I moved in with M and K after a neutral split with a boyfriend who I was living with. They had an extra room and K’s parents owned the house that they were staying in, I liked that I could bring my pets and they had a cat and dog who would keep them company while I went to school and worked. All was going well, I’m pretty laid back so I wasn’t really bothered when the same four friends of theirs came over everyday for hours, wrecked the place and left. We would all party most of the week and on the weekends, before school resumed. I had to put up with blaring rock band and Guitar Hero till all hours of the night and morning. When it was really cold outside I would smoke a bowl out the window to relax and try to study/sleep/enjoy my life.

Then things started to get weird. K had obviously had a problem with me “stealing her spotlight” because her friends liked me more than her. I couldn’t guess why since she said some of the most horrible things about them behind their backs and to each other. She would even go as far as insulting one girl’s dead mother. She couldn’t wait for people to leave so she could gossip; I was mostly appalled, tried to nod and smile and stay out of the drama. The house was filthy, except when K barked orders at M to clean it, she would sit and drink Diet Coke with a plastic guitar in her hands and watch him. They smoked cigarettes constantly and left the porch trashed on a nightly basis, but I was the bad guy cause I smoked a bit of weed, which confused me cause they would steal my weed whenever I left it on my desk.

Every time I would come home I would find K and four of her friends glued to the TV screaming into headsets playing XBox. I would immediately have to take both the dogs out since they hadn’t been let out since I left in the morning. Also, their dog routinely pissed on the couch and their friends spread MRSA (a sometimes fatal-antibiotic resistant staph infection) around to each other like candy. The health department and I both recommended a thorough cleaning/bleaching of common areas and furniture so that the infection wouldn’t be spread further or carried to others. These recommendations fell on deaf ears and I pulled an Anne Frank and stayed holed up in my room until I found another place to live (I was a week into a brutal college semester studying environmental economics — the irony was almost worth it).

When I did move out K had a literal panic attack, claiming that I owed her more money and threatened to call the cops. I told her to go ahead since there was no lease and every agreement was purely verbal. I didn’t pay and her friend threatened to kick my ass, while a large intimidating male friend stood by and glared, but he never made a step towards me and I’m so glad to be away from that biological warfare of a living room. Happy ending: I found a gorgeous house at the same price with three roommates, two are now my BFFs and the other turned out to be the love of my life and my animals haven’t been happier with their new friends either. Score!

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.

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

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

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

My junior year in college, I moved from a shared room into what used to be the graduate residence hall. In this dorm, every set of two rooms had a shared door that locked on both sides (like a hotel) and a shared phone box. Back in those days dorms either had one phone at the end of the hall, or, if you were in a “recently” remodeled building, this phone box, which meant that you had the luxury of being able to lie on your bed and talk–with only one person listening in–instead of having to sit on the floor in the hallway where everyone could hear you. Anyway, the girl who lived on the other side of the phone box was dating a guy who got off of work around two o’clock in the morning. She would set a clock radio to go off loudly around one in the morning so she wouldn’t fall asleep and miss going to meet him.

One night, the radio began to blare and didn’t stop and I realized that she’d left early and forgotten to turn off the radio. I suffered through for a while and then just had to do something about it. I figured that the only way to shut off the radio without leaving her room unlocked was to get into her room through the phone box, turn her radio off, and come back the way I got in. I crawled up on the desk, lifted the phone off its post, wriggled through the phone box, killed the radio, wriggled back into my room, and went to bed.  When I told her about it the next day, she apologized. When the radio went off again a few nights later I did the wriggle thing again, but by the third night I decided that if she could leave me with a blaring radio I could leave her with an unlocked room. That solved that problem.

