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.

When one of my housemates had to move interstate, my remaining housemate had a close friend, Bill, who was keen to take his place. I had my reservations, as his tight-arse reputation preceded him. But he seemed preferable to an unknown.

Upon moving in, a number of minor incidents began unfolding, including:

- A complete adversity to cleaning, leading to a stink cloud encompassing his bedroom so thick you could do backstroke through it.

- Rotating between a total of two meals when it was his turn to cook.

- Mysterious white stains found on the couch following a night out (no, he did not have company).

- Leaving a 1kg block of cheese in direct 35°C sunlight for an entire day, which was returned to the fridge for consumption.

- After said block of cheese ended up in his bed overnight to teach him a lesson, the same block found its way back in the fridge the following morning, seemingly ready for consumption once more.

Enough to make you shake your head and laugh, but things you tend to expect having shared with various housemates in the past. This all escalated however when the other housemate moved out, and we found a new fun and attractive girl to move in.

I often found myself waking in the middle of the night to her yelling at him to get out of her room, after he’d crawled into her bed while she was asleep. As creepy and unfair as this was for her, this paled in comparison to the day the household was abruptly disbanded. One Sunday, Bill returned home at about 6 a.m. following a drug fueled bender at a music festival.

That Monday night, we returned home from work to find Bill on the couch having spent the day at home by himself, behaving as though nothing other than his almighty hangover was amiss. Until our new housemate went to her room to find belongings knocked about, picture frames smashed with shattered glass over the floor, her underwear draw strewn across the room and her covers pulled back with a load of white sticky mess sprayed across her mattress. One messed up individual.

My Very Worst Roommate, was a guy I will call P. I moved to Singapore and needed someone to help pay expenses on a good apartment. I was in the middle of a difficult divorce and one of the only conditions I made to P when he moved in was, “No hookers or drugs, this house is my sanctuary, it’s where my son comes and I need the house to be safe.” I should note that prostitution is not illegal in Singapore. P had moved to Singapore on the pretext of working for a big cable channel. It turned out that he didn’t have any work at all. He wasn’t missing rent, but he was looking awfully worried and I was concerned about missing rent if he didn’t find work. I made a call and got him a job on oil rigs making good money.  He started the job and I headed to China the following week.

I was in China when I got a call from our condo manager at 3 a.m. The manager was furious. “Mr Smith, why are you throwing things out of your 11th story window? You will hit someone! You will get in trouble.” I told him I was in China, and he should call the police because there was nothing I could do. Five minutes later I get a call from my maid. She said, “Sir, P wants me to come and let him into the apartment, what should I do?” Not having any idea of what was going on, I told her I suppose she should but, I could not figure out how P could be locked out – the door needed the key to be turned from the outside to lock it. I texted P and said, “Mate, I don’t know what you’re doing but throwing shit out the window is illegal in Singapore” and decided to ignore the problem.

I get back a week later from China to face a shit storm of trouble. The stuff that had been thrown out was obviously destroyed, but had also damaged the lower ground unit patio roofs – to the tune of $40,000!

Not only that, but there was a lot of stuff missing from the flat including all the chess pieces from my set, a beautiful brass compass and presents from the under the Christmas tree. P would not own up to what had happened and it was only with the help of the security guards and police that I worked out what might have happened.

He had brought a hooker home, probably to celebrate his first paycheck – we saw her coming in on the CCTV tapes. She wasn’t a she though – even I could tell that on the tapes. I assume some sort of dispute over payment or the hooker’s gender had broken out. She had forced P out of the apartment, locked the door and proceeded to trash the place. To give him due credit, he cleaned up a lot of the mess, but tell tale signs were there. He paid for the damages and managed to get off the criminal charges (the cops confirmed he blamed a girl for the damage, but could not provide her name.) When he was locked out and called the maid, she later confirmed to me that when she helped him get back in, he had gone in and there was yelling but he had refused to let her in.

P still works in the oil and gas industry – he’s called the “Chess Master” by all who know this story.

