C and I decided to move in together when we both found that we were getting out of long term relationships and needed places to live.  So whenever she was moody or upset or downright bitchy I chalked it up to the stress of a breakup, especially because she seemed so normal the rest of the time. Wrong! C was certifiably bipolar and damn proud of the fact that she was not taking medication. In her view medication was for wusses and nothing but sheer mental muscle should get you through the day. This from the same girl who bragged about how whatever music she listened to in the morning would set her mood for the day. When she was on a high she’d drive piss drunk, buy a ton of stuff she didn’t have money for and call it an investment (like $300 worth of makeup) and would berate her superiors at work for not doing her job for her – this last one she just couldn’t grasp why that was bad and would complain at length about them at home. When she was low she was usually straight up mean. After we had gotten to a certain point of crazy, she would call me at work and scream whatever nasty, personal, hurtful things she could think of and then hang up on me. For no reason other than she was having a bad day. I changed jobs and didn’t give her my new number.

Since neither of us had anything after our respective breakups I asked her if she wanted to go in on some inexpensive furniture with me. She said yes and then backed out at the last minute forcing me to do some creative financing. When I asked her about it she gave me a completely nonsensical answer and then asked if I was okay with it. I said I was a little disappointed but it worked out and all was fine. She proceeded to start screaming at me for being disappointed in her and how could I say that and she’s Daddy’s little girl and… wait, what? She did typical other roommate things like leaving unwrapped used sanitary napkins on top of the trash, throwing parties in the middle of the night which would wake me up and our kitchen reeked of stale beer that she would never clean up.

But the real kicker was her boyfriend, J. Our apartment building had a balcony that over looked our parking spot and we were only two stories up. I was sitting on the couch one day and I heard J yelling for her through the open door. I looked down and he was gripping his foot with blood gushing everywhere. He said she was on her way up, he’d just cut it on a can or something and needed her to take him to the hospital.  Just then she walked through the door and I yelled, “Your boyfriend needs to go to the ER right now!”  She gave a big sigh, sat down on the couch and started leafing through a magazine.  I ran and got a towel and through it over the railing to him to wrap around his foot. She sighed again and said, “I am so tired of being taken advantage of by people. All people ever want is to use you. And really, I’m just sick of it.” I was too shocked to say anything. She finally got up and took him to the hospital and was back 30 minutes later. She’d told him she had to change out of her work clothes and grab something to eat and would be right back. Instead, she went to our neighbor’s apt to smoke a couple blunts and party for a few hours before picking J up from the ER.

I couldn’t move out fast enough.

I will never forget MVWR, no matter how hard I try. I lived with my brother and as two of our old roommates moved out, we needed a replacement. We decided to give Craigslist a try, had a few potential people over and decided upon S.  S had only been living in the USA for about five years, he was originally from China. He came here for school and was going for a master’s degree at a nearby university. He seemed like a normal enough dude when we first met and even for the first week or so of him moving in, but things quickly went downhill.  S quickly became the most annoying person I have met in my life.

The first thing my brother and I noticed were the blinds. Every night we would find them all closed and in the morning opened as far as they would go. That’s not too bad, but he was going into our rooms to do it as well and he’d open the windows no matter what the weather was. Next came the coupons. He would only buy something he had a coupon for. He once came home with 12 cans of Pringles chips because he could get $1 off. It was like an obsession, he would take every coupon he could find, print them from the internet, put the ones he thought I’d use on my desk, leave them on the kitchen table. Sure, kind of annoying, but then we took him grocery shopping. My brother and I were finished within 45 minutes and then had to wait two hours for him to finish. His explanation was that he had to keep running back and forth for things he had coupons for. The wonderful ending to that shopping trip happened as we were sitting in a McDonald’s eating some McNuggets. He took a nugget and then said, in a very loud voice, “There are two things that all African-Americans like, fried chicken and…”  my brother and I cut him off before he could finish. He apparently didn’t notice that were the only three kind-of white kids in the place.

