Note to readers: This post is a little more disgusting than the average MVWR post. 

My Very Worst Roommate was a good friend from interstate who was planning on moving to Sydney with a friend of hers. Just as she’d quit her job and planned the move, her friend backed out, leaving my friend in the lurch, so I stepped up and said I’d share a place with her.

One of those decisions that as soon as you make it you wish you could take it back, you know? That feeling of, Oh no, I’m gonna regret that! She had moved interstate to avoid debt collectors, although I didn’t know that at the time. Of course, they followed her, so all hours of the day and night we had people at the door or on the phone asking for her and asking for money. She simply refused to pay back money she owed; she felt it was a grand imposition and just disgusting of them to ask for money from a young woman.

I knew she was messy, but I figured that I wasn’t that particular and as long as the mess was only in her room, it wouldn’t matter. I was so very, very wrong. She would use an entire roll of toilet paper each day. That would have been all right, but she refused to pay for it. As I didn’t want to be without, I’d be the one who bought it all the time. Eventually, I refused to share, and when I bought my rolls I kept them in my room. So, she just went without. I don’t know if she used her hands, or if, as I suspect, she just ignored the inevitable skidmarks. She wouldn’t use sanitary protection at home, so her mattress was soaked through with blood. This attracted cockroaches. The cockroaches were also attracted by the build up of rotisserie chicken carcasses she kept on her bed. She only ate meat, watermelon, and mangos, and the meat scraps, mango and watermelon skins just built up where she’d eat in bed. The cockroaches would sneak out of her room and creep down into the common areas. Along with the smell. That rancid, decomposing animal fugue would funk up the entire house. Coming home at night, I’d have to leave the front door open and run around opening windows to try to get some air in the place before I could breathe. That smell, along with the smell of urine, was like a solid, malevolent, living thing.

She also refused to wear sanitary protection around the house until I screamed at her because I was sick of cleaning her blood stains off my couch. When she did finally use sanitary protection, she’d flush the pads down the toilet. This blocked the toilet (of course) and cost about $150 each time to get fixed. When I got angry after the first few times, she just refused to throw them away properly. If she couldn’t flush them down the toilet, then they were going on the floor. I had whined to a friend about that and she’d said ‘Oh, you’re exaggerating! No one does that!’, but then one day my friend and I were sitting chatting in the living room when the flatmate walked into the room with a used pad in her hand. She talked to us, and when she realised what we were staring at (in horror) she just looked at me and threw it on the floor of the living room as if to say,’What are you going to do about that?’ My visiting friend’s horror was such that the flatmate eventually picked it up, but no one ever wanted to stand on that patch of floor again. I didn’t have the heart to tell my visiting friend that most of the living room floor had come in for that treatment.

One of the worst episodes was when I went away for a three days. A stray cat had moved in with us and had kittens, leaving us with four unexpected cats. I was going to put them in a kennel while I was away and she got offended: ‘Don’t you think I can look after the cats for three days?’ Well, no, I didn’t think she could, but I backed down. I put down plenty of food for the first day, told her to change the food twice a day and keep the litter box clean or they would stop using it.

This was the middle of summer and our house got very hot, like an oven. When I came back, she said: ‘I didn’t have to give them fresh food, they weren’t hungry. They never ate what you left for them’. Of course the cats were starving as in the high summer heat their food had gone rancid and was full of maggots. The worst was that the litter tray was not only full to overflowing, the cats had then crapped all around it, all over the floor, in the kitchen and the living room, and even peed in appliances such as my VCR. The cats had walked through the shit, and also my flatmate had walked through the shit, leaving shit prints all around the kitchen and all up and down the hallway. Seriously, I had about six meters of shit printed carpet to scrub when I came back.

She wouldn’t do the dishes, but she’d put dirty dishes in the sink and pour some water over them. Then leave it. Then put a pizza box in the sink on top. Then a chicken carcass. Then some more dishes and some more water. Then maybe some watermelon or mango skins. Then some more dishes and more water. This would go on for a couple of days until I just wanted to scream. It would take my thickest gloves before I could tackle that mess. She painted a set of bookshelves by flicking paint at them, also flicking paint on the carpet, the cupboards, the walls, my couch, my kitchen furniture, my bookshelves, my books, etc etc. She refused to clean this up so I spent several days scraping with a knife once it had dried.