My very worst roommate was once my best friend, but things quickly changed when we moved into a group house and I discovered some rather disgusting habits. I met N freshman year and we became fast friends. We lived next door to each other in the dorms sophomore year.  Although we went to a celebrated party school, she began doing some hardcore drugs that I wasn’t into.  But we remained good friends and we signed on for a group house with a couple other close friends for our junior year. The day I moved in over the summer before fall quarter began, I noticed that she was very upset. She admitted that she had stolen some money from her last roommate, who I knew very well and was friends with. At first I thought no big deal, $20 or something, she’ll get over it.  Turns out that N had taken her former roommate’s credit card and taken over $2,000 from an ATM over the course of one quarter.  The police questioned her and she ratted out some dealers on campus in order to not receive any jail time. So now she had an irate former roommate and local drug dealers on her bad side.

She had a job that summer at a local clothing boutique. She would often come home and give me “presents” like shirts or little knick-knacks.  I was naive enough to think she was just getting a discount or they had extra merchandise. Turns out she had been stealing from them for months and eventually got fired. I would only find out about this months later when I also found out that she got arrested at a grocery store for stealing cigarettes.  So even though she was a rampant thief and was lying to me, I thought she was just going through a rough patch and would get back on track.  Even after she got kicked out of school for blatantly plagiarizing a paper for a psychology class, I figured that she would either re-enroll or wait a year and go somewhere else. I still had faith in her and wanted to be her friend.

She paid rent, but almost never had money for bills (which were minimal as there were five of us sharing a three bedroom house).  Yet she always had plenty of weed, coke and ecstasy — the latter of the two were becoming an increasing habit and starting to scare me. She convinced me that she had it all under control. I was no angel myself and we often threw parties in the house.  We were all underage at the time so I didn’t feel I had the right to judge what she wanted to do to her body. Although the lack of paying bills was starting to get to all of us.

She was having sex with lots of random guys at this time, most of whom she met online and would have one night stands with, and never hear from again. She shared a bedroom with one of my roommates, J. They had a large living space, which they promised to use if they ever had overnight guests. On more than one occasion N would be in bed with some random guy having sex and J would flat out yell at them to get out. Sometimes she would, other times she would wait till J fell back asleep then continue entertaining her guests. One day she came home after being gone for two days with no contact with any of us on the arm of a much older man.  We were all 19 or 20, this guy had to be in his early 40′s. She claimed he was a friend of her dad’s from the Navy. At this time I was still giving her the benefit of the doubt so I believed her. But the last straw for both J and I was when we discovered this “friend of her dad’s” was actually some creepy dude she met online who would drive from two hours away where he lived, pick her up and take her to a motel, then leave her hundreds of dollars at a time. She quite literally had become a crack whore.

So the stealing, lying, not paying bills, drug binges and prostitution just became too much. We confronted her mother about these issues when she called asking where N was because she hadn’t heard from her in weeks. She then confronted us and accused us of telling our mutual friends about the whole stealing incident from her former roommate. We told her right then and there that she had a week to get out, get help and clean up her life. It was really hard to lose such a close friend, but having no self-esteem and an addictive personality turned her into a monster. She asked me to still be her friend and I said I would if she promised to get her life together. This was about 10 years ago. I just read in our hometown news that she was arrested as an accessory to armed robbery.

Jason was a 32-year-old tattoo artist who was apprenticing my husband Brandon at the tattoo shop that they worked at together and later took over. He was from Louisiana and claimed to have had a shop in New Orleans that was destroyed in Katrina. He then moved to Philly to be with his girlfriend and their daughters. His portfolio was well done and extensive, so we thought he was legit. It wasn’t until much later that we discovered most of it was stolen from other artists he had “worked” with. He was very rude to me from the day we met and claimed that’s just the way he deals with women, since he grew up with four older sisters who used to beat the crap out of him on a regular basis. I have come to believe he deserved it.

