Note to readers: This post is a little more disgusting than the average MVWR post. 

My Very Worst Roommate was a good friend from interstate who was planning on moving to Sydney with a friend of hers. Just as she’d quit her job and planned the move, her friend backed out, leaving my friend in the lurch, so I stepped up and said I’d share a place with her.

One of those decisions that as soon as you make it you wish you could take it back, you know? That feeling of, Oh no, I’m gonna regret that! She had moved interstate to avoid debt collectors, although I didn’t know that at the time. Of course, they followed her, so all hours of the day and night we had people at the door or on the phone asking for her and asking for money. She simply refused to pay back money she owed; she felt it was a grand imposition and just disgusting of them to ask for money from a young woman.

I knew she was messy, but I figured that I wasn’t that particular and as long as the mess was only in her room, it wouldn’t matter. I was so very, very wrong. She would use an entire roll of toilet paper each day. That would have been all right, but she refused to pay for it. As I didn’t want to be without, I’d be the one who bought it all the time. Eventually, I refused to share, and when I bought my rolls I kept them in my room. So, she just went without. I don’t know if she used her hands, or if, as I suspect, she just ignored the inevitable skidmarks. She wouldn’t use sanitary protection at home, so her mattress was soaked through with blood. This attracted cockroaches. The cockroaches were also attracted by the build up of rotisserie chicken carcasses she kept on her bed. She only ate meat, watermelon, and mangos, and the meat scraps, mango and watermelon skins just built up where she’d eat in bed. The cockroaches would sneak out of her room and creep down into the common areas. Along with the smell. That rancid, decomposing animal fugue would funk up the entire house. Coming home at night, I’d have to leave the front door open and run around opening windows to try to get some air in the place before I could breathe. That smell, along with the smell of urine, was like a solid, malevolent, living thing.

She also refused to wear sanitary protection around the house until I screamed at her because I was sick of cleaning her blood stains off my couch. When she did finally use sanitary protection, she’d flush the pads down the toilet. This blocked the toilet (of course) and cost about $150 each time to get fixed. When I got angry after the first few times, she just refused to throw them away properly. If she couldn’t flush them down the toilet, then they were going on the floor. I had whined to a friend about that and she’d said ‘Oh, you’re exaggerating! No one does that!’, but then one day my friend and I were sitting chatting in the living room when the flatmate walked into the room with a used pad in her hand. She talked to us, and when she realised what we were staring at (in horror) she just looked at me and threw it on the floor of the living room as if to say,’What are you going to do about that?’ My visiting friend’s horror was such that the flatmate eventually picked it up, but no one ever wanted to stand on that patch of floor again. I didn’t have the heart to tell my visiting friend that most of the living room floor had come in for that treatment.

One of the worst episodes was when I went away for a three days. A stray cat had moved in with us and had kittens, leaving us with four unexpected cats. I was going to put them in a kennel while I was away and she got offended: ‘Don’t you think I can look after the cats for three days?’ Well, no, I didn’t think she could, but I backed down. I put down plenty of food for the first day, told her to change the food twice a day and keep the litter box clean or they would stop using it.

This was the middle of summer and our house got very hot, like an oven. When I came back, she said: ‘I didn’t have to give them fresh food, they weren’t hungry. They never ate what you left for them’. Of course the cats were starving as in the high summer heat their food had gone rancid and was full of maggots. The worst was that the litter tray was not only full to overflowing, the cats had then crapped all around it, all over the floor, in the kitchen and the living room, and even peed in appliances such as my VCR. The cats had walked through the shit, and also my flatmate had walked through the shit, leaving shit prints all around the kitchen and all up and down the hallway. Seriously, I had about six meters of shit printed carpet to scrub when I came back.

She wouldn’t do the dishes, but she’d put dirty dishes in the sink and pour some water over them. Then leave it. Then put a pizza box in the sink on top. Then a chicken carcass. Then some more dishes and some more water. Then maybe some watermelon or mango skins. Then some more dishes and more water. This would go on for a couple of days until I just wanted to scream. It would take my thickest gloves before I could tackle that mess. She painted a set of bookshelves by flicking paint at them, also flicking paint on the carpet, the cupboards, the walls, my couch, my kitchen furniture, my bookshelves, my books, etc etc. She refused to clean this up so I spent several days scraping with a knife once it had dried.

She tracked my pay dates on a calendar so she could hit me up every month for a loan. It took about four months before I finally put an end to that. I couldn’t pay off my own not inconsiderable student loans because I was constantly having to cover her for rent and expenses. She borrowed my books and gave them away to other people, or lost them, or left them sitting in puddles of water in the bathroom. Her excuse? ‘What do you care? You’ve already read them!’

