I’ve been pretty hit and miss with roommates over the years, but My Very Worst Roommate has to be C from my junior year of college. My junior year was shaping up to be the best yet, until one of my roommates ended up bailing at the last minute. In desperation, I turned to Craigs List to find a last-minute replacement.

When I first met him, C seemed totally normal if a bit on the quiet side. I should tell you that we had this crazy idea that instead of having two rooms with two guys in each, we were going to have one bedroom with four guys sleeping in it and then one room with just our desks for studying. We thought it was a good idea and C seemed down with it, so he became our new roommate. Things started off normal enough. C took really long showers (like an hour and a half) and then would spend an hour in the bathroom before he went to bed. It seemed a bit weird, but to each their own.

The real reason C was MVWR came one morning when one of the other guys in the room informed me that he heard some “solo activity” in C’s bed the previous night. I didn’t believe him until the next night when I woke up to hear the unmistakable sound of someone enjoying themselves. There was no doubt in my mind that C was pleasuring himself in a room with three other people. This became an ongoing thing. I was on the bottom bunk and C was on the top, so I would regularly wake up and cough or loudly roll over to try and give him the hint that we knew what was going on, but he would only stop for a minute before continuing. We were all too embarrassed to say anything to him, so it just went on like this for a couple months.

When it came time for winter break, C told me that he was going to take his desk home to get a smaller one. I said it was fine, but he insisted that his took up too much room. I thought this was strange, but at this point I was accustomed to C’s strangeness. When school started back up again, C didn’t come back. He didn’t my calls and when we looked around, we realized that he took all of his stuff home. I was actually pretty relieved that he wasn’t going to come back, but it was just so bizarre that he decided to sneak away.

I owned a house while going to university, and a year after graduation, all my sweet roomates had moved out and moved on with life. While looking for new roomates, I got an email from a girl who was looking for a place when she moved to town. I’ve had a few female roomates, and they were generally pretty good.

This girl passed all the initial tests by email and then by phone. Within two days of moving in, she had a job serving at a pretty classy restaurant in town. So initially, this looked pretty good. She was pretty good looking, and really looked hot every night as she went to work at this upscale restaurant.

One day I had to go through her room to get to the storage space. I couldn’t actually see the floor. There were three huge closets in the room (every girl’s dream I thought) and she had not used a single one. Everything she owned was just dumped on the floor. This was a month in, so there was definitely time to clean up. There was also a weird smell. The grossest part of the room was the underwear all over the floor with HUGE brown streaks on all of them. From that moment on, I could never look at her the same way, knowing how much of a pig this hot girl was.

It got worse though. The smell then started. Three months after she’d moved in, I’d decided to rent my house out to a family, instead of the hassle of having a constant stream of students and trying to find new roomates every semester. I’d show the house to potential tenants, who loved the house, until they walked down the stairs. When you started down the stairs, you could smell her room. I don’t know, or even want to try guess at what the smell was. But it got so bad that I eventually went in with a friend’s gasmask and threw out a bunch of stuff. (This was after I opened her door once, and then had to sprint to the nearest bathroom to throw up. I didn’t throw up, but definitely dry-heaved a few times)

I showed about 12 potential tenants through the house, who all said “we’ll call you later,” and of course, never did. Every one of them was completely grossed out by this basement room. I eventually got this girl out of the house, and after renting a carpet cleaner, and then getting professionals into the room, got the carpet relatively clean. (The girl also did laundry on her last day, which I realized was the first time she did laundry, in three months)

The next five showings I had all wanted the house after that, and now it’s rented to an OCD clean freak family, a great tenant to have.

College was a fantastic time in my life, but it certainly didn’t start off that way. Firstly, my mother contrived to stick me into an all-male dorm under some silly notion that I wouldn’t get into trouble. Truth be told, guys who live in coed dorms tend to be a lot more civilized than their animal counterparts in all-male dorms–but I guess that’s water under the bridge at this point.

Secondly, I had not one, not two, but THREE roommates, in what they called a “quad” (which was basically a slightly larger room–nowhere NEAR the same amount of square footage per person). Granted, I was a total nerd and a basket case (from never having to share personal living space as I grew up), but these guys were assholes, too. The nerd blood was in the water on day one–and these guys clearly relished in making my life miserable.

One of the aggravating factors was that I resisted partying with my roommates, which they correctly interpreted as a snub. They were able to get back at me, though. One night I got totally smashed with my friends, and paid the price in the hall bathroom (in these dorms, there was only one large shared bathroom per hall). The bathroom was a locker-room type setup, with benches in front of the showers. Anyway, after my stomach was sufficiently emptied, I stumbled to one of the benches and passed out. My next memory was my three roommates standing over me with the exact same smile on their faces. One of them finally spoke:

“Hey, do you realize some dude’s naked, hairy ass was pressed on that bench? Your face is right up on it, dude!”

I passed out again, and I remember thinking “he has a point.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

During my sophomore and junior years of college, I had the extreme misfortune of living with my three Very Worst Roommates.

