I actually have two MVWRs. The first was from my freshman year in college. I had told this girl, N, that I would live with her after having the same math tutor. I should have known it was going to be bad when my parents were taking us out to lunch, N was on her phone talking about getting enough bail money to get her boyfriend out of jail (I am probably the most naive, sheltered person — at least I was freshman year — ever, but I don’t know how my parents left knowing who I was living with). We got to know each other and even though we were from very different backgrounds we got along fine. Then after Christmas break, her boyfriend got out of jail. That’s when he decided to live with us, even though we were in a one room dorm and it was against the rules. I was too shy and scared of them to say anything, so he moved in. Because he had just gotten out of jail (for stabbing someone in the neck!) he didn’t sleep well and would often scream in his sleep. That was when they even slept; they often had sex with me in the room.

When he had to go back home, she would call me incessantly because she was lonely and whine about why I wasn’t there to mope with. She even gave me a curfew to come back because she didn’t have any other friends. When her boyfriend was there, they would fight constantly, calling each other horrible names and hitting each other and then have really loud sex with me in the room. I would finally get up and leave. I lasted the whole school year and moved to another dorm the next summer. But that’s not the worst of the worst.

I moved to Australia last year with a friend and I knew one person from the summer camp I worked at. When T said she had two extra rooms in her house, we gladly moved in. My friend and I both immediately got jobs and went about starting a life. T started getting jealous about us honing in on her friends, so she started wild rumors about us, never invited us to their events, even though they specifically asked her to invite us. When we did go to parties where she was, she acted horrible to us. We were there during the awful brushfires and T decided she was going to start a clothing drive. She collected clothes from everyone and said she would drive them to the area affected by the fires. After doing this she ran around the house calling herself “Angelina Jolie” and “an amazing person.” But first she went through the clothes to see if she wanted to keep any of them (which she did) and then never donated them. They sat in our kitchen for months. When my other Australian roommate L finally moved them out of the way, she called him at work at shouted at him for touching “her stuff.” She finally donated it to the Salvation Army five months later.

Her room was disgusting, she kept all her dishes in there so we never had any, she threw temper tantrums constantly and then an hour later would try and hug us and say she loved us. We were going back to the States in July, so we told her at the end of may when we were leaving. And even though she knew we were leaving early from the lease, she acted surprised and expected us to pay our rent through the end of lease even though we wouldn’t be there. She refused to find another roommate and so we had to do it. Finally, she always complained she was broke even though she got paid $500 a week and her parents paid her rent, so when the refrigerator broke a week before we were set to leave, she asked us to help pay for a new one. Wow. Our friends in America don’t believe she actually exists.

It was my first time not living at home or in a dorm and I was excited that I would be moving in with three of my friends, one of whom was my roommate the past year in the dorms. But things got ugly very fast. I would never call myself a messy person, but I’m also not a neat freak; I don’t mind a bit of untidiness here or there. But  M and K would freak out if a dirtied dish was not cleaned right away and to them “right away” meant cleaning the dish used to cook something before you even ate the food. They would also get mad if anyone left something of theirs sitting out in the living room or hallway area, if it even sat there for a few minutes too long it would be thrown into your room and I mean THROWN. Once they even threw my laptop rather roughly onto the floor of my room. They would also act like they were in charge of me and the other roommate, B. They would assign us chores to do and leave us notes calling us to “roommate meetings” if we didn’t comply. They went so far as to leave a note telling us that were not allowed to touch the thermostat, as if we were children.

K had long bushy hair and after she brushed it would be all over the bathroom sink, tying in perfectly with all the makeup that would be smeared on the counter from M caking it on every morning. M also had the habit of not wrapping up her tampons when she threw them out, which is not only gross to look at but in the summer is was a magnet for insects. Another one of M’s habits was to take the TV remote from you when she decided she needed to watch something and tell you to leave of you weren’t going to sit in complete silence while she watched her shows. Also, if anyone ever made M mad her solution was to call her mom and cry and then threaten to sue us with parent’s lawyers. K, for her part, had no common sense whatsoever and would do the dumbest things, such as catching her hair on fire, exploding wax in the microwave and coming home drunk off of two beers and try to make muffins.

The next year we all went out separate ways, but not before M warned that if we got any money knocked off of our security deposit it was not her fault so she wasn’t going to help pay for it and K trying to roll a couch out to the curb and almost taking out a railing. To this day I’m not sure what changed about them between freshman to sophomore year to turn them into complete crazies, but living with them has certainly made me appreciate my new roommates much more.

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.”

I was the cause of my four university flatmates Very Worst Roommate, and arguably, mine. I started university and had just turned 18, was horribly naïve and was living away from home for the first time. It had also been instilled in me by my parents that being “passive” equaled “polite” and being confrontational was just unacceptable in a woman, as this equated being a bitch.

I met my ex-boyfriend, who we’ll call Fuzzy, almost immediately. He began to hang out at my halls of residence. Twice a week. Three times. Four. Then all day, all night, all week. He stayed in my room during this time, and whilst I really, really liked him, I didn’t have the cajones to tell him that staying this frequently was unacceptable and that I needed my own space. To make matters worse, Fuzzy had poor personal hygiene. I mean, really, really poor. He was with me 24/7 so I knew that he showered, at most, once a month. He also only cleaned his teeth once a week. He got sweaty very frequently, but didn’t wash his clothes at all. Eventually, I did it myself as I couldn’t stand the smell, and his white t-shirts were yellowing.