She would record over my VHS tapes where I had favourite rare shows collected. Same excuse, I’d already seen them, so why bother keeping them? She lost her key ring. By dropping it in her bedroom… somewhere. The place was so filthy she couldn’t find even a large key ring plus keys. She had some of my keys – copies of my post office box, so I had to get that recut. She refused to get the house keys recut, but expected me to come home early every night to let her in.

I kept telling her I’d get another set done, but she was determined that one day they would turn up, but she never actually cleaned her room to try and find them. She owned one pair of shoes, they stank. She wanted to borrow mine but thankfully she was many sizes bigger than me. Same with her clothes – she had very little and only owned one fugly jacket. She would have destroyed my shoes and clothes too, if she could have fit in to them.

There were also other petty annoyances. She would have her alarm snooze button go off six or seven times. I was on a later shift, so I would get up later, after having lost sleep to her alarm, and go for my shower. Because she always overslept, she would be in the shower when I wanted it, making me late for work. Then she’d use all my expensive shampoos and soaps and conditioners and skin care products.

I kept cleaning and cleaning even though it was crazy because I just couldn’t stand the filth, and I knew she would just leave it. She’d call me ‘mother’ since I did all the housework and seemed to be financially supporting her, too. She just shed filth and trailed cockroaches wherever she went. We lasted six months, and of all of that, it was her insane argumentativeness that finally broke this camel’s back. I’m just not argumentative or all that confrontational, usually if people want to be wrong about stuff, I’m happy to let them be wrong. But she would pick fights over stupid things, with the excuse that if she picked enough fights, eventually, one day, she’d be right about something. She was never right. I threw her out. I gave away every piece of furniture of mine that she’d touched/bled on. The house was so filthy and damaged, despite my best attempts to clean and care, that we lost the full $1,000 deposit and I was glad to see it go as long as she went with it.

Our friendship did not survive this, and I never missed her for a second. I have to confess, I did some bad stuff too. Toward the end I was so enraged by living in such filth, I used to kick lumps of cat shit into her room. She never noticed, though.

I lived in an apartment that my campus owned my senior year in college. My best friends “C”, “K” and I decided that we wanted to move in to one of these apartment together, and we asked one of our friends, let’s call them “Sal,” to live in the other half of the apartment.

Everything started out just fine, we all got along well and we set up clear rules and boundaries for community spaces. It wasn’t long until things went south though. Sal was fairly messy, and after the first few weeks of living together, this became a bigger issue. He was constantly leaving dirty dishes (all of which I provided) all over the apartment to sit for days on end until old food was dried, crusted and sometimes moldy. We consistently had problems of mold in our trashcan because he would throw away old rotting food and not take the bag out, causing the apartment to smell. Sal was particularly bad with leaving dirty pots and pans (again, provided by me) on the stove after cooking, and being from the south, he often pan fried things in grease, and left it all out to make the whole apartment smell like greasy fried food for days. We talked about it and he would promise to be better about it, and then go right back to his old ways a few days later. We would try to passive-agressively leave notes about it, or wait until he finally took care of his dishes, but many times one of us would finally get sick of the smell or would need to use a pan and we would scrub pans he had left lying around. He started using our food without asking and promising to repay us for it, but never would. He would mysteriously be very hard to get a hold of when the electric was due (thankfully, that was the only bill that didn’t come directly out of our student accounts)

Occasionally, we would host small gatherings with friends at our apartment (only after hours of cleaning up, largely cleaning up messes Sal had left). One particular occasion included a surprise birthday party for a friend whom Sal did not know, but he joined in anyway. He took the liberty of eating an entire pizza that night, along with partaking in all the other food and drinks we had bought for the occasion. We had bought a family size tub of ice cream and it was hardly touched by guests the night of the party, but Sal managed to finish of the entire tub by himself over the span of just a few days. Sal also took advantage of C’s TV and game systems in the living room, and would leave them on and running when he left the house. We were all consistently picking up after him, and K always had to buy the toilet paper for their shared bathroom and Sal never cleaned it, not once the entire year.

The final straw came when Sal left the house early one morning and locked his bedroom door, apparently forgetting he had set his alarm. His alarm began going off at 7:30am. He did not return home until 9pm. This was just a few weeks before the end of the semester and all of us had tests, projects, and papers. The alarm would have gone off all day if after several hours or beeping frustration, I took matters into my own hands. I discovered that you could open the locked doors pretty easily with a credit card (yes, like they do in the movies) and I went in a turned off his alarm clock. When he returned home, I was upfront about the incident and I apologized for the intrusion, but explained that the alarm was hindering everyone’s work.