Jason and his psycho girlfriend Angie shared her car. She refused to let him drive it all the way up to us, so Brandon or I would have to meet them halfway to pick up Jason and bring him back to our place, where he would stay from Thursday to Monday night when the shop was open, and then one of us would take him home. Very rarely when Angie would come pick him up, they would fight for an hour or so before actually leaving. I was left in charge of their two very young children while they holed up in our (future) baby’s room to scream at each other. When he wasn’t at the shop working (i.e. taking naps on the couch or playing video games in between actual appointments or eating pizza next door or smoking outside) he was a complete sloth. He would sit on the couch and play our video games and watch our movies, or sit outside and chain smoke.

I was unemployed at the time but made extra money babysitting and selling my crafts. He gradually became even ruder than normal and wouldn’t help me around the house even though I was heavily pregnant because I “didn’t do anything all day”. He would belittle me and often made me cry, then deny it when I told Brandon. He would claim I was just hormonal and emotional and blew his “jokes” out of proportion. Meanwhile he was contributing to the trash and dishes that I was cleaning up after him, eating the food I cooked, and using our shower. He would throw a hissy fit when I wouldn’t let him use my laptop after he downloaded a virus from watching porn on it in the middle of the night. Eventually I started taking it to bed with me at night.

He would bum money off Brandon or me for cigarettes or food, then coveniently forget to pay us back until after he already spent all his own money. Brandon was paying the electric and internet bills for the shop, and Jason was using Brandon’s laptop for the shop’s bookkeeping. He also had Brandon paying him for his apprenticeship, but they didn’t have a written contract. When I would drive him to the shop in the mornings he would complain about how much he hated the North and that winter was too cold and the heater in my car was insufficient. Welcome to December in PA, douche. Maybe if you wore more than a hoodie you would be warmer? (Keep in mind his oldest daughter was three and in that time he still hadn’t learned that PA winters are really cold.)

He also insisted on telling me about his gross sex encounters with random women before he met Angie. In the same breath he told me that pregnant women were “yucky” and that he refused to have sex with Angie while she was pregnant with their daughters. He had been married once before and had a teenage daughter in Louisiana that he lost custody of after his wife found out he’d been cheating their entire relationship. He told this story openly, without a hint of shame. He even tried to cheat on Angie at a party we took him to, but I took pity on her and cockblocked him.

I put up with all of this because he was apprenticing Brandon and I was trying to be supportive. Brandon has a full time job that he would go to during the day, then go to the shop at night to learn from Jason, so often they wouldn’t get home until close to midnight or later. Brandon was getting very stressed out from lack of sleep and overwork, and our relationship was suffering because of it. The last straw was when Jason ruined Valentine’s Day. We were trying hard to make it nice even though I felt like a walrus and Brandon was tired and crabby. We were in the middle of dinner when Jason showed up.

He was supposed to be in Philly with his girlfriend, but he felt that it was acceptable to drive all the way up to our place to borrow money from Brandon so he could take the psycho out… for Valentine’s Day. Brandon forked over the money just to get him the hell out. Jason and Angie then proceeded to sit in our driveway and smoke cigarettes while they argued about where to eat. We could hear them yelling at each other through closed windows. They eventually left but the mood was already dead. Shortly afterwards Brandon told him in no uncertain terms that they were severing ties and not to come to our house again. We were having a baby and couldn’t deal with his manchild bullshit anymore.

About a month later he showed up at our door again. His shop had gone under after Brandon quit and he was demanding Brandon pay him the “rest of the money” he owed him for his apprenticeship. Brandon was at work and I was home alone with the baby, so I called my father-in-law. He came over with Brandon’s two large brothers and they proceeded to toss Jason out of the building, and promised bodily harm if he ever came back. He didn’t. Thank god.

This story is from six years ago.

I decided I wanted to save some money faster than I had been, and in order to do so, I had to rent out my guest room.

I found someone I thought was suitable at the time from a reputable site. His references checked out, we were close in age, etc and he paid for his deposit before arriving.

The first month was great, then it got weird. Really weird.