S also started to blow his nose in our sink (freaking gross), cook absurdly smelly food after midnight, spray Febreeze on our cat, talk incessantly during TV shows and movies (keep in mind the fact that his thick accent kept us from understanding much of what he said), pick through our trash can and the apartment building’s dumpster for recyclables and generally annoy the ever-loving shit out of us. After four months of what was supposed to be a year-long lease, S informed us that he would be moving out because he was attending a school 1.5 hours away, not the one just down the street as he told us originally. He offered to find someone to replace him, but after almost getting scammed out of $1000, we told him to forget it, we’d find someone. The best part?  He said he couldn’t move into his new place as soon as he though and ended up crashing in our living room for almost a month as we had already had his replacement move into his old room.

I actually have two MVWRs. The first was from my freshman year in college. I had told this girl, N, that I would live with her after having the same math tutor. I should have known it was going to be bad when my parents were taking us out to lunch, N was on her phone talking about getting enough bail money to get her boyfriend out of jail (I am probably the most naive, sheltered person — at least I was freshman year — ever, but I don’t know how my parents left knowing who I was living with). We got to know each other and even though we were from very different backgrounds we got along fine. Then after Christmas break, her boyfriend got out of jail. That’s when he decided to live with us, even though we were in a one room dorm and it was against the rules. I was too shy and scared of them to say anything, so he moved in. Because he had just gotten out of jail (for stabbing someone in the neck!) he didn’t sleep well and would often scream in his sleep. That was when they even slept; they often had sex with me in the room.

When he had to go back home, she would call me incessantly because she was lonely and whine about why I wasn’t there to mope with. She even gave me a curfew to come back because she didn’t have any other friends. When her boyfriend was there, they would fight constantly, calling each other horrible names and hitting each other and then have really loud sex with me in the room. I would finally get up and leave. I lasted the whole school year and moved to another dorm the next summer. But that’s not the worst of the worst.

I moved to Australia last year with a friend and I knew one person from the summer camp I worked at. When T said she had two extra rooms in her house, we gladly moved in. My friend and I both immediately got jobs and went about starting a life. T started getting jealous about us honing in on her friends, so she started wild rumors about us, never invited us to their events, even though they specifically asked her to invite us. When we did go to parties where she was, she acted horrible to us. We were there during the awful brushfires and T decided she was going to start a clothing drive. She collected clothes from everyone and said she would drive them to the area affected by the fires. After doing this she ran around the house calling herself “Angelina Jolie” and “an amazing person.” But first she went through the clothes to see if she wanted to keep any of them (which she did) and then never donated them. They sat in our kitchen for months. When my other Australian roommate L finally moved them out of the way, she called him at work at shouted at him for touching “her stuff.” She finally donated it to the Salvation Army five months later.

Her room was disgusting, she kept all her dishes in there so we never had any, she threw temper tantrums constantly and then an hour later would try and hug us and say she loved us. We were going back to the States in July, so we told her at the end of may when we were leaving. And even though she knew we were leaving early from the lease, she acted surprised and expected us to pay our rent through the end of lease even though we wouldn’t be there. She refused to find another roommate and so we had to do it. Finally, she always complained she was broke even though she got paid $500 a week and her parents paid her rent, so when the refrigerator broke a week before we were set to leave, she asked us to help pay for a new one. Wow. Our friends in America don’t believe she actually exists.

It was my first time not living at home or in a dorm and I was excited that I would be moving in with three of my friends, one of whom was my roommate the past year in the dorms. But things got ugly very fast. I would never call myself a messy person, but I’m also not a neat freak; I don’t mind a bit of untidiness here or there. But  M and K would freak out if a dirtied dish was not cleaned right away and to them “right away” meant cleaning the dish used to cook something before you even ate the food. They would also get mad if anyone left something of theirs sitting out in the living room or hallway area, if it even sat there for a few minutes too long it would be thrown into your room and I mean THROWN. Once they even threw my laptop rather roughly onto the floor of my room. They would also act like they were in charge of me and the other roommate, B. They would assign us chores to do and leave us notes calling us to “roommate meetings” if we didn’t comply. They went so far as to leave a note telling us that were not allowed to touch the thermostat, as if we were children.