Sal was outraged. He immediately searched through everything in his room to ensure that nothing was taken. He then began making wild accusations that I stole some money out of his desk, and that a lighter was missing. He began claiming that we were all conspiring against him and all the passive-agressive notes were attacking him, specifically because we all hated him (which may have been partly true). The fight wrapped up and everyone went to bed. The next day, he had suddenly written his name on all of his food along with messages like “Don’t touch!” and “This is not ‘apartment property’”. He was out of the apartment or shut in his room most of the time (which helped with the TV issue, but only worsened the dishes issue).

At the end of the year K, C, and I spent hours cleaning up the apartment after Sal moved out so that we could get our security deposit back, even going as far as to break into Sal’s room and clean up all the trash he left behind and taking all the pictures of nude women off the walls (which it’s fortunate that I did, because I found two of my cups, dirty, in the bottom of his closet. Ew!). Sal never paid for the last electricity bill, because he had stopped speaking to any of us after the big blow-out fight, but it was worth the extra the three of us paid to never have to speak to him again!

Soon after I moved into a townhouse with My Very Worst Roommate , ‘Rose’ took a second job at a nearby restaurant for some extra money. Her new coworkers were into drugs and Rose had always been keen to fit in. Things went downhill pretty quickly from what had promised to be a good situation.

Because our house was very close to the restaurant, it became the favored post-shift hangout for she and her coworkers, as many were too messed up on drugs or alcohol to drive home. That’s not my thing AT ALL, but they weren’t terribly disruptive and I would rather they hung out at our house for a while than drive intoxicated, so I let them be. Then our house stopped being a sober-up crash pad and developed into the after-party that kept  ’Lisa’ (our third roommate) and me  up on weekday nights. I woke up in the morning to the smell of weed and sex noises. Two of her friends were having sex on our couch at 6 a.m. I had to shout at them from the stairwell that I was coming downstairs and they needed to pull themselves together. They weren’t even ashamed, and were even nervy enough to mock me for being rude and jealous.

Soon after Rose attempted to send one of her ‘sick’ (too drunk/high to function at work) male coworkers to our house. Lisa and I told her we wouldn’t open the door for this intoxicated stranger when she wasn’t here to watch him. We argued about it for a while, with her getting angrier at us for not caving, and then finally saying ‘Fine, next time I’ll just give him the key!’ I told her that she absolutely would not, and had to stop myself from adding that I wouldn’t hesitate to call the police. After that, I left most of the discussions with her to Lisa because my temper had grown too short.

Not long after, I woke up on a Thursday morning to find a random guy on our couch. It was still early, so I figured the guy would clear out soon enough. I was wrong – when I finished doing schoolwork and went back downstairs at 4 p.m., he was still asleep on the couch. Rose was gone. Lisa came home around that time, and while we were talking about what to do with him, the guy woke up, turned the TV on, and wandered into the kitchen to look for food! He nodded a casual ‘hey’ at us and made way for the fridge. When I asked him, “Are you aware it’s 4 p.m. and you’re in someone else’s house? Do you think that’s OK?” he just shrugged. We immediately kicked him out. When Lisa told her that she absolutely couldn’t leave anyone unattended in the house and had to explain to her friends that our hospitality had a 10 a.m. expiration, she laughed it off, saying ‘That wouldn’t bother me if it was one of your friends,’ which is both patently untrue and completely irrelevant. Lisa and I were livid, but everything we said to Rose rolled off her back or poked her into a rage that made living with her miserable, so we let a lot of things go.

We shared a bathroom and she was a stickler for cleanliness, which was fine. What was odd, though, was her refusal to allow anything on the countertops – even the handsoap. If I left so much as a hairbrush on the counter, I would come home to find it flung into my room. What she left, however, was completely acceptable – she’d fix herself up before going out and leave her things everywhere. If I so much as moved something, she would flip and accuse me of using her expensive toiletries. It got to the point where she took EVERYTHING of hers out of the bathroom and kept it in her room. She was hypocritical like this about everything – would flip over a smudge of flour I’d missed wiping down the counters, but leave the remains of an explosion fossilizing in the microwave for three weeks; lose it over someone leaving a dish in the sink for more than twenty minutes, but spill a glass of milk on the carpet and not clean it up before she left for the weekend, leaving our house reeking while Lisa and I ripped everything apart tried to figure out what smelled so terrible.