Then, there was the very odd girl directly across the hall.  She was afraid of heights, so she had bought a loft bed as part of a de-sensitization plan. It didn’t really work, so she took something to help her sleep. And, she was a lover of mudpuppies (an aquatic salamander), who need a warm and moist environment. To keep the mudpuppies happy she ran the heat full-blast and put pans of water on the radiator, so her room smelled like the tide pool at the zoo. One night, one of her mudpuppies escaped its tank and made its way under the shared door into her suite mate’s room. When the suite mate got up to go to the bathroom she stepped on the mudpuppy. She screamed loud and long, which woke the rest of us up quickly and the mudpuppy-lover not so quickly. Sadly, the mudpuppy died, and the acrophobe went into mourning. I bet the suite-mate is still undergoing therapy. Want to see a mudpuppy? Go to Wikipedia and check it out, but don’t ever step on one with bare feet!

MVWR story began when my mom and I decided to rent out the extra room (which happens to have a closet that is separated by a piece of cardboard from my room letting every noise in) at our place. She decided to rent to her old friend who was about 35 and has four cats, which was cool because I already had one and a pair of Roborovski hamsters. When she moved in, all was well and the cats, the hamsters and the humans got along. We would do a food deal once a month where we would pay $25 each and get a huge box of meat and other frozen snack food. Before she moved we also explained all the details of our city’s bus transit and we would go swim laps together. A few weeks later she was working at a halfway house and could easily pay the $350 for rent. We would pick her up after her shift at 12 a.m. but she soon complained that the 1/4-mile walk to the bus stop was too far for her flat feet and demanded we give her rides to work. A few days later, she dramatically came in the door and started complaining that she had to walk to the mall and how her feet are all messed up and that she needed new stuff for her room, even though she knew the bus would take her there.

We both had computers with no internet, which I needed for school and she wanted, so after her harrassing my mom for it, we added it to her phone bill. When she got the internet, she proceded to use it to play loud music and when I would play mine, she would complain and bitch that it was too loud and she couldn’t hear hers. She started buying alot of stuff online. Her cats began getting into my room, which was always closed, and would climb on my shelves and dresser and knock my vases off and try to eat my hamsters by ripping the screen open. She ate all the meat and wasted the better cuts on chilli. She demanded we keep the house immaculate and said that the floor was never clean. She also demanded we spray the shower with Scrubbing Bubbles after every use. Yet she started using my razors to shave her, well yeah, and would leave hair and my razors hairy on the bathtub for all to see. She would take all my pads and tampons and she would leave used tampons on top of the trash not wrapped in TP.

The last straw: she had physical therapy for her feet so my mom took her over there. A few hours later she came home acting funny, claiming she bought $50 in Pizza Hut, and left it on the bus with her wallet. My mom took her to the bank to pay rent and cancel her credit card, but she couldnt write out a check for shit, so my mom took me to my then-boyfriend’s and took her home. That morning, I made my mom a birthday cake and it was in the fridge. My mom went to lunch with her friends and later called me to tell me that our roommate ate 2/3 of the cake with her hands. I was flaming furious. I had my dude take me home and I bitched her out and she cried that she didn’t eat it. Turns out, she took twice her pain meds and got more at the therapy. While in her room, I saw a wine bottle and she said she was sober. An hour later, she came back into my room and was freaking out. We took her to the ER. She was fired shortly after and owed us $700 in rent that she couldn’t pay because she wasted it on booze and junk. We threw her out.

I once had this roommate who I lived with for about six months. Before she moved in she let me know that she had chihuahua and I told her that was fine as long as she let the landlord know and paid the pet deposit. I didn’t think anything of it since my last roommate had a small dog and there were never any problems. Little did I know that this girl didn’t give a sh** about her dog and didn’t take care of it. She worked eight hours a day starting in the morning and would go straight from work to her boyfriend’s house and hang out there for hours at a time. She pretty much only slept at the apartment and was there from about midnight to 8 am. Meanwhile, this poor dog was locked in her room the entire time.

