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.

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.

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.

I had a friend, A, who called and asked me if she could stay with me for a few nights because she was having some problems she needed to escape from. I had an extra room, so it was no problem.

Well over the months I became increasingly put out in my own home. Although she was staying in another room, my belongings seemed like a free-for-all. I had a makeup desk in my room where I would get ready daily and she set up shop on one half of the desk, but used my makeup and all my hair gadgets. Once she was ready, she would go to my closet and pick out her clothes for the day. Because I was going to school at the time and she was not, I would study in the evenings and she would have Monday through Thursday night parties inviting over other aimless people.

The most disgusting thing she did was she would only take baths, then not rinse out the tub and leave a very gross dirt ring around the tub for me to come along and clean out. This one still gives me the creeps today. Well, six months later, I tried to rack my brain for excuses to try to get her to move out. (Remember she was only a guest, supposed to only be sleeping over a couple nights.) I enlisted the help of my uncle asking if I could say he will need to move in because he worked in the area. So I set it up with her that she had to be out on the Sunday as he would be there on Monday. I had some errands to do that day and gave her some time to collect what little she had.

I got home and WHEW she was finally gone … along with half my belongings including two of my winter coats. I chose to not make a big deal out of it with her as I chalked it up to being the price I had to pay to get my ‘roommate’ out.

Now I am very careful, when I have guests. If I know they have problems, I try to make their stay as uncomfortable as possible. When her equally problematic sister (but more honest) came to ‘stay a couple of days’ and was turning into a roommate, I took a different approach. I stayed up all night bugging so she got no sleep, wouldn’t make meals, instead sat down with a bag of chips and kept a ficticous diary about how I am falling for her boyfriend. LMAO!  Note to friends: Don’t move in on my makeup table.

I lived in a townhouse with Aaron (the owner). Aaron informed me that his abusive ex Joe was staying with us for a week. Joe didn’t have any money to leave. Aaron told me Joe would only be there as long as it took for him to get a job. So Joe moved into the spare room across from mine with his hyperactive dog. Aaron informed me that he was being transferred to another location. Joe would also move into Aaron’s old bedroom. Ken, an acquaintance, would be living upstairs too. Ken brilliantly decided to put his gerbil in the dining room…ewww.

We got along for about a week before the police knocked on our door. The police were questioning him about recklessly driving down our busiest
street, as well as ramming his car into another person. Joe yelled and  swore at the police officers. They gave him a ticket. If I had a friend over, Joe and Ken would yell something inappropriate so I stayed in my room or not at home at all. Joe let his dog shit all over the carpet and decided to tell our mutual friends lies about me. I stopped talking to them and was ready to finish the semester so I could move.

After talking to a friend of ours, I found out that Ken and Joe decided to change the wireless password almost causing me to fail a final. Out of the blue I received a text message from Joe telling me that I had a week to get out before I was evicted. I was surprised, so I went up to talk to him. He said that Aaron was behind him 100%. Joe wanted to beat me up and shouted racial slurs but Ken stopped him. I finished moving out, and received many death threats in the process. I’ve heard that Joe and Ken are now homeless!

My Very Worst Roommate was at my first duty post in the US Army. After months of training I was assigned to one of the elite Ranger Battalions. The barracks were mostly four-man rooms, one fire team per room. Live together, work together, play together was the idea. Two of my roomies were great. But the third? Let’s call him Opie. He was from a tiny town in a flat, corn-centered state. He was a religious fanatic. He constantly tried to convert us to his particular brand of Christianity even after being told by the chain of command and the battalion chaplain to cut it out. I learned the hard way that if I left my metal albums out, they’d be mysteriously broken. Opie condemned everything we did as sinful.

But that’s not the worst of it. Soldiers are responsible for the upkeep of their rooms and the barracks in general. We’d normally spend Sunday afternoons giving our room a detailed cleaning to pass Monday-morning inspection. Opie, after agreeing to this, never bothered to show up for the cleaning. He always has some weak excuse, but the reality was the three of us had to do the work of four. We finally got sick of it and didn’t touch his area in the weekly clean-up. He was livid when he got written up for having a slovenly area.

He got kicked out of the battalion after we got a new company commander. Opie loudly announced he would never take orders from a “Christ killer” (a Jew, in other words) and was removed for insolence. I ran into him a few years later in Hawaii. He had been busted to Private and was in the process of being thrown out of the Army. What a shock.