Rose’s paranoia that we were stealing her things got worse. She accused me of stealing her hairspray and Keurig coffee cups and demanded I replace them. I don’t drink coffee and had only used her hairspray once or twice (always with her permission) and wasn’t going to replace them – I offered her $5 for my limited use of the hairspray, thinking that would placate her. She called me a thief and a liar and again demanded I replace the things I ‘took’. I think she no longer had the money to finance expensive habits like $25 cans of hairspray and Keurig cups, especially when all her money seemed to be going to drugs, and was trying to wring them out of me. She’d been fired from her day job for showing up clearly messed up on something, and now the ‘extra money’ from waiting tables was her only income. I withdrew my $5 best offer.

The final straw was rent. Lisa approached Rose for her share of the rent and was told she wouldn’t have it until the end of the weekend, and would just deliver it herself and pay the late charge. Two weeks later there’s a notice in our mailbox, we have seven days to pay up or get out. Lisa and I panicked, tried to get a hold of Rose to see what had happened to her rent. Somehow Rose turned it around to Lisa and I being ‘disrespectful’ to her. She threatened to move out, we called her bluff and told her she was welcome to. As a parting gift she left the taps in the house on while Lisa and I were out to run up our water bill.

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

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

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

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

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

My Very Worst Roommate was my friend’s friend at the time. Let’s call her L. At the beginning she was fine, but then we started noticing small irritations about her, like watching a TV show for six hours in the lounge room so we couldn’t, even though she had her own TV in her own room. She explained that she did this because she still wanted to be around everyone, even though we’d end up going into the other rooms as she watched TV shows we didn’t like. She was obsessed with TV, and if you were watching something, she would come into the room and pretty much demand to know what you were watching, and what was going on and then just stare at it really intently, it was weird… She also kept a collection of dead batteries, and then when the TV remote went dead she would try each one in with a different combo to see if they worked, and then put them back and would try the next time something went dead. At one time, she had over 15 dead batteries that I just threw out.

Me and my sister were vegetarians at the time, transitioning to a vegan diet, but we didn’t mind her eating meat or cooking her food with our pans and pots, as long as she cleaned it really well, but sometimes she would make mincemeat spaghetti sauce and leave it in our pans for ages and we’d have to clean up old meat. And then she would also badly wrap her meat and let it drip though out the fridge, which to a vego, smells awful.

She was also a bit overweight and was obsessed over it. Every week she was talking about dieting, but nothing would come of it. She would buy TV dinners all the time and just really unhealthy processed food. She would then always bring up that my sister and me were so slim and that she wished she could be like us, which was just awkward. It then began to get weird, as she suddenly turned against my boyfriend and whenever he spoke to her or around her, she tried to twist his words into insinuating that he was saying she was fat. For example, at the table once I was sitting at an angle on my chair and was behind her chair. My boyfriend tried to speak to me and so he just moved his head to one side so he could see me past her. She then attacked him saying that he was trying to make it look like he couldn’t see past her because she’s so fat. My boyfriend couldn’t even reply as it was just so ludicrous.

She then also got angry believing that he should be paying rent as he sometimes spent the night at the house, I thought this was silly as we each had our own room and mine was the smallest (half the size of hers). I still paid the same and when he was over we spent most the time in my room and went to his house to watch movies together, but I said that he should pay some bills like for water as he does have a shower there sometimes. But she didn’t want to do that and instead just started watching his power consumption. She walked into the kitchen and saw his phone charging and literally ripped it out of the socket. This still didn’t phase me though as I understood she felt like she was paying for his power, until I realized that she left the TV on in her room ALL NIGHT LONG as she couldn’t sleep without it.

She also couldn’t ever turn off a light and would constantly re-wash her clothes as she would leave them in the washing machine until they smelt funky, then just wash them again and doing the same thing! The other thing that pissed me off, was that through all her complaining about my boyfriend, he had helped me to do some paving out the back and also helped out with heaps of gardening and cleaning. When we had a rent inspection, he would come over and help, even though none of it was his mess apart from some dishes! He also went vegan and she was trying to convince him not to.

The thing though, although small, that pissed me off the most was that she would make a milo (chocolate drink) with milk, drink it, and then fill it up with water (not rinse it) and then drink the water in it. This murky browny water was disgusting. My boyfriend moved in after she left. And soon my friend will be moving out. My boyfriend and I have decided that instead of getting another roommate, we’d rather be poor. As we don’t want another L experience ever again!