K had long bushy hair and after she brushed it would be all over the bathroom sink, tying in perfectly with all the makeup that would be smeared on the counter from M caking it on every morning. M also had the habit of not wrapping up her tampons when she threw them out, which is not only gross to look at but in the summer is was a magnet for insects. Another one of M’s habits was to take the TV remote from you when she decided she needed to watch something and tell you to leave of you weren’t going to sit in complete silence while she watched her shows. Also, if anyone ever made M mad her solution was to call her mom and cry and then threaten to sue us with parent’s lawyers. K, for her part, had no common sense whatsoever and would do the dumbest things, such as catching her hair on fire, exploding wax in the microwave and coming home drunk off of two beers and try to make muffins.

The next year we all went out separate ways, but not before M warned that if we got any money knocked off of our security deposit it was not her fault so she wasn’t going to help pay for it and K trying to roll a couch out to the curb and almost taking out a railing. To this day I’m not sure what changed about them between freshman to sophomore year to turn them into complete crazies, but living with them has certainly made me appreciate my new roommates much more.

I moved in with M and K after a neutral split with a boyfriend who I was living with. They had an extra room and K’s parents owned the house that they were staying in, I liked that I could bring my pets and they had a cat and dog who would keep them company while I went to school and worked. All was going well, I’m pretty laid back so I wasn’t really bothered when the same four friends of theirs came over everyday for hours, wrecked the place and left. We would all party most of the week and on the weekends, before school resumed. I had to put up with blaring rock band and Guitar Hero till all hours of the night and morning. When it was really cold outside I would smoke a bowl out the window to relax and try to study/sleep/enjoy my life.

Then things started to get weird. K had obviously had a problem with me “stealing her spotlight” because her friends liked me more than her. I couldn’t guess why since she said some of the most horrible things about them behind their backs and to each other. She would even go as far as insulting one girl’s dead mother. She couldn’t wait for people to leave so she could gossip; I was mostly appalled, tried to nod and smile and stay out of the drama. The house was filthy, except when K barked orders at M to clean it, she would sit and drink Diet Coke with a plastic guitar in her hands and watch him. They smoked cigarettes constantly and left the porch trashed on a nightly basis, but I was the bad guy cause I smoked a bit of weed, which confused me cause they would steal my weed whenever I left it on my desk.

Every time I would come home I would find K and four of her friends glued to the TV screaming into headsets playing XBox. I would immediately have to take both the dogs out since they hadn’t been let out since I left in the morning. Also, their dog routinely pissed on the couch and their friends spread MRSA (a sometimes fatal-antibiotic resistant staph infection) around to each other like candy. The health department and I both recommended a thorough cleaning/bleaching of common areas and furniture so that the infection wouldn’t be spread further or carried to others. These recommendations fell on deaf ears and I pulled an Anne Frank and stayed holed up in my room until I found another place to live (I was a week into a brutal college semester studying environmental economics — the irony was almost worth it).

When I did move out K had a literal panic attack, claiming that I owed her more money and threatened to call the cops. I told her to go ahead since there was no lease and every agreement was purely verbal. I didn’t pay and her friend threatened to kick my ass, while a large intimidating male friend stood by and glared, but he never made a step towards me and I’m so glad to be away from that biological warfare of a living room. Happy ending: I found a gorgeous house at the same price with three roommates, two are now my BFFs and the other turned out to be the love of my life and my animals haven’t been happier with their new friends either. Score!

My best friend and I decided to move in together and we found a nice big three-bedroom home with one bathroom to share. She and I couldn’t afford to split the rent, so we decided to rent the last bedroom out to someone else who we decided wouldn’t sign a copy of the lease, just in case they turned out to be psycho. Ever heard of Murphy’s Law? We put a post up on Craigslist and heard back from G. She seemed cute, sweet and very quirky and was a textile major at the State University a few miles away from the house. She was moving in with us from a house down the street and even before she had brought her things over, she would drop by (she’d climb up over our fence and onto our front porch and hang out until we got home) because she was apparently miserable in her old living situation. As soon as she moved in, we figured out why she was so unhappy.