Here are the next 3 months:

- Started putting the dishes away in very obscured places. Steak knives with the tupperware (there was a knife block)

- Somehow got the impression that rent, bills etc were all now negotiable. Many fights occurred over this.

- He had a date over once, and when she asked if everything in the apartment was mine, I relied “yes,” she responded with “are you sure?” (I started to wonder what he was telling this girl, who btw appeared to be way out of his league).

- When I was in the shower, he would yell through the door that there was a phone call for me. Instead of taking a message, he’d leave the phone on the floor outside the door.

- Other times, I’d be coming out of the bathroom for whatever reason, and he’d be sitting on the floor against the door, cos he needed the bathroom. Um, ever heard of knocking?

- He couldn’t be bothered to wash dishes of mine he used to cook for his date, I came home to find all my pots and pans in the garbage.

- When I had female friends over, he’d go to his bedroom and then come out in with only a towel on, sit on the edge of the couch and life one leg up etc (the same way you would if you were dressed). When asked if he was taking a shower, he’d look at me like I was stupid and say “No.”

- I’d be sharing a bottle of wine with a friend, he’d walked up and say, “I wish I had some wine to enjoy.” Ignoring him, since we’d asked if he’d like any before we opened the bottle.

- I decided to eat dinner at work during late shifts for a week. When asking him why he only did part of the dishes, he would jump up and scream at me that the rest were mine. Impossible as I had been eating lunch and dinner at work for a week. Shuts up and does the dishes. “Accidently” breaking a few in the process.

- G/f’s and I be doing finale touch-ups in the bathroom to go out for the night, leaving in mere minutes, and he’d barge in and start to prepare for a shower. When asked to wait til we were done, he’d yell, “I have to shower NOW.”

- He had decided he no longer wanted to pay for his share of cable and insisted that I move the living room TV into another room. (living room and both bedrooms had tvs)

-Same with the phone, but would use it anyways and forget to erase the outgoing calls.

- He would leave the apartment for whatever reason and leave the door wide open. Thankfully I have great neighbours.

- He stood over me whilst I was on the couch, with his finger in my face, yelling that HE’D be very patient with me and that I better find “my place” as a female, cos I was too aggressive as a woman. As hard as it was, calmly as I could, I advised him to put his finger away and step back, or he would see just how aggressive I could be as a female. This was repeated twice as he did not believe me, until I stood up and walked towards him, with all intentions of breaking his finger.

- He’d bought a car, and with in 48 hours had two hit and runs. He couldn’t stick around, cos 1- he was late for work the first time, 2- he had a date.

I had blogged about it, used some key words and shortly afterwards I got a call from an insurance person from this particular company. Told him everything I knew. A few weeks later and all this weird shit getting to me, he mentioned he was going camping and was going to “trade” in his car for a truck for the weekend, then take it back and say he didn’t like it. I called the dealership where he bought his car, and the insurance guy that called me and informed them both. He didn’t get the truck.

- I was away on holidays and he called to asked if he could use my computer for Powerpoint etc for his job, but needed access to my part of the computer. I had him set up as a guest user on it with restricted access. I agreed because I knew about the project for work he had. Upon returning home, I quickly learned that he made me the guest and himself the administrator, changed all passwords.

At this point we’re 4 months in, and I’ve decided to evict him. The weekend before I had planned to do so, some weird stuff happened.

- My car had been broken into, but nothing had been taken.

- My computer suddenly needed a bioss password. It ended up frying my motherboard, resulting in a new computer, but not til after he was out of the apartment.

- Filling my gas tank up on my way to work. I usually pay cash and drive off, but that day, I had to use the debit machine as I’m about to turn on my car, a gas station attendant punched out my driver-side window screaming not to turn on my car! There was 60 litres of gasoline spewing from the undercarriage of my car. Hazmat, police etc were all called. It was later learned by my mechanic that the new tank we put on a few months earlier had indeed been tampered with.

Of course I’m hysterical at this point. I evict him. He refuses and claims as I rent, not own, I did not have authority to evict him and he would take this up with the building management. Where the hell is guy from? They laughed at him of course.