She tracked my pay dates on a calendar so she could hit me up every month for a loan. It took about four months before I finally put an end to that. I couldn’t pay off my own not inconsiderable student loans because I was constantly having to cover her for rent and expenses. She borrowed my books and gave them away to other people, or lost them, or left them sitting in puddles of water in the bathroom. Her excuse? ‘What do you care? You’ve already read them!’

She would record over my VHS tapes where I had favourite rare shows collected. Same excuse, I’d already seen them, so why bother keeping them? She lost her key ring. By dropping it in her bedroom… somewhere. The place was so filthy she couldn’t find even a large key ring plus keys. She had some of my keys – copies of my post office box, so I had to get that recut. She refused to get the house keys recut, but expected me to come home early every night to let her in.

I kept telling her I’d get another set done, but she was determined that one day they would turn up, but she never actually cleaned her room to try and find them. She owned one pair of shoes, they stank. She wanted to borrow mine but thankfully she was many sizes bigger than me. Same with her clothes – she had very little and only owned one fugly jacket. She would have destroyed my shoes and clothes too, if she could have fit in to them.

There were also other petty annoyances. She would have her alarm snooze button go off six or seven times. I was on a later shift, so I would get up later, after having lost sleep to her alarm, and go for my shower. Because she always overslept, she would be in the shower when I wanted it, making me late for work. Then she’d use all my expensive shampoos and soaps and conditioners and skin care products.

I kept cleaning and cleaning even though it was crazy because I just couldn’t stand the filth, and I knew she would just leave it. She’d call me ‘mother’ since I did all the housework and seemed to be financially supporting her, too. She just shed filth and trailed cockroaches wherever she went. We lasted six months, and of all of that, it was her insane argumentativeness that finally broke this camel’s back. I’m just not argumentative or all that confrontational, usually if people want to be wrong about stuff, I’m happy to let them be wrong. But she would pick fights over stupid things, with the excuse that if she picked enough fights, eventually, one day, she’d be right about something. She was never right. I threw her out. I gave away every piece of furniture of mine that she’d touched/bled on. The house was so filthy and damaged, despite my best attempts to clean and care, that we lost the full $1,000 deposit and I was glad to see it go as long as she went with it.

Our friendship did not survive this, and I never missed her for a second. I have to confess, I did some bad stuff too. Toward the end I was so enraged by living in such filth, I used to kick lumps of cat shit into her room. She never noticed, though.

Falling on hard times, my husband and I thought getting a roommate would ease our financial stress. We posted an ad on Craigslist, finding two guys who desperately needed a house (living in their car), and worked long hours.

The first month was perfect because we barely talked and they were both respectful and gone most of the day. The second was pure chaos. We quickly noticed they never cleaned their bathroom or room and left (our) dishes nasty in the sink until I cleaned them. Soon fed up, I asked them to start cleaning after themselves. Instead they never used them again (in front of us). They also started bringing girls into our home every day doubling the people in our household and singling out my husband and me. Trying to be nice we ignored it, but it got hard to ignore when we couldn’t even be in our own living room, kitchen or bathroom without someone there.

They also tripled both our water and electric bill and completely walked all over us. They started running our w/d every day and night and taking three showers each daily. Also completely ran our internet so we couldn’t even watch one movie. Again, we asked them to be more courteous, that I was pregnant and my husband worked thirteen hours a day, and we deserved both to sleep and a warm shower.

We paid double the rent and all the utilities and let them still use our stuff. Every time we had a discussion they nodded and said they were wrong and it would never happen again, it always continued. It got to the point where their lamp even burned holes straight through the shade. If I ever left the house the had many people cooking and the w/d was running and every light in the house was on. Eventually we said they had to use the l mat, that we could no longer afford it with a baby coming and again they just begged us and said it would change, we refused.

They always said they appreciated our honesty and we didn’t just avoid them and blow up because that’s happened in the past (not surprised). The best part is the pretended they didn’t know where stuff was when we were home even though I’ve seen them steal many times (even checked other drawers in front of us bahaha!) They never once bought their own products and used everything of our they were “entitled” to and acted like the nicest people you’d ever meet. Our three months are almost up finally and we see this moral as you can really never know people until you live with them and even then they could be acting.

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!

My Very Worst Roommate was a girl I met on Craigslist. At first “Liz” seemed super cool and normal. I should have been concerned the first night she asked me to borrow $20 for gas. I said “sure.” The next day she comes home and she has no car. Liz said it won’t start and she thinks it ran out of gas. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to start problems.