My flatmates and I shared the cost of food between us, as we all got on well together. However, Fuzzy also ate this food, but never contributed, until about two months in when I literally had to spell it out for him to do so. I felt horrendously guilty for burdening my poor, patient flatmates with Fuzzy as I was such a walking doormat, and did, eventually, through life-experience of living on my own and realising that actually, being honest with someone doesn’t equate being a horrible person.

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

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

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

My 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.

My dorm roommate seemed like a good match for me. We had similar tastes in music and movies and sense of humor. We shared appliances (by that I mean she used mine) and she volunteered her wardrobe for borrowing. Then, slowly but surely, I noticed some cold shoulder tension. I don’t subscribe to the belief that it is better to live in silence than suffer an awkward, confrontational moment. My attributes don’t exactly fit-in in Southern California. I tried to be as nice as possible, but eventually it became unbearable. I talked to our suitemates and they weren’t forthcoming with any insight. I asked if they could join me in talking with her to help mediate the situation. They agreed, but when the time came, my suitemates were nowhere to be found. I discovered later that they thought it would be too uncomfortable so they warned her about it and fled.

I knew I needed to get it over with, so I asked her if we could talk. She proceeded with verbal diarrhea of all the things she hated about me. Apparently, she had hated me from the start.  All the concessions she had said were fine, but me staying up late, the day my boyfriend had put his suitcase on her side of the room, every Advil she had ever given me, those weren’t fine. Also, she never took out the trash because she wanted to see how long it would take me to do so (I had my own trash can) and she had been placing pieces of paper on the floor to see if I would pick them up. She was offended that I had tried to participate in conversations when her boyfriend was over and she couldn’t stand that I ate fatty foods. Finally, came her complaint that I’m the person who answers honestly when asked, “Do I look fat in this?” She explained that you’re supposed to say “No” and then stroke their ego with a complement.

I was upset, mostly because I was realizing that I was not going to be able to patch it up with her, but I was trying to listen patiently.  I fought back complaining about all of her annoying habits and simply asked why she had lied to me for so long. That was it. She exploded with anger at my accusing her of being a liar and starting screaming obscenities at me. Those were the last words we spoke to each other.

My Very Worst college Roommate was S, a spoiled brat who had all her bills paid by daddy and tortured us with her sense of entitlement, pathological need for attention, and lack of respect for others. I have not met anyone in the three decades since college who had a more self-absorbed attitude than this miserable little snot.

She was engaged to a guy she let live rent-free with us – without asking us first, of course. Although he was using water and electricity, leaving his razor stubble in our bathroom sink, and invading our privacy, she would come unglued if we did something she didn’t like, such as turn on the heat when it got cold or come in late from bar-hopping.

We had a front-row seat to their baby-talk at all hours, which was gross because even though her boyfriend slightly resembled Tom Selleck, he had a high-pitched voice like Porky Pig. It was not a good combination. He was so whipped, he would get up with her at 6 a.m. on weekends to watch Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies, which were her idea of relationship nirvana.

The worst thing was, she wouldn’t let me lock the bathroom door if I planned to take a shower because her bladder was small and she might have to use the toilet. Once I was taking a bath and the beeyotch came in and took a quick picture of me—mascara streaming down my face, looking like a drowned rat. She showed it off at her next family get-together, although she lied and said she didn’t.

The whole world revolved around her—when her hometown church burned down, she screamed bloody murder because now she couldn’t get married there as planned. After months of her BS, my other roommate moved out in disgust. I suffered on, but was ecstatic when the idiot Princess moved out the next term. She complained to daddy about my “bad attitude,” and he paid for her to live in a co$tly condo.

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 freshmen year in college, I lived in a large dorm room with three other girls. Three of us got along well, but the fourth girl was definitely My Very Worst Roommate. First, she never showered. She would occasionally disappear in to the bathroom and turn the sink on for 30 minutes at a time, and I don’t know what she did in there, but it wasn’t doing her any favors. She had horrendous body odor. You could tell if she had been in a room recently, just by smelling the air. She also never did laundry, but she did wake up at 6:00am every morning to iron her jeans (WTF? Who irons their jeans)?

MVWR also had a bizarre habit of mumbling to herself. At first, I thought she was talking on the phone a lot, but I eventually realized she was just mumbling, constantly, sometimes in different voices. We usually couldn’t understand her, but sometimes we would hear her say our names. Yes, she talked about us, to herself, while we were in the same room. Creeptastic. She would blast the same Ludacris song on repeat on her stereo, then leave the room, but leave the music on while she was gone, and yell at us if we turned it off. Halfway through the year, she switched from Ludacris to Celine Dion (again, WTF)?

She would fall asleep in the living room with the TV on, and use our blankets (which then acquired her unique stench). She once slept for hours while the DVD menu to “Fat Albert” played on repeat. (“Hey hey hey! Hey hey hey! Hey hey hey!”) She liked turning all the lights, the TV and the radio on in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t stop, so my roommates and I started hiding the TV remote and unscrewing the light bulbs at night. She was even obnoxious in her sleep. She talked in her sleep and snored.

She would also repeatedly kick her foot against my bed frame, to the rhythm of a song, repeatedly, such that I could feel my entire bed shaking to the beat. She would do this every night until she fell asleep, and then the sleep-talking or snoring would begin. We complained about her behavior constantly and one night, MVWR brought her friends in to the room and had them all scream at the top of their lungs at the same time, to wake the rest of us up, in retaliation. Frankly, I was just amazed she HAD friends – but I guess her friends stopped hanging out with her not too long after that, too. She said they “had a falling out.” I wonder if her friends confronted her about her body odor?