MVWR started out so promisingly. My boyfriend and I needed to rent out the second bedroom, and thought we’d found a like-minded couple. P was a sweet, easygoing guy who went to grad school with my boyfriend, and E was his fiancée, who had a weird sense of humor and a high-intensity way of talking – like me, or so I thought – and after having them over for dinner and an apartment viewing, it seemed like a match made in heaven. They told us that they had only ever lived in “co-ops,” which should have been a red flag – but as they initially explained, this meant that everyone shared the cooking and cleaning and had meals together. My boyfriend and I love having dinner parties and made cooking meals into a social event, so we thought this would be great.

Little did I know that these two, or more specifically E the fiancée, would turn out to be the most astounding combination of social awkwardness, inconsiderate behavior and lack of common sense bordering on mental impairment that I had ever met, and that we would be not so much roommates to her, but parents.

The first week, we ended up cooking all the meals but one. We had made meatloaf with eggplant parmigiana, ambitious ethnic feasts, stews and homemade soups, etc; they made us store-brand pasta with canned red sauce and frozen vegetables.  OK, so they weren’t quite at our level of cooking, but to their credit they always did the cleaning. Or P did, anyway. E, however, would usually find some excuse to leave, unless the cleaning only required rinsing dishes and stocking the dishwasher. On one of those nights, we were all watching a movie after dinner when E did kind of an urgent, whisper-call to P to come into the kitchen, where they whispered in worried voices for several minutes while my boyfriend and I tried to watch the movie. After a few minutes our curiosity/concern overcame us. The problem?  E had failed to find the dishwasher detergent (though it had been right under the sink, where all normal dishwasher detergent lives) and decided to try running it with HAND SOAP instead.

While P was trying to get by with his grad school stipend, E was using her parents’ money to pay for architecture school. Sounds cool, right?  She soon explained, however, that she “never finishes anything, as a general rule” and in particular did not care much for homework. She hassled my boyfriend, a math teacher, to help her with the quant requirements for school – which he did for free though it was time-consuming and quite tedious – and then she blew off the final assignment and ended up not completing it, ultimately wasting both his time and the money her parents had spent on it. She was fired from three jobs the first two months she was there – all restaurant gigs, none requiring more than four hours a day, four days a week – and yet constantly talked about her stress level and slept 16 hours a day, explaining that she was “just so exhausted.” Eventually, a mutual friend of ours took pity and helped set her up with a secretarial job at his company – perfect ending, right?  Nope. Turns out she saw an ad for a job she liked better at a museum in the paper, and quit the secretarial job on her FIRST DAY to apply, making our friend look like an ass for recommending her. She did actually get the museum job, but was fired from it less than two months later.

Because I also have a goofy sense of humor and am a fairly open person, I thought I would be the last person to get annoyed with a person who likes silly voices and who trends toward TMI stories.  Nonetheless, after her fifth time talking to us about her diarrhea – my boyfriend and I had to begin telling her to simply stop talking.  Furthermore, it’s one thing to like imitations and intone things in funny voices, but her tendency was to talk in a baby voice as much as 80 percent of the time.

Items would mysteriously disappear from the kitchen; pans, a fancy holder for cookbooks. Because E was chronically clumsy and incapable of using the stove without burning everything, we knew well before she eventually confessed under our repeated questions that she had simply destroyed these items accidentally by breaking or burning and throwing them away. Her BO was calamitous and our bathroom smelled chronically like a rectum. They also brought two somewhat disturbing objects into our bathroom – one, a small stool that lived in front of the toilet which E explained “helps you get in the right position so you poop effectively,” and a small bottle of Vaseline upon which she’d written, inexplicably (thank God), “For Butts ONLY!”

I thought I had done a pretty good job being direct about my complaints without being too mean, choosing my battles to only bring up important stuff, and never attacking her about the personal stuff that couldn’t be helped. One night, though, I reached the end of my patience with being the grown-up to this stunted woman-child, and totally hit my ceiling.

My boyfriend and I were having a rare moment at home without either of them there, and upon getting home I found my nicest, whitest dish towels streaked with tomato sauce. I opted for the note approach – I made sure it wasn’t a bitchy note. It read, “Hey – could you use the older dishtowels for red sauce, or put mine in the laundry so they don’t stain permanently?”  I forgot all about it and settled in to watch “Iron Man” with my boyfriend, enjoying our rare quality alone time at home.