Liz told me she had a nephew, who she loved and would be over a lot. I found out after she moved in that this nephew was actually her son, and her ex-boyfriend was keeping her from him and refusing to let her see him. I found out later that MVWR made no effort to see her son in three months. One day Liz decides to go and kidnap her son. This was about a month after she moved in. This resulted in Liz getting 50/50 custody.

About a month and a half later, about seven cops came to our house. Apparently Liz got a DUI a year before and never paid her fines and they were looking for her. Her dad found out, and took back the car he bought her and that’s why she actually had no car.

The entire time we lived together Liz had a hard time paying bills, even though she made more than I did. The solution for her was I would give her my half of the money for bills and she would pay them and give me the receipts. That was working at first. She gave me all the receipts and everything was well documented until about 3 months later when I got a call from the rental agency saying they realized we were three months behind in rent (the last month I paid is the last payment they got there.) Liz admitted she just kept the money and was forging receipts and was just going to move out and get her own place. I sued her and won, but never saw a penny of the money. There are a lot of other things that were awful about this living situation, but that would be a book I’d have to write. She was just bad. I was only 19 at the time. After that, I grew a backbone, which I guess is the good thing that came from it.

When I was young, I shared a house with a few friends. Our worst roommate was a drifter named Todd. He was bone thin and had hair like Jesus. He carried all of his belongings in a bulky backpack. Except for his bongo drums, which he kept tied around his neck with a leather thong. Because he didn’t have a job, he had nothing better to do than get stoned, put on a Yes album, and invite other drifters over for a drum circle. They played the stereo at full volume so they could hear it over the drums. The windows shuddered, the floor vibrated and the room stank of a dozen homeless men. They had drug-induced stamina and could play all night.

Todd was obsessed with the zodiac and mentioned it as often as possible. It was the lens through which he viewed every social interaction, from meeting a woman at a bar to purchasing a soda at Kwik Mart, to having a conversation about paying a little rent once in awhile. The first time he met me, he asked my birthday. When I answered, he sneered, “I hate Libras.” From that moment forward, he viewed me with eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Todd enjoyed dropping acid in the morning. When everyone else was getting ready for work or enjoying a cup of coffee, he’d sit on the living room floor, listlessly petting his bongo drum with his mouth hanging open. During one such trip, my roommate and I made the mistake of trying to speak to him about a housekeeping matter (late bill). He cried that we were sending off bad vibes and insisted that he could see our black, nasty auras swirling all around the room. He pulled frantically at his Jesus hair and said, “Uh oh. Now you’ve done it. I am having a bad trip.” He backed away from us, his dilated eyes shining with terror. “Get away from me, Libra!” He diverted all conversations about rent and utilities in this manner.

Todd was always gone, in one way or another, when conversations about money were afoot. But when a meal was prepared, he could sense it from miles away. He would skulk around the sidelines of the kitchen, rubbing his stomach and discussing his acute case of munchies. If I didn’t offer him a plate, he sulked and complained that Libras were bastards.

Todd also had plenty of homeless, damaged friends that he invited to live in the house. There was a leering, thick-necked giant with a bald head and a foot long beard. He thought I was cute and told me with stories that were geared to impress. For example, he told me that he had acquired some rohypnol (aka the date rape drug) and had gone downtown to the bars. After a few hours of drinking, he got bored and tried to get high off of the rohypnol. He dosed himself, blacked out immediately, and woke up the next morning in a municipal flowerbed. I could only be thankful that he was too dull-witted to follow through with his horrible plan. Because I couldn’t really get away from him, I told him he was a jackass and went upstairs to bed. Later, he scared the crap out of me by breaking into my room and trying to cuddle with my unconscious body.

There was also a young hippie who had a wolf for a pet. Of course he named her Luna. Luna was not a domesticated animal. She was lanky, she was clever, and she had a set of razor sharp fangs set in a jawbone as long as my forearm. She put up with being walked on a hemp leash and tied to a park bench, but Luna was only biding her time. The wolf and her owner started squatting at our house on invitation from Todd. “Why do you have this animal?” I asked. “You don’t even have a home! How are you going to take care of her? Can’t you tell she thinks you’re an asshole and wants to eat you?” Todd rose up, his eyes dilated, his hair swishing around, his skinny finger poking in my face. “How dare you talk to one of my friends like that,” he screamed. “You are so close-minded!” A few days later, he banned Luna from the house himself because she had taken a nice acrid wolf piss on his backpack.