During my sophomore year of college my roommate had to move out unexpectedly, due to some serious family issues, so I knew that I would be matched up with a random. At first Maria seemed nice. Although we had nothing in common, we were polite to one another and sometimes sat and watched TV shows together. Since I had a boyfriend in another dorm I was often hanging out over there with him, so I really didn’t have a big issue with the arrival of this new person. After about a month, Maria started talking late night to a guy from her hometown. The conversations got longer each night and sometimes I would wake at three in the morning only to hear her doing baby talk that made me a little sick. She was a pretty tough chick by day so it was funny and gross to hear here talking in “baby wayby” and “kissy wissy” phrases.

She failed to alert me to the fact that she was bringing this guy up for a weekend to stay. Since we shared an actual bedroom a heads up would have been nice (I never had my boyfriend stay over since they barely knew each other and I thought she would feel uncomfortable). One day I came home from class and he was there. They were cuddling on a twin bed and he was about half her size weight and about a foot shorter. He reminded me a bit of a drowned rat with his greased up hair and scrawny figure. No one introduced me so I just said, “Hey nice to meet you.” I went out to the common area for a couple hours, but finally needed to come in to change so I knocked and there was no answer. I opened the door and didn’t see them. Then I realized they were in the shower together. Having sex. It was louder than it needed to be and I left to head to dinner. When I came back they were at it again.

This continued weekend after weekend until finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I sat down with her calmly and explained that I felt really uncomfortable with all the shower sex and I never felt like I could be in my own room on weekends. She wasn’t happy with this and just got up and stormed off, saying they were going to get Mexican food down the street. Later that night I went to my car to go home for the weekend and found a giant burrito smeared all over my windshield as if it had been launched from afar. Of course I couldn’t prove it was Maria or the rat, but I of course knew that it was. She ended up moving out a few weeks later because it turned out she wasn’t going to classes so student housing was alerted and she was asked to find alternate arrangements.

MVWR Sam lived with my boyfriend and I from December to April last year without incident. I actually considered him one of the best roommates I’ve had because he was never there. With my busy out-of-town work schedule and his job taking him up to Northern Canada, we maybe crossed paths two or three days out of the month. When he moved out for a job in a different city, he even left his nice couches, coffee table, and beer fridge because he didn’t want to rent another trailer to move them six hours away. Major score for us!

Fast forward to the summer: Sam’s job wasn’t all he had hoped and dreamed and he decided to quit and head back home and get a job back up in the north. Unfortunately, my place was directly between his last place and his hometown, making my place the favorable mid-way stop point. At first his stop-overs were fun. My boyfriend was working overseas and I didn’t have a lot of friends so it was nice to have someone to hang out with. This soon changed when he would start showing up every other week, with little or no notice (read: showing up in my driveway unannounced).

He decided to not get a new place while he was working up north, and rather couch surfed on his time off. Sam turned into my very worst house guest very fast. He had lived with me before, so all of the formalities that exist as a house guest didn’t seem to apply to him. He never once brought a bottle of wine or case of beer, but would always dip into my stash. He would get out of camp and not have time to pick up any weed, so he would smoke all of mine (note: I rarely smoke and a little baggy would last me months… he would go through mine in days). Because of his little addiction, he would constantly sleep on my couch even though he had his own room with a bed. I would come home after working triple shifts between my three jobs to find him passed out on the couch with my dog snoring loudly.

He never once bought groceries, instead he would get baked and eat spoonfuls of my peanut butter. He rarely showered, but when he did would use my towel, which I had been using for a week… gross. He even once left a big turd in the toilet. He would hit on my friends and creep them out to the point of them leaving the bar. I got sick of him and would avoid going home by staying at my shop or picking up extra shifts. He would come to visit me at work and overall just not take a hint.

His last stay was the worst. He showed up with a couple hours notice and stayed for over 10 days. I was working double waitressing shifts at the time and was exhausted when I got home. I sent him a text telling him to not be sleeping on my couch when I got home because I wanted to chill and watch some TV. He was passed out hard when I got home with several peanut butter spoons in the sink. No matter how many pots and pans I banged around, he didn’t budge. I even shook him and asked him to go to bed; he just rolled over and went back to sleep. I thought he was never going to leave! Luckily my new roommate was moving in that weekend so Sam disappeared the go couch surf somewhere else.

I’m sure many readers here have had a flatmate like me. I’m a 24 year old male, fairly intelligent, but unfortunately a bit a loser and a computer addict. I never played WoW, but more tended just to spend a lot of time on the internet on forums, and a bit of Warcraft 3. I’m not consistantly like this, it’s more I get into these depressive spells that turn into a vicious cycle, I start playing some games, and that makes me depressed and not want to go out, and so I just play games to pass the time. This year I managed to get kicked out of four flats in my study year.