E got home about halfway through, went to her room and did some puttering around the apartment.  After a few minutes, she entered the living room where my boyfriend and I were cuddling and enjoying a few glasses of wine, turned on the lights in the darkened room and stood in front of the TV and said, “Hey, can I just talk to you about this note you left me?”

I’ll never know whether it was the wine or the months of trying to hold it together, but I lost it. I told her in colorful language how unbelievably inconsiderate it was of her to interrupt us, what exactly made it so essential that we discuss an issue related to HER mess at that precise moment when we were obviously otherwise occupied, and whether she had any common sense or social graces in her. P got home and intervened, suggesting we all sit down for a “roommate meeting.”

She started talking about how she’d always felt “unwelcome” and how it was starting to border on “unsafe,” clearly trying to get me or my boyfriend to tell her how thrilled we were to have her and how she should stay. Instead, I continued reiterating all the issues we had living here – not as meanly as before, but still very directly – and explained that yes, while there continued to be such different ideas about how to share the space and inequity in the household responsibilities and mess-making, it would be hard to fulfill the ideal of compatibility we all hoped for when we’d first met. E stomped off and went to bed, and we all went our separate ways. The next morning, they were gone, taking refuge at P’s parents’ house about 30 minutes away; P called in the afternoon to let us know that they would be moving out effective immediately. Though we’d lose out on some money for the rent, this was a tremendous relief.  It took six weeks for the last vestiges of the ass-smell to fade, but before long, all was right in our apartment again.

We greet them nicely enough when we occasionally run into them, and she has apparently kept down a part-time job working at the corner grocery store sharing the cashier job with the owner’s daughter (who takes over for her in the afternoons when she gets home from elementary school).  E does make a great cocktail party story now, so at least I owe her that much.

I moved in with a classmate and a girl (we’ll call her Sally) who was a friend of a friend that had just transferred to our school. She seemed normal enough at first, as they all do, but after about four months her controlling nature became very apparent.

Though she was in a serious relationship at the time, Sally would get super jealous when I’d invite boys over, often texting me in the middle of the night telling us to be quiet because she needed sleep when we weren’t even making noise. It escalated to the point where she informed me that I wasn’t allowed to have friends over on school nights because it disrupted her sleeping patterns. One Saturday night around 10 PM, I was talking on the phone to my mother in my own room when Sally texted me and told me to talk downstairs because I was talking too loud and she was trying to sleep. At 10 PM on a Saturday night. Right. She seemed to want to constantly parent me, as if I didn’t already have a mom.

The boiling point came in January, when an all-out war broke out over the heating bills. Sally didn’t want to turn the heat on in the house, ever. The thermostat, which read 59 degrees, began flashing, indicating that it was too cold in the house and the pipes were in danger of freezing — not to mention it was uncomfortably cold. After weeks of this torture, I had had enough of laying in my bed in four layers shivering, so at 2 AM, I crept downstairs to turn the heat on. Less than 10 minutes later, Sally awoke from a sound sleep and turned the heat off. The next morning I awoke to find a huge, hand-printed note covering the thermostat that read “DO NOT TOUCH”.

I confronted her the next morning and told her I planned to get a space heater for my own room if she continued to be so unreasonable. She told me I couldn’t do that because then our electricity would be too high. I’m not quite sure how I didn’t hit her in the face right then, but I refused to talk to her for the duration of the next six months that we shared the house. I did get my revenge on MVWR after she finally moved out in July. The construction workers on my street hit a gas main when they were digging, causing a leak in the gas main connected to our house. After a whole day’s worth of leakage, they finally shut off the gas. However, the workers forgot to inform the company that does the billing, because a few weeks later we received a bill for the gas in Sally’s name…..to the tune of $15,000! Hope Sally enjoys paying that off!

I don’t know what made me possibly made me think I could live with six girls during my freshman year of university. I attend a very Christian University. I can’t start to describe what it’s like here. I’m on overflow housing in the sophomore houses so it’s hard to change housing options. One of the girls already moved out yesterday, the only one who was on my side, stood up for me and I liked. I’m leaving at the end of the semester. Let’s just say I’ll sum it up like this. I’m not allowed to listen to rap music because it’s the devil’s music. They have an open door policy when using the bathroom so I walked in on one girl today taking a dump. They also talk about poop all the time! There’s period blood and poop around the toilet and when I brought it up I was called a princess. They talk to me behind my back about me stealing things because I do my homework at the suite but I never leave my room and most of the stealing occurred around the weekend when I wasn’t here, I never stay here on weekends. The reason me and my roommate don’t have stuff stolen from us is because we lock our things up.