Another awful Todd friend was a popular downtown begger. He could always be found sitting on a bench downtown, strumming random chords and taking handouts. He had a rough mane of red hair, a bushy beard, and a heavy leather jacket. Todd invited him to the house, and he soon became a regular. This one also thought I was cute and would not accept no for an answer. After a particularly frightening encounter with him, I fled the house. For days, I either slept in a booth at the restaurant where I worked or at my boyfriend’s place because I was scared to go home.

At last, I was able to talk to my other roommates. We voted to ban the creep from our house. Todd thought this was highly unfair. He discredited me, saying that I had probably given his friend mixed signals since that was a classic Libra trait. It was all I could do not to strangle him and smash his bongo drums over his head. It was not long after this incident that we jettisoned Todd. He had never paid rent or utilities, and his bongos wore on everybody’s nerves. Nobody cared for his choice of company. I saw him a few summers ago. It had been a decade since we lived together. I was rummaging through a bin of nails in front of a hardware store when he approached me. His Jesus hair was shorter, but his face was unmistakable. He looked at me hard, but he didn’t remember me. “You have great legs,” he said. “I’m a Libra,” I replied.

Soon after I moved into a townhouse with My Very Worst Roommate , ‘Rose’ took a second job at a nearby restaurant for some extra money. Her new coworkers were into drugs and Rose had always been keen to fit in. Things went downhill pretty quickly from what had promised to be a good situation.

Because our house was very close to the restaurant, it became the favored post-shift hangout for she and her coworkers, as many were too messed up on drugs or alcohol to drive home. That’s not my thing AT ALL, but they weren’t terribly disruptive and I would rather they hung out at our house for a while than drive intoxicated, so I let them be. Then our house stopped being a sober-up crash pad and developed into the after-party that kept  ’Lisa’ (our third roommate) and me  up on weekday nights. I woke up in the morning to the smell of weed and sex noises. Two of her friends were having sex on our couch at 6 a.m. I had to shout at them from the stairwell that I was coming downstairs and they needed to pull themselves together. They weren’t even ashamed, and were even nervy enough to mock me for being rude and jealous.

Soon after Rose attempted to send one of her ‘sick’ (too drunk/high to function at work) male coworkers to our house. Lisa and I told her we wouldn’t open the door for this intoxicated stranger when she wasn’t here to watch him. We argued about it for a while, with her getting angrier at us for not caving, and then finally saying ‘Fine, next time I’ll just give him the key!’ I told her that she absolutely would not, and had to stop myself from adding that I wouldn’t hesitate to call the police. After that, I left most of the discussions with her to Lisa because my temper had grown too short.

Not long after, I woke up on a Thursday morning to find a random guy on our couch. It was still early, so I figured the guy would clear out soon enough. I was wrong – when I finished doing schoolwork and went back downstairs at 4 p.m., he was still asleep on the couch. Rose was gone. Lisa came home around that time, and while we were talking about what to do with him, the guy woke up, turned the TV on, and wandered into the kitchen to look for food! He nodded a casual ‘hey’ at us and made way for the fridge. When I asked him, “Are you aware it’s 4 p.m. and you’re in someone else’s house? Do you think that’s OK?” he just shrugged. We immediately kicked him out. When Lisa told her that she absolutely couldn’t leave anyone unattended in the house and had to explain to her friends that our hospitality had a 10 a.m. expiration, she laughed it off, saying ‘That wouldn’t bother me if it was one of your friends,’ which is both patently untrue and completely irrelevant. Lisa and I were livid, but everything we said to Rose rolled off her back or poked her into a rage that made living with her miserable, so we let a lot of things go.

We shared a bathroom and she was a stickler for cleanliness, which was fine. What was odd, though, was her refusal to allow anything on the countertops – even the handsoap. If I left so much as a hairbrush on the counter, I would come home to find it flung into my room. What she left, however, was completely acceptable – she’d fix herself up before going out and leave her things everywhere. If I so much as moved something, she would flip and accuse me of using her expensive toiletries. It got to the point where she took EVERYTHING of hers out of the bathroom and kept it in her room. She was hypocritical like this about everything – would flip over a smudge of flour I’d missed wiping down the counters, but leave the remains of an explosion fossilizing in the microwave for three weeks; lose it over someone leaving a dish in the sink for more than twenty minutes, but spill a glass of milk on the carpet and not clean it up before she left for the weekend, leaving our house reeking while Lisa and I ripped everything apart tried to figure out what smelled so terrible.