Moving day arrived, and he refused to leave. I called the police to advise what was taking place and that I was actually becoming afraid. (I do not scare easily). They arrived and were out of sight from the hallway when he returned. I had just finished explaining everything that had been taking place and could not prove he was responsible for any of it etc.

He walked in the door and it must have been the look I gave him, because he started beeking off about how I was lucky to still be alive etc after all the things he did and not to mention my car etc and that he’d still “get” me. The police out of direct view heard. The female officer walked down the hallway and he postured up to her, challenging her in a way. That is until the male officer walked down the hallway. He changed his tune. He was advised to pick up what he could carry and would be escorted from the building.

But he didn’t go quietly. They had to forcibly take the keys from him and issued him a no contact order. I changed my locks that hour.

It was months before I started to relax. Even though the police had told me, if he was to return I could do what was in my power to defend myself.

Thankfully I’ve never heard from him again directly, but did hear from his old employers, as he took a personal loan of substantial amounts and never returned the cash. Same with insurance people regarding his car and defaulting on his payments.

About a year later a girl called me to check his references as a former roommate etc. Poor girl, I had her on the phone for over 20 mins.

I’m pretty sure she didn’t accept his application.

My final year of school I lived with three other girls, two of them, Jessica and Katie, were great and I remain friends with them, but the other one, Crystal, was a disaster. The four of us lived in a three bedroom apartment, Jessica and I had our own rooms but Katie and Crystal had to share a room. The first couple months we lived together, everything was fine – nobody did anything too terrible. Then, all of a sudden, Jessica and Crystal had a fight and stopped talking to each other. I figured it was just their problem and as long as they could be civil with each other and not involve Katie and I in their feud, it would be fine.

However, soon after this happened, Crystal started becoming unbearable for any of us to live with. First it was little things, like talking on the phone late at night. We’d tell her to quiet down, sometimes she did and sometimes she didn’t. Then it was loud music early in the morning while she got ready and the rest of us were still sleeping. She’d apologize whenever any of us complained about it but her behavior didn’t change.

Then it progressed further. She stopped doing her dishes and they just piled up in the sink, making it impossible for the rest of us to use it. She left all her belongings in the living room constantly even when she wasn’t there, so the rest of us weren’t able to use it. She also left nasty hair in the tub, sink, etc… and this is despite her telling all of us that she was a clean person and lecturing us several times about cleaning up after ourselves.

She started bringing all these guys over and having loud sex in her room, and because of this Katie often felt like she couldn’t sleep in the room so she’d end up at the library. She was sleeping with several different guys and then constantly complained that none of these guys actually wanted a relationship. She even had a pregnancy scare at one time. They were loud frat guys too, so whenever they were over, the rest of us wouldn’t be able to study or do anything productive.

Finally, she smoked weed all the time and all over the house. Now, I don’t mind what people choose to do, but at the least, when she lives in an apartment with three people who don’t smoke, she should go smoke outside or at a friend’s place. But no, she’d smoke in the living room and make the entire place smell like weed. When we confronted her about it, she switched to smoking in her bedroom (except when she was home alone, when she’d still smoke in the living room, which didn’t change the fact that the place would smell when we got home). But since that was Katie’s room as well, that was still a problem. Eventually we all got so used to Crystal being high that we couldn’t imagine her when she wasn’t.

After several attempts by all of us to talk to her about her behavior, she basically said she refused to change the way she was. By this time we only had a couple months left to live with her so we just decided to deal with it. The last few weeks together, the bathroom got increasingly dirty, including the sink becoming clogged. We all knew it was from her so the rest of us didn’t do anything about it, and instead left her to fix it along with cleaning the rest of her filth (she was the last one to move out). She then wrote a long tirade on Facebook about how we should all go to hell for making her “clean the whole place herself.” Sorry girl, but all that filth was yours. Thankfully she unfriended us all so we don’t have to deal with her anymore.