I got yelled at for apparently using a girl’s hand towel which she left hanging over the shower and it fell in the tub. However, I thought hand towels were a universal thing anyways….apparently not. She found a black hair in her drawer while putting away her laundry and exclaimed the hair was mine, while yelling at me that I was going through her stuff. Well girl, maybe you shouldn’t leave your laundry in the laundry room sitting out for four hours. Yesterday one of the girls found one of her Dixie cups in the trash can and flipped out. I seriously thought the world was going to end the way she went on and basically had a witch hunt to see who used it. I was Skyping last night and I hear this intense bawling coming from outside so I run out to see what happened and my suite mates are around the girl comforting her and I exclaim what’s wrong and she’s like I just can’t be good enough for god, I know this kid and he’s so close to god and I’m just so depressed I can’t be like him. She’s in hysterics and can’t calm down so I go back in my room and I’m like did this just happen……this was the girl who tries to tell me how I need more faith in my life, like don’t tell me how to practice faith girl.

One of the girls is a total hippie and grabbed my Jif peanut butter from me because she said it has MSG in it along with all my other food and gave me a lecture on MSG and described her bowl movements in detail on what happens when she eats MSG. It’s gotten so bad I’ve had to contact the guy in charge of housing to help control this. So this is my story, there’s much more that has happened but I feel this is the just of it.

My junior year of college, two of my friends and I found a house for rent that we loved, but it was a four-bedroom and we needed another roomie. One of my sorority sisters mentioned that she knew someone from her hometown, a girl she’d gone to high school with, who was transferring to our college and needed a place to live (let’s call her Princess.) Problem solved.

The three of us were moving in a week before Princess, so I covered her portion of the deposit and first month’s rent with the understanding she would pay me back when she arrived. In reality, it actually took around five months for me to get that money back. On at least four occasions, she wrote me checks that bounced three days after I deposited them, resulting in an overdrawn account and staggering fees from my bank. She seemed to be a nice girl and we were all getting along otherwise, and she would apologize profusely every time and give me a laundry list of excuses (she gave me a check to an old account by accident, she had forgotten to transfer the money from savings, blah blah.) This was shady enough by itself, but Princess also liked to allude to her family’s wealth as often as possible. She would go on weekend trips with her dad or the various men she claimed to be dating, then come back and brag to us about mansions on the beach, dinners at five-star restaurants, and the new Vuitton bag she was dying to buy. All the while owing me $1,500 for the move-in cost, not counting all of the charges I’d racked up trying to deposit her worthless checks.

Princess became obsessed with Mercedes SUV’s and rambled endlessly about buying one. Sure enough, one day she came home and dragged all of us outside to see the huge, brand-new, totally loaded SUV sitting in our driveway. We were all a little annoyed, mostly because she’d taken so long to pay me back and her selfishness was getting on our nerves (and we were probably a little jealous too, not gonna lie.) Less than a week later, some police officers showed up at our door looking for Princess. Her father had alerted them she was a possible missing person. Also, she had been at a party that was broken up by a noise complaint, and the cop there checked everyone’s ID’s to make sure there was no underage drinking. He was suspicious of Princess’s ID so he confiscated it. The officers in my living room then showed us the driver’s license she had given, which was also how they found our address, and of course it was mine. I had gotten a new one when I turned 21 and left the old one in a desk drawer, and apparently Princess had helped herself to it.

When Princess came home, she was all in a fury over her father and the ID situation. She apologized profusely and claimed her father was just being overprotective and dramatic, and she hadn’t been at the party but had loaned my ID to a friend, which she knew was a terrible thing to do and was so sorry, etc.  Then she made a big scene of stomping around the house on her cell phone, supposedly yelling at her dad and the friend. During these conversations, she wandered out to the front yard, which we all did when we needed some privacy on the phone, and I could see her from my bedroom window. About an hour later, I looked out and saw a tow truck backing up to her Mercedes. Yup, it was getting repossessed. Princess had given the dealership a check for the down payment when she bought it, which of course bounced. We later found out the check was for $21,000.

We never saw Princess in person again after that. There were some signs that she had come back to the house when no one was home and taken little necessities like underwear and her suitcase. We were near the end of the lease by then and could manage to split the rent three ways if she never paid, which we assumed she wouldn’t. Truthfully we were all kind of glad she wasn’t around, plus we figured she was staying with a friend and was too embarrassed to see us after all that had happened. It was about a month later when one of the roommates called and said her checking account was overdrawn by $5,000.  Because of checks she had supposedly written out to me, and I had supposedly cashed. As it turns out, during one of her jaunts back to the house, Princess had swiped my old driver’s license AGAIN, even though I stashed it in a box under my bed and she would have had to do some serious searching to find it. She’d also taken some of roommate’s checks, written them out to me, and then used my ID to cash them. In another state.  It was really creepy to see the scanned images of the checks, which showed that she had obviously practiced forging my signature.