Rose’s paranoia that we were stealing her things got worse. She accused me of stealing her hairspray and Keurig coffee cups and demanded I replace them. I don’t drink coffee and had only used her hairspray once or twice (always with her permission) and wasn’t going to replace them – I offered her $5 for my limited use of the hairspray, thinking that would placate her. She called me a thief and a liar and again demanded I replace the things I ‘took’. I think she no longer had the money to finance expensive habits like $25 cans of hairspray and Keurig cups, especially when all her money seemed to be going to drugs, and was trying to wring them out of me. She’d been fired from her day job for showing up clearly messed up on something, and now the ‘extra money’ from waiting tables was her only income. I withdrew my $5 best offer.

The final straw was rent. Lisa approached Rose for her share of the rent and was told she wouldn’t have it until the end of the weekend, and would just deliver it herself and pay the late charge. Two weeks later there’s a notice in our mailbox, we have seven days to pay up or get out. Lisa and I panicked, tried to get a hold of Rose to see what had happened to her rent. Somehow Rose turned it around to Lisa and I being ‘disrespectful’ to her. She threatened to move out, we called her bluff and told her she was welcome to. As a parting gift she left the taps in the house on while Lisa and I were out to run up our water bill.

My Very Worst Roommate was my friend’s friend at the time. Let’s call her L. At the beginning she was fine, but then we started noticing small irritations about her, like watching a TV show for six hours in the lounge room so we couldn’t, even though she had her own TV in her own room. She explained that she did this because she still wanted to be around everyone, even though we’d end up going into the other rooms as she watched TV shows we didn’t like. She was obsessed with TV, and if you were watching something, she would come into the room and pretty much demand to know what you were watching, and what was going on and then just stare at it really intently, it was weird… She also kept a collection of dead batteries, and then when the TV remote went dead she would try each one in with a different combo to see if they worked, and then put them back and would try the next time something went dead. At one time, she had over 15 dead batteries that I just threw out.

Me and my sister were vegetarians at the time, transitioning to a vegan diet, but we didn’t mind her eating meat or cooking her food with our pans and pots, as long as she cleaned it really well, but sometimes she would make mincemeat spaghetti sauce and leave it in our pans for ages and we’d have to clean up old meat. And then she would also badly wrap her meat and let it drip though out the fridge, which to a vego, smells awful.

She was also a bit overweight and was obsessed over it. Every week she was talking about dieting, but nothing would come of it. She would buy TV dinners all the time and just really unhealthy processed food. She would then always bring up that my sister and me were so slim and that she wished she could be like us, which was just awkward. It then began to get weird, as she suddenly turned against my boyfriend and whenever he spoke to her or around her, she tried to twist his words into insinuating that he was saying she was fat. For example, at the table once I was sitting at an angle on my chair and was behind her chair. My boyfriend tried to speak to me and so he just moved his head to one side so he could see me past her. She then attacked him saying that he was trying to make it look like he couldn’t see past her because she’s so fat. My boyfriend couldn’t even reply as it was just so ludicrous.

She then also got angry believing that he should be paying rent as he sometimes spent the night at the house, I thought this was silly as we each had our own room and mine was the smallest (half the size of hers). I still paid the same and when he was over we spent most the time in my room and went to his house to watch movies together, but I said that he should pay some bills like for water as he does have a shower there sometimes. But she didn’t want to do that and instead just started watching his power consumption. She walked into the kitchen and saw his phone charging and literally ripped it out of the socket. This still didn’t phase me though as I understood she felt like she was paying for his power, until I realized that she left the TV on in her room ALL NIGHT LONG as she couldn’t sleep without it.

She also couldn’t ever turn off a light and would constantly re-wash her clothes as she would leave them in the washing machine until they smelt funky, then just wash them again and doing the same thing! The other thing that pissed me off, was that through all her complaining about my boyfriend, he had helped me to do some paving out the back and also helped out with heaps of gardening and cleaning. When we had a rent inspection, he would come over and help, even though none of it was his mess apart from some dishes! He also went vegan and she was trying to convince him not to.

The thing though, although small, that pissed me off the most was that she would make a milo (chocolate drink) with milk, drink it, and then fill it up with water (not rinse it) and then drink the water in it. This murky browny water was disgusting. My boyfriend moved in after she left. And soon my friend will be moving out. My boyfriend and I have decided that instead of getting another roommate, we’d rather be poor. As we don’t want another L experience ever again!