The first flat I moved into was with the 30 something year old lady, her boyfriend, and another guy. At this time I was actually on supervision for doing graffiti, and my PO told me that I had to tell any potential flats about this, which did make find a flat at the start of the study year a bit harder, and so I was really thankful that this lady was OK with it. The landlady was Iranian, into a bit of spirituality, was a counselor for a living. Also she seemed to have a bit of a struggle with her eating habits (she was overweight), she would talk to me about how she was wheat free, but then told me one day, “I’m trying just to eat what my body tells me – today it was donuts.” Anyway, she was a little passive aggressive, and example was I had just done the dished, and she told me off for not microwaving the sponge afterward (I didn’t really see that as a big deal – she could have just microwaved it herself, and save having to tell me off). After one month the landlady told me that she had some friends coming to stay, and that when I moved in she didn’t know if they were coming or not. To this day I don’t know if this was the truth or not. When I went to move out – she accused me of using her shampoo (I didn’t), and breaking a baby lemon tree (I don’t think I did, I suspect it was her partner’s son), and wanted reimbursement for it, which she took from the bond.

Next flat was with a fairly normal young couple, the arrangement was that they were the lease holders and the other flatmates would pay a fixed rate, rather than a share of the rent, so they were getting a good deal on the rent when the flat was full. The flat quite a nice house in a dodgy area. I hardly talked to the girl of the couple, and so was only ever told off by the guy. Things I did that annoyed them: general messiness in the kitchen – I never left the kitchen hugely messy, but I might have missed a bit of wiping down. These guys were pretty tidy, so it was fair enough. I was smoking weed in my room for about two weeks before they noticed and told me that it wasn’t on. Sleeping on the bed with out sheets – (more the sheets riding up and me not remaking the bed). And yeah – my staying inside was pretty bad at this time. I lasted about two or three months at this place before they asked me to leave.

Next flat was with some students, it was quite a run down flat which was good in contrast to my last flat – I felt I could relax a bit. The first night I moved in, I asked if we were allowed to smoke weed inside – which was a bit of faux pas – none of them smoked weed, and were actually a bit anti – I assumed that as they were so casual that they did. They would sit in the living room with their laptops and post things on each others Facebook Walls and talk about it. I thought it was pretty lame. The only other guy flatmate was idolised by the girls, he was quite loud and obnoxious in my opinion, he really admired cops, and struck me as the kind of guy who would be a real power tripping cop. These guys almost never did the dishes. One night I went to party that it turned out the guy flatmate was also going to. I ended up getting quite drunk (as you do), and taking the piss out of him, when he came back to house while a few of us were just milling around
outside about to go into town, saying “Alright guys, I’m here to shut the party down.” The next day they asked me to leave – citing “it wasn’t working out” – the real reason was because their mate had just broken up with his girlfriend and so needed a new flat. Oh well.

I quickly found a new flat that seemed real cool. It was with some alternative arty type guys, in a fairly rundown house, two of them smoked weed, and for the most part it was real cool. Still spent too much time on computer, at times, but it wasn’t too awkward. One of the flatmates was a small time pot dealer, and his deals were real good. Early on in the piece I fucked up though – at the time we hadn’t sorted out the internet for my computer, because we needed a multiport router – so I was just to use his computer, which the other flatmates did. He left his personal stash right in front of the computer, and helped myself to a few bongs. He’d been weighing it to see if I did and confronted me about it and I owned up. He told me “not cool” and I didn’t do it anymore, and by that time we had sorted the internet out for my computer. The flatmate that didn’t smoke weed was a bit anal/uptight (for example he’d bitch when the dishes didn’t get done)
- but actually quite a cool dude who I enjoyed talking to. I was pretty good at doing the dishes in this flat, better than the other two flatmates.

Annoyed this uptight flatmate by using his Ranch dressing while I was really drunk making toasted sandwiches. One time I was running late for a test, and I didn’t have enough change for the bus, so took 70c from his room and paid him back that night. It annoyed him, but I don’t think either of us thought it was a huge deal. (Earlier on I had been in the habit of going into his room and reading his comics, but I stopped that). But the shit kinda hit the fan one night when one afternoon the other two flatmates invited me to get drunk with them. So got nicely drunk, and then we happened to be in kitchen where one of the flatmates German girlfriend was cooking dinner. I asked her “So what do they teach you about WWI and WWII in school?” and she got defensive – She got upset and marched out. I went outside and was having a bit a laugh about it, and the other flatmate came out – and told me that I’d have to be out in two weeks, – I told him that I
didn’t think it was a big deal – and he also cited me taking his weed earlier and the borrowing 70c.