not be able to *accurately* diagnose a person, that doesn’t mean they won’t try. Grandiose Psych 101 babble ftw!
So when she left the window open you talked to her about it? When she didnt help you clean, was that after you told her she was responsible for the mess and would need to grab a mop? When she brought up you not contributing purchasing milk, did you point out that you were and then continue drinking milk, maybe keeping track in case she did it again? When handing over money for the vaccum, did you ask her who would be keeping it when she moved out?
If you’re so deep in it that bending over backwards that hard to avoid any conversation that MIGHT get vaguely antagonistic doesn’t remotely register to you as cowardly, then this sh1t is going to continue to happen to you for your entire life.
I actually think the dish baskets were kind of a good idea (except for their location) – I’m planning to do the same soon so I can get my boyfriend’s dishes off the kitchen counters – but it’s hilarious how this scheme backfired on her. Hope the same thing doesn’t happen to me
@Ellere: Yes, I did comment on it. She didn’t clean, I pointed out it was her mess, she still didn’t clean so I did because it’s my room and I didn’t want to live in that. I certainly wasn’t going to wait for her to clean it and live in a messy room out of spite.
When she suggested that I didn’t buy milk, I told her that I bought it about once a month and that I’d purchased it the previous week. I might also have asked when the last time she bought milk was. At any rate, I decided it was less of a hassle to have my own source of milk (and at this point, I was suspicious that she wasn’t buying her share, this was after the posting a tally and the start of the dish baskets). So I went for soy (by the way, vanilla soy milk on cereal is fantastic) because nobody else would drink it so I didn’t even have to worry about who was drinking how much milk and who was buying it. It’s just so much easier to avoid sharing food with roommates and I have never shared food with roommates since (unless we’re ordering in some pizza).
When handing over money for the vacuum and couch, I complained to her, my other roommates complained to her, we all complained to each other, but eventually they paid and I did too because being the odd person out and refusing to pay would have made my life much more uncomfortable. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s ridiculous that I was expected to do this, but paying $100 (or something, I don’t remember) to avoid a year of complaints on this point every time I got home was worth it.
I wasn’t avoiding conversation with her or bending over backwards to appease her. I definitely pissed her off on multiple occasions by disagreeing with her about household shit (which probably lead her to bother me more). Further, I lived in this apartment early in my university career, back when I thought that sharing anything other than household items, toilet paper and cleaning supplies with a roommate was a good plan. I have about seven years of additional “living with roommates” experience. I don’t have these problems any more, with my roommate or with people in general. So you know, nice assumptions about me based on a couple pages of text. You might want to put away your crystal ball though, it doesn’t seem to work so well.
zing
Drunken Fruitfly is a great band name.