The girl didn’t have a car and would rely on us to give her rides everywhere. She went to school full-time and worked at a children’s party facility full-time. She came home sweating and stinking like crazy and never took showers. Did I mention we all shared one bathroom? The smell became overwhelming when G went in there to pee or change her grody pad. She was perpetually broke and would hover over us as we made dinner, hoping we would offer her some, and the few times we did go to out to eat, she’d weasel her way out of paying her share of the check. G’s money issues became too much to handle, especially when she stiffed me on basic necessities that I paid for (“Oh, I owe you $27.43? Why don’t I just go ahead and give you $25 for the gas bill?”). The last straw was when she met my good friend E, a guy I’ve known since childhood, and she decided she was in love. She stalked him incessantly to the point where he never wanted to come over to visit, for fear that she would rape him upon site.

We eventually asked when she’d be moving out, and she begrudgingly took all stuff out of the house and over to her mother’s place about a month before she planned to leave. My best friend and I lucked out because she wasn’t on the lease, and therefore paid us a $500 deposit directly, which we had no problem keeping to subsidize the tab she had racked up over the course of her six months living with us.

My year of MVWR hell started on day one. I was living in a 3/2 apartment during my sophomore year of college when my friend D from high school and his friend J came to live with me. J was cool, but D was an absolute nightmare. Prior to moving in, he asked if he could bring his one cat and I agreed. On D-day, he arrived with his one cat, the cat’s sister, and her six kittens! And to make things worse, he already owed me over $400 for rent, utilities etc. After arriving, the bastard only had $80 to his name, proceeded to give me 40 of it, and then nonchalantly informed me that he needed the rest for food. This is definitely one of the times I regret not consulting the magic 8-ball!

Things only got worse. The eight cats he kept coralled in his room decided to use his dirty pile of clothes and streek-marked tighty-whiteys on the floor as their litter box and filled the entire apartment with the stench of cat piss and crap. He then spent the next two weeks sitting on his “6″ watching my TV (when he was supposed to be looking for a job of course). He eventually managed to secure work at Taco Bell for five days before he decided that it just wasn’t for him. Meanwhile, his debt to me kept rising and the eight mangy cats succesfuly shredded not only the newly shampooed carpet throughout the apartment, but the covers to my brand-new tower speakers.

Why keep this idiot around one might ask? Well, if J and I could have afforded the place ourselves, we would have given him the boot. D’s answer to this financial dilemma (with him now earning a wopping $400 per month in 1999 at a local playhouse) was to invite his friend M to live with us too, thereby splitting expenses four ways instead of three (because this of course was the only way D’s sorry butt could afford to live there). M, of course, slept on the pull-out couch and promptly awoke at the first bit of sunlight to loudly play final fantasy on MY tv and my now-shredded speakers on most mornings. One time when I made the “mistake” of asking D for his portion of the bills, he actually threw his wallet directly at my face. He blamed low blood sugar. But wait, there’s more!

M’s cat got fleas somehow, and of course M could not afford the medicine as he was in penury. I ended up buying the poor cat’s medicine, and the fleas soon dissapeared. I added the cost of the medicine to his debt which I now realized will probably never be repaid. My requests to D and M (J pretty much stayed in his room all day eating ice cream and playing video games) to help out with the horrendous mess they created daily around the apartment went unanswered, effectively turning me into their maid. D also slept nude (don’t ask me how I found out!). And then his dad and brother visited for Thanksgiving!