MVWR was a girl that I lived with my junior year of college. Lets call her M. After transferring to a new school, I had decided to live in the dorms in order to meet new friends. However I ended up having to live with the most annoying, “OCD”, territorial and passive aggressive person I have ever met.

I had arrived first to move in to the dorms so I was pretty much already settled in when M moved in later. This girl was a petite blonde who liked the Ed Hardy/Jersey Shore Douche look. She also had the loudest voice I have ever heard! Now, I’m not a slob and I did some initial cleanup/sanitatition upon moving in to the apartment; but M went crazy with the cleaning. She scrubbed down all the walls, doors and doorknobs. She also cleaned both of the bathrooms including mopping. At first I thought it would be nice to live with someone so clean, but it did not turn out so great.

A week later, M asked me and the other roommate (X, who is a MVWR story all of her own) if one of the bathrooms could specificly belong to her while both of us shared the other one.  At first I said no, because it did not make any sense since there were three of us, and what if someone needed to use the bathroom while someone was in it etc. These logical statements made M burst into tears and cry/sniffle about how “it wasn’t respectful.” So we ended up letting her use the small bathroom while we used the big one.

A month into living with M, I noticed that her “OCD cleaning problem” appeared to not be a real issue because M was actually a very messy person! She would make ramen with my pots and never clean after (even though she somehow managed to burn the ramen and thus the pan). She would also clip her toenails on the living room coffee table and never clean it up. Gross! Then there was “her” bathroom. It was utterly disgusting, with the toilet never flushed, dust everywhere, used tampons on the floor etc. There were also red lipstick kiss marks on the mirror that were a bitch to clean off later.

The last problem was her psychotic ex-boyfriend, who shall be called Duke. She had broken up with him because he had abused her, so I have no idea why she would get back with him. The climatic moment was one morning when they got into a fight and Duke shoved M up against a wall. Somehow something glass was shattered, I found tiny shards of glass right in the hallway for months after.

Eventually X and I filed a police report against Duke because of his violent behaviour (he would try to start fights with us over imagined slights, even if we were sleeping or our doors were closed) and this was the final straw for M. She finally moved out, but never really cleaned up after herself and also left about 20 huge nails in the wall from pictures. We calculated that M probably got fined about $2,000 for her apartment damages.

I had a few roommates in college, but by far my very worst roommate was living with me earlier this year. Thankfully, she didn’t last more than three months in my house. I rent a family friend’s house and my mother, husband, and my stepkids share it. Someone close to the family needed a place to stay in my city to go to school.

She was a slob. She would make food in the kitchen and dirty nearly every dish, never cleaned up after herself (mac ‘n cheese juice boiled over and baked onto the stovetop, dishes everywhere, etc). How hard is it to rinse it off and throw it in the dishwasher? She would leave her dishes and dirty clothes all over the living room and tried to take over the whole bathroom, which wasn’t all that big. She would do laundry and then leave it in the middle of the floor in the living room and then complain that the dogs would tip over the basket.

She had a lot of annoying little quirks, like chomping her food with her mouth open and was completely irresponsible and rude. She didn’t have a job or go to school yet and let someone else pay her bills, she would sleep until 2PM or 3PM and be noisy all night even though I get up at 4:45AM. She wouldn’t take the garbage out or clean up around the house. She would ask me to take her places right before I was going to bed, ask to loan her money, and ask me to go places with her and call in to work the next day.

By far the funniest part happened after a really bad snowstorm (about 17 inches). I had fractured and dislocated my ankle the week before, so obviously couldn’t be much help but I did get out and shovel for about an hour until my mom (who lives in the upstairs half of the house) made me go inside. We had to beg and threaten and basically push my roommate out to get her to go help.

After maybe 10-15 minutes outside, she came back in and said her part was done. When I questioned it, she told me that she was starting to sweat (after 10-15 MINUTES) and if she stayed out in the cold she would get hypothermia and DIE. Needless to say, I made her go back outside (with her swearing under her breath about me not helping – hello? Cast on the ankle?) and a few weeks later she moved out and complained to other people that she was tired of being treated like a child.

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.