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.

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.

I have never been treated as poorly as I was by my MVWR and I can’t believe that I didn’t see the sucker punch coming. We were both college freshmen and she tried to get along with me at first. But soon I was getting prank phone calls from my roommate and her friends while she was up partying and I was sleeping. She also liked to blast rock music early in the morning. She said I was lame because I didn’t want her to store alcohol in my fridge. I didn’t have a problem with her drinking or even illegally drinking in our dorm room. I just thought it would be best to be sneaky about it, but she didn’t want to hear it from me.

She then requested that I leave the dorm room after she got off from class because she needed some alone time or she would get bitchy. I stupidly agreed and started studying for hours in common room. She did me a favor at the end of the semester though. She found me a new roommate down the hall since she didn’t think that we were the best roommates for each other.  I agreed, packed my bags and left. A few weeks later, I walked past our old room only to see her packing her belongings. I asked her what was going on and she told me that she was moving out of the dorms into a house with her friends. The same friends who would prank call me while I was sleeping. I have never felt so stupid in my life.

So she moved out and I moved back.  At least I got my own room for a semester.

My junior year in college, I moved from a shared room into what used to be the graduate residence hall. In this dorm, every set of two rooms had a shared door that locked on both sides (like a hotel) and a shared phone box. Back in those days dorms either had one phone at the end of the hall, or, if you were in a “recently” remodeled building, this phone box, which meant that you had the luxury of being able to lie on your bed and talk–with only one person listening in–instead of having to sit on the floor in the hallway where everyone could hear you. Anyway, the girl who lived on the other side of the phone box was dating a guy who got off of work around two o’clock in the morning. She would set a clock radio to go off loudly around one in the morning so she wouldn’t fall asleep and miss going to meet him.

One night, the radio began to blare and didn’t stop and I realized that she’d left early and forgotten to turn off the radio. I suffered through for a while and then just had to do something about it. I figured that the only way to shut off the radio without leaving her room unlocked was to get into her room through the phone box, turn her radio off, and come back the way I got in. I crawled up on the desk, lifted the phone off its post, wriggled through the phone box, killed the radio, wriggled back into my room, and went to bed.  When I told her about it the next day, she apologized. When the radio went off again a few nights later I did the wriggle thing again, but by the third night I decided that if she could leave me with a blaring radio I could leave her with an unlocked room. That solved that problem.

Then, there was the very odd girl directly across the hall.  She was afraid of heights, so she had bought a loft bed as part of a de-sensitization plan. It didn’t really work, so she took something to help her sleep. And, she was a lover of mudpuppies (an aquatic salamander), who need a warm and moist environment. To keep the mudpuppies happy she ran the heat full-blast and put pans of water on the radiator, so her room smelled like the tide pool at the zoo. One night, one of her mudpuppies escaped its tank and made its way under the shared door into her suite mate’s room. When the suite mate got up to go to the bathroom she stepped on the mudpuppy. She screamed loud and long, which woke the rest of us up quickly and the mudpuppy-lover not so quickly. Sadly, the mudpuppy died, and the acrophobe went into mourning. I bet the suite-mate is still undergoing therapy. Want to see a mudpuppy? Go to Wikipedia and check it out, but don’t ever step on one with bare feet!

It was my sophomore year of college and I had moved into a quad with a few good friends. The quad was set up with two shared bedrooms and a large living area in the middle.  I shared my bedroom with T, a girl I’d become very close friends with during freshman year; our friends K and C shared the other bedroom. Fall semester was wonderful. Then, during spring semester, T got “sick”.  At first we thought she was genuinely sick, since she was fainting a lot and claimed she was really weak. She never got any confirmation from a doctor that she had anything wrong with her, but she stopped going to class anyway. Eventually we realized that she was faking it to get attention; aside from the random “fainting”, she didn’t really seem sick. She also always “fainted” rather conveniently – she never fainted during her long, hot showers in the dorm bathroom, even though she didn’t bring a chair in there or anything. I felt pretty certain that a long, hot shower is almost guaranteed to make you pass out if you’re really that sick. She also always “fainted” very gracefully – for example, she often “fainted” while she was drying her hair, but she always managed to turn off the hair dryer, set it on the dresser and then collapse neatly in the very narrow area between the bed and the dresser, with her head on her arm.  She must have “fainted” five or six times a day for a couple months and never once hit her head on something.  When she’d “come to,” she was never disoriented and was able to sit back up without even a hint of dizziness. She also insisted on making us walk her to the school cafeteria with her arms on our shoulders and she’d “faint” every few steps. We volunteered to bring back some food but she refused, insisting on going to the cafeteria with us.