R was a spoiled brat. She would always call her mom and yell at her to give her more money, and said many times, “If I can throw money at a problem to make it go away, I’ll totally do it.” If I was going to the store half a block away, she would whine for me to get candy for her. When I couldn’t find it, she’d blame me instead of getting it herself. She required total silence from 9 p.m. onwards, but would be blasting her music at 7 a.m. She was a slob, too, never doing any dishes, and letting piles of them get moldy under her bed. She was extremely fat, and her doctor told her to watch her calorie intake. R took this to mean that every morning for breakfast, she could have a bagel slathered with cream cheese, bacon, more cheese and several eggs. Not exactly Jenny Craig.

C was a self-righteous prima donna. She was constantly dating, and cheating on, new guys and using them for their cars. She was super messy most of the time, except when she went on cleaning kicks for the entire apartment (though not nearly often enough). I’m pretty neat and usually helped out when she did this, except she would scream at all of us for not helping her. She slept with my boyfriend between sophomore and junior years, and apparently all three of MVWRs knew for months and didn’t tell me. C was self-absorbed, and convinced she was the next Janis Joplin, spending hours practicing with her lame reggae band of white kids.

L was the best of the three because she was constantly with her boyfriend and out of the house. But when she was back, her and C were inseparable- gossiping about me and my friends behind my back, and generally being catty and spiteful. Halfway through my junior year, all three of MVWR sat me down and explained to me that they didn’t like me as a person (me!) and asked me to move out when the lease was up. I spent a couple weeks miserable in my room, alone and abusing painkillers, before realizing it was a blessing in disguise. I now live with two wonderful girls, and am dating a much better guy. I just hope I never have to live with anyone like the last MVWR crew again.

A was randomly assigned to me in my freshman year of college, and I could tell on the very first day of school that we were not going to be best buddies.

As I began to settle into a group of friends, MVWR usually tagged along with us wherever we went, generally alienating everyone in the group with backhanded insults. For example, my friend K mentioned that she was considering rushing a sorority, and A asked, “So you can be, like, a dumb sorority girl?” in a valley girl voice.  She also asked awkward questions, like whether we thought sex outside of missionary position was sinful. Whenever someone said “fuck you” to anyone, she would respond with, “Right here, on the table?”

One night about a week into school we hung out and drank in a guy friend’s dorm room. I left early, and A ended up staying the night. When A arrived the next morning, she looked as though she’d been strangled. Her neck was covered in about 30 hickeys, which she had received from our friend’s roommate, who’d been passed out drunk when I left.  The guy later reported that at some point during the make-out session she told him, “I think I’ve just been bitten by a vampire!”

All of her weirdness might have been tolerable, had it not been for the smell in our room. A loved to eat salmon-flavored cream cheese, which she would spread on crackers with the same crusty knife that she never washed. The knife would sit out on a cardboard box that she used as a table, which was also covered in crusty salmon dip and made the whole room smell like fish. The smell was so bad that my friends refused to hang out in my room at all. To counter the stench, I went out and bought some air freshener.

One day, I came into the room and was met with a particularly pungent odor, so I sprayed some air freshener, and A poked her head out of her loft bed and looked at me like I’d just killed a puppy. About 20 minutes later she posted a note on Facebook titled “Air Freshener,” which never specifically mentioned me, but discussed how she generally felt unwanted (I’ll admit that by this point I had stopped inviting her to hang out with my friends and me), and friends posted comments saying things like “Don’t let her get to you!” To this day I have no idea why my spraying air freshener was so offensive to her. It was a very long rest of the year after that incident.

My freshman year roomate was an ultra-religious Korean guy named Paul. At first we got along by ignoring each other, but as I spent more time in my dorm room doing work, I was exposed to more of his peculiar tendencies. He only listened to two types of music: Christian rock, which sounded like Third Eye Blind only all the lyrics were about Jesus and hard-core Korean rap, which sounded exactly like American rap, except everything’s in Korean besides the occasional “motherfucker.”  He would watch one of the Rush Hour movies over and over again, but not the whole movie. Just the same 4-minute sequence where Chris Tucker almost falls off a building. Over and over again. Every night.

Then things got weirder. I would come back to my room when the weather was still warm, to find him in nothing but boxers and the thermostat cranked up past 80 degrees. He sang along to his music in a high falsetto. He’d leave his laptop open with pictures of him and other Korean guys hugging, wearing very little clothes. But at the same time, he always had his Bible on his desk, and updated his AIM profile to declare that he “hated fags.” As someone with several gay relatives, I’m fine with homosexuality, but people who have their true nature suppressed and distorted by religion are all but insane. I avoided my dorm as much as I could, but one night, everything collided into a mess.

I came back to my dorm room in a hurry at around 9 PM on a Thursday and finding the door unlocked, walked right inside. Paul was in the sink area, wearing nothing but boxers as usual. As I walked in, I looked ahead and saw a completely naked guy sitting on his bed, feet propped up like he was resting. A moment of utterly awkward silence. I quickly grabbed shoved my stuff into my backpack, as the other guy hopped up and struggled into his pants. As I made a hasty exit, I could hear the other kid say, “So Paul… need uh, any more help with your, uh, Comp Sci?” Comp Sci my ass.

