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 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!

At 18, I moved into a shared house with my boyfriend and four other guys. Living with all of those guys was a challenge on its own–it quickly turned into a brofest–but there was one dude in particular that sucked.

T was a proud misogynist. In his view, there were two types of women: bitches and pussy. Pussy were women who’d have sex with him, bitches were ones who weren’t. Needless to say, he knew a lot of bitches. I tired of his constant “Women are stupid and useless” mantra, but none of my roommates–or my boyfriend–would back me up against him. Turned out they were all a bit sexist themselves, and were more than willing to listen to T’s crap. When I complained, I was told to stop being so sensitive. Also, my roommates collectively decided that all the housework was my problem. Even when a sinkful of dishes was demonstrably not mine, they would complain and yell until I finally gave in and cleaned it up for them.

The sexism was but a minor quibble compared to the other stuff. For one thing, T loved to eat. And he didn’t like to spend money on food. On several occasions, I came home from work starving only to find he had eaten the food I had bought, and I didn’t have enough money to buy more. Soon I had to buy nonperishables and keep them in my room. He only targeted my food for eating.

Another thing he liked to do was to destroy stuff and then say, “I took care of that.” Like the boat my boyfriend got from his uncle: T shot it up and then informed us he’d “taken care of it.” Another time he burned down the storage shed in our backyard, in which the other roomies liked to hang out in during the summer. It also was full of boxes of my books and my boyfriend’s drumset. When I confronted him angrily about the damage (unbelievably, my other roommates weren’t angry about the fact that the fire he set destroyed our shed AND almost burned to the house) he laughed, told me to untwist my panties, and tossed me a twenty.

The best thing of all came later, though. T was working at a computer superstore, and all the roommates (except me) were enjoying his employee discount by purchasing computers and other equipment. One night I came home to find all the doors wide open and my house crawling with cops. His “employee discount” was really a five-fingered one. All the stuff in the house was hot, and I ended up getting questioned by the suspicious cops. I was freaked out because I couldn’t find my cats, but fortunately they had been scared and hid under the bed. That was the last straw. While T was in jail overnight, I called a meeting with the roommates, to talk about kicking him out. I was outvoted four to one–the other roommates insisted that he wasn’t a bad guy, and we shouldn’t abandon him in his hour of need. Enough was enough, and I grew a spine and moved out.

My freshman year of college, I was randomly paired with this girl. By the end of our first week her side of the room was a total mess. There was clothes and food everywhere. She was even sleeping with trash and leftover takeout in her bed. Finally, I asked her if she could please clean up. She then called her mom and started screaming that she couldn’t “stand the white bitch anymore,” and demanded that her mother come and take care of things. Whatever her mom said, she must not have liked because she began to cry and scream that I was oppressing her and that her mother didn’t love her and didn’t care. She started ripping up her books, pulling at her hair, smacking herself, throwing things and smearing old food on the walls, the whole time explaining to her mom what she was doing and telling her it was her fault. At least point I was seriously freaked out so I went down the hall to a friend’s dorm and called housing who evicted her right then and there.

I found this posting that seemed too good to be true. It was five minutes from my work, allowed pets and it was $100 under my budget. I met the guy who has posted the listing and he seemed pretty decent. He was a student and it sounded like it would be a quiet house, with not much partying going on. The first month went fine, with only minor incidents. However, as time progressed, things got really bad. As I got to know my fellow housemates, the drama just seemed to explode. One of the housemates was a girl who worked as a personal trainer, but turned out to be doing some stripping on the side. I normally wouldn’t be bothered by that, but she was so inconsiderate of everyone else that I lost any respect for her. She had a cat that she took very poor care of. I have two cats of my own and she blamed my cat for peeing all over the place, even though it was her cat. She never cleaned its litter box and it took her several weeks to take it into to vet to get care for a urinary tract infection.

I work with animals for a living and it pained me to see this. She would also be gone for four days out of the week due to her stripping job and the cat would be left in her room, without food or water. I would sneak into her room to take care of it and let it out of her hell-hole of a room. She would repeatedly clog the toilet and wouldn’t unclog it. She wouldn’t buy toilet paper, even though we had made it perfectly clear we would take turns supplying such communal items. She even wiped her ass on my hand towel, denied it and then blamed it on me because I had left it out (hanging on the towel rod). The entire time I lived there, I saw her do dishes once, even though she probably used the most dishes out of anyone.

This same girl also decided to take in another girl she “worked” with, telling us that it would only be a few weeks. This girl would hog the bathroom for hours, blasted awful music at 3am on a Tuesday and she would leave used pregnancy tests on the kitchen counter. After leaving the bathroom, the tub would be filled with brownish water and tons of floating little curly hairs. Yum yum. I left three months into a year lease. The last I heard, the girl who was only supposed to be there for a few weeks had moved into my old room with a guy she’d been dating for three weeks.

K moved into my 4-bedroom condo less than a month ago and is being evicted this month.

On Saturday, I came home at 6:30 p.m. from a friend’s house and found 20 people in my house dancing to techno music. Each was high on either GHB, coke, MDMA, ketamine, or a combination. I was asked multiple times if I “needed something” as a tray of various white substances and pills was placed in front of me. I was a bit stressed and needed to get out of there. I escaped to the park with my my dog to process what I walked in on. After an hour, I walked back home as I needed to speak with a few clients in Taiwan. When I went to my room, I found a girl passed out in my bed. I walked downstairs to the closest muscular man and politely asked him to remove the girl from my room.