My Very Worst Roommate has since been dubbed the Rabbit Killer. A year after graduating from college, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a girl who had been one of my best friends in middle-school and high school. We hadn’t seen much of each other during college because we were on opposite ends of the country, but when we both ended up in the same town, it seemed like a perfect arrangement. After a few months of living with her, I discovered that she had never quite grown up. She didn’t have a high paying job but as soon as a new video game system, video game or DVD box set would come out she would instantly buy it. Then when the first of the month rolled around and I asked for her half of the rent and utilities, she would act like I was the biggest creep and would go into sob stories about how she didn’t even have enough money for food.

On top of that, she was insanely dirty. I’m not the neatest person myself, but I try to be sanitary if not tidy. She would do the strangest things, like leave a completely untouched Jamba Juice in the middle of the living room floor until it molded over. Why would you buy a smoothie and not even drink any? Building management even had to come into her room once to fix a leak and wrote her up because she was so messy that they deemed the space dangerous.

It all came to a head when she decided she wanted to get a pet rabbit. I put my foot down and said no to pets because I knew that she wouldn’t be able to take care of it. She already was incredibly messy and I knew that it would just make the apartment even grosser. She argued that she could keep it outside on the balcony, but I told her that it would be too cold for something to live out there. A few months later, I walked out onto our shared balcony and discovered a pet rabbit. She told me that she knew I had said no, but that she knew that if I saw the rabbit, it would win me over. I was angry but decided to drop it. Fast forward to a particularly frosty Thanksgiving weekend, and my roommate came into my room crying and asking for a box with a lid. I asked why, and lo and behold, the rabbit had frozen to death. She insisted that she didn’t know how it died because she knew everything about rabbits and they are fine in the cold. I decided to not make matters worse by telling her “I told you so” and gave her a box and a hug.

Fast forward a month later when I had friends visiting over the Christmas holidays. I hadn’t been on the balcony in a while but the friends were smokers and so we went out there to have a smoke. Then I hear, “Hey, what’s in this box?” I look, and it’s the same box I had given the roommate for the bunny, with bunny still inside! I was completely mortified that a dead rabbit had been on our balcony for a month. When I brought it up with my roommate later and asked her to get rid of it, she started crying and said I was heartless and that it had to have a proper burial and there was no place to bury it where we live. I finally convinced her to take it with her when she went home for the holidays and bury it there.

The final straw came a few months later when I went back out on the balcony and discovered a new pet rabbit living there. I decided to move. A little while after moving out, I heard from some mutual friends that the new rabbit had killed itself by jumping off the balcony. Even it couldn’t stand to live with her anymore.

I moved in with a classmate and a girl (we’ll call her Sally) who was a friend of a friend that had just transferred to our school. She seemed normal enough at first, as they all do, but after about four months her controlling nature became very apparent.

Though she was in a serious relationship at the time, Sally would get super jealous when I’d invite boys over, often texting me in the middle of the night telling us to be quiet because she needed sleep when we weren’t even making noise. It escalated to the point where she informed me that I wasn’t allowed to have friends over on school nights because it disrupted her sleeping patterns. One Saturday night around 10 PM, I was talking on the phone to my mother in my own room when Sally texted me and told me to talk downstairs because I was talking too loud and she was trying to sleep. At 10 PM on a Saturday night. Right. She seemed to want to constantly parent me, as if I didn’t already have a mom.

The boiling point came in January, when an all-out war broke out over the heating bills. Sally didn’t want to turn the heat on in the house, ever. The thermostat, which read 59 degrees, began flashing, indicating that it was too cold in the house and the pipes were in danger of freezing — not to mention it was uncomfortably cold. After weeks of this torture, I had had enough of laying in my bed in four layers shivering, so at 2 AM, I crept downstairs to turn the heat on. Less than 10 minutes later, Sally awoke from a sound sleep and turned the heat off. The next morning I awoke to find a huge, hand-printed note covering the thermostat that read “DO NOT TOUCH”.