The bank eventually sorted everything out, we filed a police report and my roommate was reimbursed, which I suppose is the happiest ending we could hope for having lived eight months with a pathological liar and identity thief. We also discovered that she had never even enrolled at our college, though we’d all had countless conversations with her about our classes and seen her writing papers and studying. She never came back for her furniture or the rest of her stuff, so we had the joy of throwing it all away when we moved out. We weren’t at all surprised to see that her cherished collection of designer handbags were all cheap plastic knockoffs.

I lived in a really cool little apartment with my best friend Jane and we decided to share a room and rent hers out to save up on a bit of cash for a few months. It took a while to find a flatmate we thought would suit us, but eventually we met Tom. He was the same age as us, he studied the same sort of thing as us, and he seemed like a pleasant guy to live with.

Things went well for the first month or so, until we noticed the pungent smell coming from his bedroom. Then our food and shampoo started going missing. We didn’t say anything though because we didn’t want to cause a fuss over something not so important. After a while it did start to get on my nerves though, coming home after a hard days work to find the meal I had been thinking about all day eaten by him, it was a little more than irritating. He continuously paid his rent days late, leaving me near broke for a good part of the week, I politely asked him to not do it again, but he seemed to take no notice. And it just became a routine.

One night I came home late to see my bedroom light on. I assumed it was Jane getting ready for bed, but as I made my way up the stairs I heard frantic footsteps, the light switch off and a door slam shut. When I finally reached the top of the stairs, outside my room was a very sweaty, nervous and half naked Tom, wearing nothing but a towel. I was so confused and couldn’t understand what just happened, so I just went on with my own business, hesitantly asking him how his day was. That night I did lose sleep wondering what the heck we was doing, but Jane told me it was probably just a misunderstanding and to let it go.

The very next day I arrived home early from work to find Jane angrily scrubbing all the dishes, when I asked her what was wrong she explained to me that Tom had, for some mental reason, stuffed three pairs of dirty socks as well as two pairs of dirty underwear into the plate drawer? I called him and asked him what the heck was he thinking, to which he responded with “I had friends over and I didn’t want them to see them” and afterward he texted me saying, “I’m just trying to please everyone.” Jane and I couldn’t understand and decided we didn’t like Tom anymore. So we went and stayed with our boyfriends that night.

When Jane and I got back from our night away we found the whole apartment trashed, our food was all gone, every glass and cup in the house was smashed, his bedroom walls were covered in graffiti, and our entire liquor cabinet was empty. No one messes with my liquor. I toughened up and gave him two weeks to find another place, and told him I was taking the money to paint his room out of his bond. That week, it was a little awkward living with him, but we tried to be grown up about it.

One night I noticed my toothbrush wasn’t in it usual place. I felt the bristles and realized they were wet, someone had been using my toothbrush. I counted the toothbrushes in the bathroom and there were only two, when I asked Jane about it she said, “That’s the toothbrush Toms been using the past three months.” On his shelf there was a prescribed toothpaste with “anti fungal gum disease” written on it. I was gagging while I read it. I cannot tell you how fast I drove to the store to get a new toothbrush.

During Tom’s last days of living with us, Jane and I had to paint his room back to the way it was for our next roommate. There was a laundry pile as big as me, as he hadn’t done any washing since he moved in. Next to his bed we found a pile of toenail clippings and scabs. And on the wall was a layer of boogers. The only explanation we have is that he literally rolled out of bed and blew his nose onto the wall. It was absolutely, by far, the most disgusting thing I have ever seen. Or so I thought. Jane and I we so appalled we thought that after all the things we had put up with, we had the right to do some snooping around his room. While going through his drawers we found my favorite book. And on top of my book, were several used condoms. Apparently he thought the only use for the book was to use it as a place mat for used condoms. We couldn’t believe that someone so disgusting had a sex life.

In the end we kept all of Tom’s bond, fair trade for what he put us through really. Last we heard of Tom he was being kicked out of his new place after only a few weeks, we assume they were less patient then we were. I have never had another flatmate who is a stranger, and I ensure I take my toothbrush back to my room every time I use it.