Anytime the dog heard someone come home he would bark in this high pitched tone that was like nails on a chalk board. I could never stand the dog and always felt so bad that I would try to walk the dog as much as I possibly could. Being a full time student and working, it made it kind of hard. I’ve always wanted a dog but never had one because I knew I didn’t have time to take care of one. Since the dog was rarely outside, I knew where it was going to the bathroom. I finally asked my roommate how it was working with the dog going to the bathroom in her bedroom. She replied, “Oh, I lay blankets down so don’t worry, it doesn’t get on the carpet.” I was grossed out but didn’t really know what to say. After awhile, I noticed the hallway outside of her room started to smell really, really bad. Her room was always a giant mess and it was nearly impossible to get in and out of it whenever I got the dog out to take it for a walk but the smell was started to get overwhelming. I told her that she needed to move out or give her dog to someone who could take care of it.

Weeks went by and the little dog was still there. I talked to her again and she said she couldn’t find him a home which I found hard to believe because so many people seem to love little dogs and they get adopted right away at shelters. I told her that she had to move out. About a month later she was finally gone but the smell of the room was still there. I had to tell my landlord about it and she had the carpet replaced. She didn’t give her the pet deposit back, but that didn’t cover all of the costs of having the carpet replaced. It’s almost been a year since she moved and she never paid the landlord for the carpet so now I’m having to foot the bill.

When my boyfriend of six years purchased his first home, he told me I could live there with him and help out with some of the renovations. In addition to me, he also asked one of his long-time buddies to move in and pay rent to help with some of the initial costs. My first introduction to my new roommate was when he pulled up in a beat-up truck with its front bumper tied up with string, wearing huge dark glasses, a trucker’s hat, and pulling along a huge pit bull by a rope, smack dab in the middle of quiet middle class suburbia.

My boyfriend and I had three cats and his buddy insisted that his dog got along well with cats. We soon found out that this was a horrible lie. Not only did the dog view cats as a meal on four legs but it was ill-trained and a consummate escape artist to boot. This was a 1-year-old pit bull mix with the energy and strength of Hercules whose owner saw no reason to give him regular walks or exercise or even spend time on basic obedience training.

Once this dog put its mind to something, it would do it. In the course of a year, this dog busted through a window, a wood door, a wooden banister, chewed a hole open in a chain link fence and found a way to climb out an 8 foot high kennel. Wooden boards needed to be placed on both sides of the kennel fencing in order to keep things secure and the door chained shut. Plastic gates to try and keep him out or in parts of the house were good for only a couple of hours if no one was around to watch him. The kicker was that our roommate saw no issue keeping the dog locked up for hours on end, despite the howling or endless piles of crap that appeared in his room, he’d just yell at and beat the dog and tell us he was fine where he was.

In addition to the hound of hell, our roommate turned into an inconsiderate lazy bum who smoked in the house when no one was looking despite my asthma, ate food I pulled out for dinner, blocked the driveway so no one else could use it, threw out our items that he perceived as trash, and by winter was leaving out his used dishes and tissues in the living room while he was passed out on the only couch in the house, all the lights and electricity-sucking items on in every room.

Finally, our roommate’s job had him start working at a site two hours away so he was forced to move to an apartment that was closer to the site. Both my boyfriend and I have since sworn off having anymore roommates.

I was looking for a way to save some money because my one bedroom apartment, although nice, was getting entirely too expensive.  So I went on Craigslist and I found a really nice place that was in a fantastic location for a great price. Within a few weeks, I was all moved in. There were two girls living there although one was always at her boyfriend’s house and the other girl had a completely different schedule so it seemed like a perfect situation. I didn’t realize everything that I had signed myself up for.

The girl who was never home is a dog breeder. She has dogs constantly coming and going from the house, in addition to the ones who live in the yard.  Now, I love dogs and have two of my own and I enjoy having tons of dogs around. But I didn’t realize I was agreeing to care for her dogs. She’ll stop by for maybe 10 minutes every few days to pick up stuff in the yard and check their food and water levels and that’s it.  Keep in mind, this is her only job so who knows what she does with the rest of her time. They do always have food and water and they aren’t neglected, only because of my other roommate and I.