That alone wouldn’t have made her MVWR; at least she was still showering and being social during her “illness.”  The real problem came when she miraculously improved and instead began seeing demons following everyone around. This went on for a few weeks and although it seemed a bit odd and I began wondering if she may be schizophrenic, it still wasn’t too bad. Then, one night at about 3 am, she woke us all up with a blood-curdling scream and began claiming that demons were attacking her. Somehow, she managed to convince someone that she needed to get her pastor from church, so then he showed up and started praying with her. She remained in her bed in our shared room during this whole ordeal; I don’t think I got any sleep that night. Thankfully, after that she said the demons were gone and things calmed down. The worst thing she did after she got rid of the demons was to throw her shoes at the wall whenever she was mad at this guy she liked, leaving large black marks. Junior year I moved off-campus with my boyfriend and she moved into one of the upperclassmen apartments. She and I still hung out a few times after that, but we eventually drifted apart.

Continued from yesterday...

J also liked to sleep in the living room instead of his bedroom. This was a huge problem. He slept odd hours and sometimes we would have company over to watch a movie and he would refuse to leave to go and sleep in his bedroom.We would end up having to sit on the floor and listen to loud snoring while trying to hear the movie. Also, he liked to sleep in pajama bottoms with a huge hole in the crotch and wear no underwear underneath.

The only way I got him to sometimes sleep in his room was when I threatened to start up a website called “Where did J sleep last night?” And take a picture everyday. If he slept in his room, I would only show his bedroom door. If not he would have a picture posted of him on the couch. That pissed him off and did get him to occasionally sleep in his own room and I never actually followed through with the website.

We also had got a new puppy and J really, really liked him. That was fine. Except he would fall asleep with the puppy on the couch and then almost kill him by suffocating him or rolling on top of him So we had to absolutely insist that he did not have him on the couch with him!

Eventually we found somewhere else to live. My ex is still friends with him and I still keep sort of in touch. He’s not a bad person really. Just the Very Worst roommate!

I needed a roommate so I looked on Craigslist. I found J, a girl that seemed normal and I checked her through the courts, met her current roommates and friends and she checked out. All this clearly was not sufficient. She moved her boyfriend in the very day she moved in. She had never met him before as this was an online relationship. He didn’t have a job and was there 24/7. After a month, I told J that I would not pay half the rent or bills if he was there all the time. She got incredibly angry and threatened to beat me up. Up to this point, we had been sharing cookware (all mine) so I told her she wasn’t allowed to anymore since I was paying half of the bills when I had two roommates. She flipped out and took everything of hers away–the shower curtain, toilet paper, paper towels (that I had paid for initially). Everything. It was unbearable living there because she would often threaten to harm me. The worst part happened one day when I tried putting in my contacts with my solution and it burned. I opened the solution and it was dark brownish-yellow and smelled like urine. She peed in my contact solution bottle. I threw everything away that she might have contaminated and filed a restraining order. I actually ended up suing her on a TV judge show—and won!

My Very Worst Roommate was an acquaintance from college. We ran in the same circles and had partied together a few times. We got along well, and when I heard that her roommate (who I thought was a real bitch) was asking her to leave their apartment, I offered her the spare bedroom in the apartment I shared with my fiancee.

MVWR was a spoiled, drug-addicted JAP who spent all her money on drugs and expensive bath products. She survived on a diet of sorbet, red wine and all MY food. When asked to contribute, she would yammer on about how she was on a “fixed income,” which in the language of crazy that my MVWR spoke, translates to “My mother only sends me money once a month, and I already spent it all on blow.”

She took three-hour baths during which no one was allowed into the bathroom, even though the tub was separated from the rest of the room by a locking door. When she left the bathroom, there would be cigarette butts (we had a non-smoking apartment) and wine glasses littering the side of the tub, and water all over the floor.

Every day, I would leave for work in the afternoon and she would be on the couch in our living room with the blinds drawn, watching Dr. Phil. When I came back, she would be right where I left her, but with the added bonus of an ever-growing pile of Whipit cartridges

The only thing that made the situation livable was the fact that my MVWR kept a large amount of weed in our freezer. Whenever her terrible behavior and gross lifestyle got to me, my fiancee and I would pilfer from her stash and numb the pain of living with such a shitty individual and take small pleasure in our tiny revenge.