I confronted her the next morning and told her I planned to get a space heater for my own room if she continued to be so unreasonable. She told me I couldn’t do that because then our electricity would be too high. I’m not quite sure how I didn’t hit her in the face right then, but I refused to talk to her for the duration of the next six months that we shared the house. I did get my revenge on MVWR after she finally moved out in July. The construction workers on my street hit a gas main when they were digging, causing a leak in the gas main connected to our house. After a whole day’s worth of leakage, they finally shut off the gas. However, the workers forgot to inform the company that does the billing, because a few weeks later we received a bill for the gas in Sally’s name…..to the tune of $15,000! Hope Sally enjoys paying that off!

My junior year of college, two of my friends and I found a house for rent that we loved, but it was a four-bedroom and we needed another roomie. One of my sorority sisters mentioned that she knew someone from her hometown, a girl she’d gone to high school with, who was transferring to our college and needed a place to live (let’s call her Princess.) Problem solved.

The three of us were moving in a week before Princess, so I covered her portion of the deposit and first month’s rent with the understanding she would pay me back when she arrived. In reality, it actually took around five months for me to get that money back. On at least four occasions, she wrote me checks that bounced three days after I deposited them, resulting in an overdrawn account and staggering fees from my bank. She seemed to be a nice girl and we were all getting along otherwise, and she would apologize profusely every time and give me a laundry list of excuses (she gave me a check to an old account by accident, she had forgotten to transfer the money from savings, blah blah.) This was shady enough by itself, but Princess also liked to allude to her family’s wealth as often as possible. She would go on weekend trips with her dad or the various men she claimed to be dating, then come back and brag to us about mansions on the beach, dinners at five-star restaurants, and the new Vuitton bag she was dying to buy. All the while owing me $1,500 for the move-in cost, not counting all of the charges I’d racked up trying to deposit her worthless checks.

Princess became obsessed with Mercedes SUV’s and rambled endlessly about buying one. Sure enough, one day she came home and dragged all of us outside to see the huge, brand-new, totally loaded SUV sitting in our driveway. We were all a little annoyed, mostly because she’d taken so long to pay me back and her selfishness was getting on our nerves (and we were probably a little jealous too, not gonna lie.) Less than a week later, some police officers showed up at our door looking for Princess. Her father had alerted them she was a possible missing person. Also, she had been at a party that was broken up by a noise complaint, and the cop there checked everyone’s ID’s to make sure there was no underage drinking. He was suspicious of Princess’s ID so he confiscated it. The officers in my living room then showed us the driver’s license she had given, which was also how they found our address, and of course it was mine. I had gotten a new one when I turned 21 and left the old one in a desk drawer, and apparently Princess had helped herself to it.

When Princess came home, she was all in a fury over her father and the ID situation. She apologized profusely and claimed her father was just being overprotective and dramatic, and she hadn’t been at the party but had loaned my ID to a friend, which she knew was a terrible thing to do and was so sorry, etc.  Then she made a big scene of stomping around the house on her cell phone, supposedly yelling at her dad and the friend. During these conversations, she wandered out to the front yard, which we all did when we needed some privacy on the phone, and I could see her from my bedroom window. About an hour later, I looked out and saw a tow truck backing up to her Mercedes. Yup, it was getting repossessed. Princess had given the dealership a check for the down payment when she bought it, which of course bounced. We later found out the check was for $21,000.

We never saw Princess in person again after that. There were some signs that she had come back to the house when no one was home and taken little necessities like underwear and her suitcase. We were near the end of the lease by then and could manage to split the rent three ways if she never paid, which we assumed she wouldn’t. Truthfully we were all kind of glad she wasn’t around, plus we figured she was staying with a friend and was too embarrassed to see us after all that had happened. It was about a month later when one of the roommates called and said her checking account was overdrawn by $5,000.  Because of checks she had supposedly written out to me, and I had supposedly cashed. As it turns out, during one of her jaunts back to the house, Princess had swiped my old driver’s license AGAIN, even though I stashed it in a box under my bed and she would have had to do some serious searching to find it. She’d also taken some of roommate’s checks, written them out to me, and then used my ID to cash them. In another state.  It was really creepy to see the scanned images of the checks, which showed that she had obviously practiced forging my signature.

The bank eventually sorted everything out, we filed a police report and my roommate was reimbursed, which I suppose is the happiest ending we could hope for having lived eight months with a pathological liar and identity thief. We also discovered that she had never even enrolled at our college, though we’d all had countless conversations with her about our classes and seen her writing papers and studying. She never came back for her furniture or the rest of her stuff, so we had the joy of throwing it all away when we moved out. We weren’t at all surprised to see that her cherished collection of designer handbags were all cheap plastic knockoffs.