His dad bought stuff for the meal and they cooked and ate it while I was at work (leaving nothing for me of course). I came home from work to find his dad standing in front of the TV–like he was expecting poltergeists to fly out at him at any moment. My new DVD player was definitely to his liking. Fast forward one week: I sat in the living room watching TV and J had returned to place his pizza in the pre-heated oven. The oven door openned, and I heard a loud, “Ooohhhh…Myyyyyyy…God!” As I looked over at the oven, I could plainly see the massive chia-pet that used to be a turkey still sitting in the oven. If it had been left in the oven any longer, it might have sprouted legs and impregnated us all with its spores as we slept. Or maybe it already had…

Things from that point onward pretty much remained as crappy as they had been since he moved in. Towards the end of the year, D decided to move out (as in, decided to leave before I could tell him his sorry debt-ridden butt had to go), taking M with him. Watching him leave was bittersweet. I was relieved to see him go, but was annoyed knowing that I would never see the $500 he owed me. The douche tried to “friend” me on Facebook awhile back. He probably needed some money or worse, a place to stay.

Despite the protestations of my friends, I decided to room with a notoriously moody friend of mine who I’d known since high school.  At first her lack of boundaries and burgeoning alcoholism were merely annoying, but they steadily progressed to the point where most debates or conversations devolved into yelling matches. For a year, I endured temper tantrums, constant scolding for drinking all her booze (never touched it), never paying my share of bills (untrue), never cleaning the house (she’d come home two hours before me and begin cleaning – never leaving me any chores to do), and more. I knew things were going down fast when I came home to discover her attempting suicide. Instead of flipping out, or calling the cops (I should have, in retrospect), I calmly nursed her back from the edge. When I tried to speak with her about it later, and tell her how it had affected me, she blew up at me instead, calling me an awful friend who was never there for her.

A few weeks later, it all came to a head when she decided to throw another enormous temper tantrum — this time because I wouldn’t share my dinner with her (she had already helped herself to a large portion at this point). Having taken all the abuse I was willing to take, I threw my plate of spaghetti on the table, and told her to have as much as she pleased, because clearly it meant so much to her.  She had been saying some deliberately hurtful things to me during this whole episode, while I just stood there and took it. We then argued for an hour about whether or not she had even said those things. I decided to leave the apartment before I lost my temper. Instead of letting me leave, she physically blocked my exit, even grabbing onto me to force me to stay and talk things out.  As I was standing in the doorway trying to leave, she grabbed onto my messenger bag and the doorjamb in a death-grip, and refused to let go. So I did the only thing I could. I used my basic judo knowledge to try breaking her grip.  It worked, but she wasn’t expecting it — she careened into the doorjamb and stumbled over.

At that point, I ran out the apartment foyer and didn’t look back. Even though she had assaulted me, I had to wait a full month for her to move out. Apparently, she had told the landlord that she was moving in with her boyfriend. The one who had just dumped her the month previous. Not wanting to make things any more difficult, I just went along with the ruse. This was a situation that didn’t need any more escalation. After that, she had the gall to ask me if I’d help her move. I told her I would, and then flaked out on purpose. Fifteen years of friendship down the tubes because she wouldn’t put down the fucking whiskey. Thankfully, my new roommate is absolutely awesome.

Two years ago, as a singer looking for a new band, I accepted an opportunity to join one two provinces away from me. The drummer of this band, whom we will call B, offered to be my roommate. I had wanted to stay in my hometown to work and save up money before coming, but being impatient to get things with the band rolling, he offered to cover the rent and the bills for the first couple of months until I got adjusted to the new city and had a new job. He failed to mention that his brother J, whom I’ve never met before, would be moving in with us. I trusted his judgement that we would all get along, which I soon realized was a huge mistake. J was uneducated, yet had many rants that he would repeat with little provocation about subjects he had little to no knowledge about and would often state his ill-informed opinions as fact. He was also a gym junkie, prone to outbursts of roid-rage.

B was never at the house, opting to stay at his girlfriend’s place, only coming home to do laundry once a week. J seemed unaware of the arrangement B had made with me about covering bills and constantly harassed me about money, starting on the second day after moving in. I shortly got a job and paid B back for my portion and the harassment ceased. I told him I wouldn’t split the cost of furniture, saying that it made more sense for us each to purchase different pieces, that way there would be no arguments as to who owns what down the road when we cease to be roommates. He told me that was a stupid idea, but proceeded to go to Ikea and just buy it all himself and would occasionally make comments about how I “never paid him back” for it.