I have had several bad roommates over the years, but K definitely took the cake. K was a co-worker who seemed warm and friendly at first, so when she mentioned that she was looking for a roommate, I decided to move in with her.

As these stories go, everything seemed to be going great at first. But it wasn’t long before I started noticing things going missing from my room. At first it was just hair clips and makeup  and then it was clothes. (Never mind that K was about half my size!) After the fifth or sixth thing disappeared, I finally went snooping in her room and found all of my things stuffed under her bed. Like a fool, I said nothing. I just took back my things and started keeping my valuables hidden.

Shortly after I moved in, K broke up with her boyfriend and she started dating a new guy, our boss. I would come downstairs in the morning to Boss sitting in his underwear eating a bowl of cereal. Definitely awkward. Before long, their relationship started to cool, and while they continued to date off and on, K began seeing her ex-boyfriend again, and she took a job at another company.

Things got really weird one day when the boss pulled me aside at work to ask if I’ve heard any updates on how K was doing, and to ask if her mom had made it here from California in time. I had no idea what he was talking about, as I had just seen K a few hours earlier and she seemed fine. Boss then proceeded to berate me for being a terrible roommate. Totally confused, I asked him what on earth he was talking about. Apparently, K had told him that she had to have open heart surgery, and that she was going to be recovering for a while so she wouldn’t be able to see him. That’s when I had to sit Boss down and tell him the truth–K is a pathological liar, and that was her way of breaking things off.

In addition, she lied to her parents about taking classes (which they were paying for). She would try to keep up the charade by leaving and saying she was heading to class, only to come home a few hours later with an armload of new clothes from various stores. (I said she was a liar, not a good one!)

Eventually, I moved in with B, an old college friend and eventually my very BEST roommate. K’s cousin and a friend moved in to my old place with K. Because she was the only one officially on the lease, they would give her their checks for rent and utilities, and she was supposed to be paying the bills. About three months after they moved in, K moved to another state, and it was only a few weeks after that when the utilities were shut off and they received an eviction notice from the landlord. She had been pocketing their money and not paying the bills.

I have no idea what became of K, but I imagine that she is somewhere out there still scamming her way through life.

I live in a flat with four other people. I am on good terms with all flatmates (we call them flatmates instead of roommates here in New Zealand) but one, my MVWR. She has many irritating habits, such as soaking the bathmat with at least one litre of water every morning upon leaving the shower, never cleaning anything, (this is really gross) leaving menstrual blood on the toilet seat, and having her transient father who lives out of a van, stay in our spare room from time to time.

I am also an amateur artist, painting the occasional canvas. Much to my dismay, I found aformentioned father in my room as I was going to bed at 12:30 a.m., critiquing the works, and giving me advice on brush strokes and layering. And at 6 a.m. yesterday morning, I awoke to a cracking sound as she drove her car into the front of our house, failing to note the difference between first and reverse gear.

As if this wasn’t enough, I came home in the evening to find a canvas I had painted for her (during early days, when we were on better terms) returned to my room, along with a note telling me she wanted to give it back, citing an “icy tension” she felt between us. She apparently also didn’t know what she had done to “cause angst.”

I currently live with MVWR, W. I’ve come to realize that it’s really not just W and myself that live at my apartment. It’s actually quite the paradise for all of “W’s” friends who are, coincidentally, unemployed.

My apartment turns into what I call, the UEP (unemployed playground) when I leave for work. W wakes up, presumably around 11 or 12, makes himself breakfast, eats it under the covers on the couch, and then calls his friends to come over.

Then one, maybe two or three of them show up, plunk their dirty asses down on the couch (which I’m strongly considering NEVER sitting on again) and watch TV/Movies/Sports and smoke blunt after blunt until its time to, surprise! EAT again…

They may go out to lunch, you know, spending that unemployment money wisely, but more than likely, they will be ordering in. I know this because of all of the wonderful take out containers that have made their way into my cabinets (still covered in oily grease btw)… Then, its time to smoke another blunt…

Now, if one of these dreamboat, super cool and productive friends of W’s has a car, perhaps a blunt cruise and a stop at the convenience store for some Arizona iced teas (which will be spilled either on the couch or on the floor shortly thereafter) and then rendezvous back to marinating on the couch for hours upon hours…

That is when I come home. I walk in after a 10-hour work day, house smelling like old asshole and blunt, the sink littered with dishes (that used to be in the dishwasher, but for some reason, W has decided to place on the counter) and the living room filled with refuse. And by refuse, I am referring to the 2-4 dudes who have done nothing all day except serve as an excellent examples of sloths personified…

And he wonders why I lock myself in my room/stock up on Febreeze/am gone as much as possible/avoid him. I cannot take living at the UEP anymore. I seriously cannot. But thankfully, the lease is up soon. May 31, may you come quickly for us all.