On this day, one of the other housemates, M was away, and another, R, was hiding in his bedroom from the craziness. At a loss of what to do, I do my work and lock the dog and cat in my room with me. I spoke to K around 9 p.m. when he told me that everyone was leaving. At 11 p.m., he told me the same thing. At 12, R invited me to go out with him while he advertises for a club. We returned home around 4:30 a.m. The party was still going. I found K and told him he must remove everyone from the house and that I’m not comfortable with this many drugs and people (whom he just met the previous night) in the house. He told me that because he did the dishes that I should let him have his friends over. I attributed his apathetic response to him being high. Everyone left shortly thereafter to go to another party. A few days later, I explained why I was upset. He told me that his party was no different than when R and I have our three mutual friends over for cocktails as he ‘didn’t know them’. He didn’t understand why it was a bit dangerous to a woman to have 20 strangers drugged out in her home,

I found out later that that this party at my place was the after-party from their partying the previous night, They had gone straight from the after hours place to the rooftop of my condo building then into our home.

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 am unfortunately living with MVWR until June when his lease is up.

I bought my condo last year and looked online for a roommate. I am recently divorced and managed to start my life over as an independent single woman. I’m proud of my house and have made it a nice, cozy home. Well, I found this guy and had pity for him because he was getting divorced and moving out of his ex’s house. What he didn’t tell me before moving in was that he had a DUI, no car, no job, and was waiting for his lawyer to complete a car accident settlement. He’d lost his health insurance, so instead of paying cash for meds for his back pain, he drank up to a case of beer a day, followed by shots, while checking Facebook from my couch. This would end in loud, late-night mournful sing-a-longs with his laptop.

One night he was so drunk  that he told me he wanted to “puke scotch all over my tits” and another night he “accidentally” took a muscle relaxer after a day of drinking. He ended up baking a tomato on a cookie sheet and putting water to boil in a casserole dish on the stove. He’d managed to fall asleep with his hand down the garbage disposal before I told him the kitchen was closed. Another day I got a text that said, “If you see a young girl in the house when you get home, don’t freak out – her boyfriend beat her up and she needs a place to stay.” (Oh, no problem! Not freaking out!) That girl stayed for a week and a half.

Last weekend, I came home after being away, and the whole place smelled like there’d been a tire fire. I cleaned all day and when I finally saw him I asked him about the smell and he said, “Oh, do you think it was the pot?” Now, I don’t care if people smoke marijuana, but he signed a lease that said absolutely no illegal substances in my house.

I was nice enough to let him stay through to the end of the lease. What’s most shocking is that when I told him he absolutely had to be out the day his lease ended, he was genuinely surprised!

My Very Worst Roommate just moved out today, but is inexplicably still sitting in my living room, causing me to delay celebrating that she’s finally going to be (somewhat) out of my life. Almost four years ago, I met my girlfriend, and her best friend, MVWR.  Our relationship was budding, things were going well, we were about to move in together when MVWR broke up with her significant other and needed a place to stay. She moved in with my girlfriend and I shortly followed. She was schizophrenic, didn’t pay rent on time, once “fixed” my car by causing $2,300 worth of damage by changing a fuse incorrectly and in general drove me crazy. She met someone new and moved in with them a few months later. A year and a half later and single once again, MVWR once again needed a place to stay. When we had previously lived together, we were three adults and a child living in a small two-bedroom apartment, so I chalked the previous experience up to the small quarters and wanting our privacy and tried again.

We had a huge house and our roommate at the time had just moved out, so, in MVWR moved once again. We gave her a major break on the rent because she was on SSI and couldn’t work because of her craziness and she was supposedly going to help us out with renovations on the home. She never paid rent on time, stopped helping with the cleaning after five months, went through a series of jobs and once used the rent money she wasn’t paying us to buy a bag of pot and a Wii. She was constantly making up stories, not remembering what actually happened (like claiming I had told her it was okay for her to spend rent money on pot and a Wii) and constantly borrowed everyone else’s car since she didn’t have one (at one point, she caused a huge dent/scratch in mine that still hasn’t been repaired).

She thought she was smart, but was a complete immature, selfish, idiotic asshole with no common courtesy. The voices she heard were even creepier, but she’d usually just hide in her bedroom. The bedroom was a place she spent a lot of time, with all the various people she was dating that she’d bring over and expose our daughter too, only to have them dump her when she told them of her diagnosis. I wanted her to move out long ago, but my girlfriend feels an obligation to her.  MVWR was finally looking for a new place when the last straw came a month and a half ago.

During one of her schizophrenic breaks, she tried to choke my girlfriend – her best friend – with a pool cue. She went to the psych ward and was completely unaware that any of it happened.  Somehow, she convinced them to discharge them three days later, and while she was supposed to go to a halfway house for a transition, she instead chose to come straight home. Thankfully, she found a new apartment. If only it wasn’t just four blocks away, with my expensive comforter and various other belongings sitting in it. And if only, when she just left, she hadn’t said, “See you tomorrow.”