I didn’t drive, but J owned a truck, so it was expected that he should take the recyclable items to the recycling centre (there was no pick-up service for this at the time), and he would let bags just sit in the kitchen for months, which made the whole house stink like rotten milk. He would never take the garbage out and I got tired of being the only one to do it, so I just stopped and that piled up as well, until an entire corner of the kitchen was taken over by garbage bags.The house we were renting was a strict non-smoking place, but he still smoked cigars, but did so beside the stove with the fan on. He would have friends over to drink all night on weeknights, blasting terrible hip hop music and smoking cigars with the very loud overhead fan on till about 2 or 3 am, even after I had complained to him that he was keeping me awake and I needed to be up very early for work on weekday mornings.

He would constantly threaten to kick me out if I complained about anything and acted as if he were the “man of the house” simply because only his name was on the lease. When a cousin of his needed a place to stay, he told me I was no longer welcome to live there. That cousin ended up flaking out on him, and I was told “you can still stay here.” Being short on cash and having no other prospects for new roomies, I stayed. Shortly after I noticed that instead of his cheap Ikea butterknives, he was using my expensive cutlery to “hot knife” (a mode of smoking weed, by sticking knives under a hot element on a stove, and pressing a chunk of weed between them, and inhaling the smoke as it burns), thus ruining them. He also had scratched up an expensive copper bottom frying pan by using a fork as a cooking utensil, which I had warned him not to do because it would ruin the Teflon coating. When I confronted him with this he went into roid-rage mode and started saying that because I didnt pay him for furniture, I deserved to have my things ruined. He kicked me out on the spot, and I had to move my things out that very night, despite having paid rent for the month. I moved back to my hometown and have never looked back.

I live in a three bedroom townhouse and need two roommates in order to make my rent. My boyfriend was moving in and I got a new roommate who arrived about a week after he did. When my female roommate and I first met (through Craigslist) she had said her boyfriend would be home from his job on a cruise ship, but would only for three weeks as had to go back onto the ship. I told her it was fine that he stay with us. The four of us got along really well and she was gone a lot hanging out with her friends. On weeknights my boyfriend and I always went to bed early because we had to work in the morning.

One night, around 2am my roommate came barging into our room, flipped on the light and exclaimed that she had lost her phone. All I could do was stare at her. She said that she lost her phone several times and finally I replied with, “What do you want me to do about it?” She explained further that she used it to wake up in the morning and asked if I had something for her to use. I told her she could use my cell phone which was right on my bedside table. Even though she was standing right there she said she didn’t know where it was. I gave it to her and she left. A few minutes later she came back in saying she needed me to set it for her so I did. What made this situation so awkward was that I was naked, trying to stay completely under the covers while I set my cell phone alarm clock for her.

A week went by and my boyfriend and I didn’t see her so we figured she was embarrassed because she was obviously drunk or on something when she did that. When I finally got to ask her about it, she claimed she had only two beers that night. About a month later my boyfriend and I broke up and her boyfriend got back from the cruise ship. My ex paid that month in rent so I wouldn’t be screwed over money wise. Meanwhile, I looked for a third roommate assuming my roommate’s boyfriend would be leaving. I guess he lost his job on the ship because he never left. I wasn’t able to find another roommate so I asked if he could pay the third share of rent. My roommate got pissed at me and said that since they shared a room, he shouldn’t have to pay rent.

Meanwhile, her boyfriend would cook these elaborate meals and leave the clean up for me, all without offering me any of the food. I found out my roommate was horribly jealous and would get mad at him anytime he stayed in the same room as me, like the living room or kitchen. I dealt with him living there for four months before they finally moved out. I finally told her that I was sick of him living there and not picking up after himself. She called me a coward for not telling her sooner. She wanted her deposit back a month before she moved out and I told her no. She then called me a miserable person.