I’ve also had to help four dogs give birth because my roommate was nowhere to be found. The last time, she was out of town and didn’t even stop by until the following day despite getting back in town that night. And she didn’t even care. She makes more money than I do, for much less work. Who needs to do their job when they can get their roommates to do it for free? Her boyfriend lives three miles away so its not like she’s far. If he doesn’t come over with her to do her dog care for all of 10 minutes, he is calling and texting her constantly the whole time. Separation anxiety much?

I’ve now been given 30 days to move out because my dogs “lunge at the fence at pedestrians walking by.” My roommate has been told by the landlord that she can only have four dogs so I don’t know what she is going to do. There are currently 8 of her dogs plus my two.

My sister and I moved in with a mutual friend my sophomore year at college. A month into the fall semester, he adopted a cat, who would spray all over clothes that he began to leave in the hallway which led to my room. Since he didn’t pick up said clothes, the smell became so unbearable that I began to sleep on my sister’s bedroom floor. He would then wear some of those clothes; I never saw him do laundry the entire time we lived with him and his white shirts turned dark yellow. I would, at times, come home to find that he was using the bathroom next to my bedroom – with the door wide open – and would get mad that I came home at that time and slam the door closed. Also, it wouldn’t be unusual to come home at 3pm and find him sound asleep on the living room futon, butt naked with his (hairy) backside facing the front door.

We refused to do dishes that we did not eat off of, therefore his would stack up in the sink and even began to pile next to the sink (since it could hold no more). Out of the goodness of her heart, my sister decided one day to do them for him. Once she got to the bottom of the stack, she found dishes with mold growing in the advanced stages. Another time, I told my sister that she didn’t have to clean his dishes; he came out and started arguing with me and we got into a shouting match over his dirtiness. He would leave food in the refrigerator for months, and once they were covered in mold, my sister would throw them away. For some reason, he did not like this and would broadcast his displeasure toward her. Toward the end of the school year, he allowed two of his friends to “move in.” Of course, they did not help with the rent and contributed to an already high utility bill (without paying that, as well).

Since the lease we signed expired soon, we decided that we were going to move somewhere else since the other two “unofficial” roommates were not contractually obliged to pay rent. One day, the landlord came to fix the water heater that had been broken for about a month; he had not told us this and we had to go elsewhere to take warm showers. After seeing the clothes plus the two extra roommates he allowed to stay over for free and the disaster of a kitchen, he was evicted.

I was forced to get my first roommate after moving to New Orleans for grad school because of the crazy post-Katrina prices. Older than me, she was also starting law school and had the same breed of dog as I did, and they got along well. She was shy and reserved when we met and I thought would make a great roommate. First weekend there, she and her long-distance boyfriend invited me to the French Quarter to “show me around.” Except they got so plastered that when I woke up the next morning, I found the apartment filled with purple vomit. Even worse, there were feces smeared on the toilet and wall. I tried to keep an open mind and never mentioned it, but things got steadily worse. Her dog was sweet, but completely untrained. He’d get into my room and destroy my shoes, clothing and things (total damage: over $400) and she’d just shrug. One time he got out and I spent 40 minutes dodging cars trying to catch him. She never made other friends and would sulk if I tried to talk to other people on campus. As time went on, she kept more and more to herself, leaving the common area as soon as we walked in.

She would cry to me how her parents only loved her sister and had long, loud, drawn-out fights with her boyfriend. As long as they were on good terms, she’d be jovial and friendly. But as they began breaking up on a weekly basis, she became downright rude. As living there became unbearable, my now-husband and I bought a place with the plan to move in after exams. But a week before exams, she told me, “I think it’s a given, but your boyfriend can’t come over during exams.” I was dumbstruck. I didn’t trust myself not to explode so I wrote her a long email explaining that I was an adult and paid as much rent as she did and she had no right to tell me who I can see and when. Next thing I know, I see her leaving our landlord’s place in tears. I don’t know what she told him but he called me seconds later, screaming and threatening me and actually forbidding him from coming over to our place! I was shaking when I hung up. At home, I heard her crying hysterically on the phone, telling them that I threatened to kill her dog. We ended up overpaying several thousand dollars just so we could move into our new house early and I was moving boxes a day before my first exam instead of studying.