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.

I moved across country for five months to work and was placed in a three-bedroom apartment with five other girls. We decided I would share a room with E. Within a week, I found out I couldn’t use my laptop in my room at night because my typing was too loud and my screen was too bright. She would sleep in a spaghetti strap t-shirt and thong with just a sheet, and compensate by turning the heat to 80 degrees in Orlando, Florida. After a month, I was so uncomfortable in my room, I moved to the couch, which sadly, was less awkward. E would go to bed by 8pm, then complain the TV was too loud and preventing her from sleeping. She would get up at 6am and sing at the top of her lungs in the shower, waking the rest of us. She flat ironed her melted hair daily, first using mine until I started hiding it, then using her own, leaving it on to scorch the counter, as well as the stench of her burnt and broken hair all over our shared bathroom.

She only did laundry twice during the five months and just shoved the rest under her bed. She could only make scrambled eggs and usually burned those and left them in the sink. She lived off of peanut butter, literally just eating it out of the jar with a spoon. E was also, by far, the dumbest person I had ever met. She wasn’t allowed to drive, even in her hometown because she would get lost and not be able to find her way home. One day, she came out of “our” room (I still used the closet) and said the room had a funky smell and wondered if I had an air freshener. I told her to open the window to get rid of the smell rather than just cover it and make it worse. She started going to the room, taking only a few steps before turning around and asking how to do that!  I bought an ironing board and iron because I was raised to press everything. I was fine with my roommates using it as well. One day,  A, another roommate, came home to find the iron on, and very hot. When later confronting E about it, she said that she had left it on and thought the blinking warning light meant it was charging, not that it needed to be unplugged.  Those are just a few of the “smack your head at the shock of her stupidity” moments we had.

I was so glad to move out and be rid of her.

At 18, I moved into a shared house with my boyfriend and four other guys. Living with all of those guys was a challenge on its own–it quickly turned into a brofest–but there was one dude in particular that sucked.

T was a proud misogynist. In his view, there were two types of women: bitches and pussy. Pussy were women who’d have sex with him, bitches were ones who weren’t. Needless to say, he knew a lot of bitches. I tired of his constant “Women are stupid and useless” mantra, but none of my roommates–or my boyfriend–would back me up against him. Turned out they were all a bit sexist themselves, and were more than willing to listen to T’s crap. When I complained, I was told to stop being so sensitive. Also, my roommates collectively decided that all the housework was my problem. Even when a sinkful of dishes was demonstrably not mine, they would complain and yell until I finally gave in and cleaned it up for them.

The sexism was but a minor quibble compared to the other stuff. For one thing, T loved to eat. And he didn’t like to spend money on food. On several occasions, I came home from work starving only to find he had eaten the food I had bought, and I didn’t have enough money to buy more. Soon I had to buy nonperishables and keep them in my room. He only targeted my food for eating.

Another thing he liked to do was to destroy stuff and then say, “I took care of that.” Like the boat my boyfriend got from his uncle: T shot it up and then informed us he’d “taken care of it.” Another time he burned down the storage shed in our backyard, in which the other roomies liked to hang out in during the summer. It also was full of boxes of my books and my boyfriend’s drumset. When I confronted him angrily about the damage (unbelievably, my other roommates weren’t angry about the fact that the fire he set destroyed our shed AND almost burned to the house) he laughed, told me to untwist my panties, and tossed me a twenty.

The best thing of all came later, though. T was working at a computer superstore, and all the roommates (except me) were enjoying his employee discount by purchasing computers and other equipment. One night I came home to find all the doors wide open and my house crawling with cops. His “employee discount” was really a five-fingered one. All the stuff in the house was hot, and I ended up getting questioned by the suspicious cops. I was freaked out because I couldn’t find my cats, but fortunately they had been scared and hid under the bed. That was the last straw. While T was in jail overnight, I called a meeting with the roommates, to talk about kicking him out. I was outvoted four to one–the other roommates insisted that he wasn’t a bad guy, and we shouldn’t abandon him in his hour of need. Enough was enough, and I grew a spine and moved out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I met K in our first year at university. We were both doing the same subjects and, after a night out with her and her boyfriend, I quickly became close mates with her boyfriend’s friends. As such, I started seeing a lot more of her.

Cut to nine months later and I was dating a friend of her boyfriend. K, her boyfriend, myself and my boyfriend found a cheap house to share and all moved in together. K was very intense. She wanted to know where I was at all hours of the day–if I missed a class she would call me non-stop for an explanation. Then she started “Single White Femal-ing” me. She cut her very long blonde hair the same as mine – very short and dark. She’d “borrow” my clothes all the time. She’d mimic my accent.

Suddenly my boyfriend started avoiding home. We both had part-time jobs to supplement university and he would get home much earlier than me. He started going to the local pub and waiting there until I finished work. When I asked him why, he confessed that he found her “creepy.” I stupidly thought he just didn’t like her.

Then one night I came home late, and was standing outside our house on my phone so as not to disturb my roommates. As I stood outside I watched through the front windows as K came downstairs to find my boyfriend asleep on the couch, sat next to him, slowly crept closer to him, rested her head on his shoulder, put her arm around him, and eventually lay right on top of him, as he snored through the whole thing. When I went inside and asked what she was doing, she pretended to have just woken up and claimed they fell asleep watching TV together–despite the fact I watched the whole thing!

My boyfriend and I moved out a month later, after her she stepped up her campaign to “get” him. As a post script, after he and I split up she claimed she had cheated with him a few weeks previously. Sadly that lie ruined only her own relationship, and my ex, her ex and I remain very good friends to this day.

My Very Worst Roommate (we’ll call him “R”) was actually my best friend all through high school. I always thought he’d be a blast to live with. After school, he moved to the city and I stayed in town and got a killer place to myself. One night, R called me up and told me how miserable he was living in the city and how he wanted to move back to our town. So, I drove to the city, picked him up and he moved in. Now R needed a job. I told him I could get him some food and he didn’t have to worry about rent until he got a job.

It wasn’t long after he moved in that I started to see his disgusting habits–not using plates, sandwiches on the couch, dripping toothpaste in the living room without realizing it, never picking up anything, you name it! Finally, about three months in, I helped get him a job at the same store I worked at and he finally started paying rent. Things have been pretty fun so far.

However, R had a friend. A homeless friend. This kid finished high school and has couch surfed for four years. R started having this homeless kid over and letting him sleep on the couch. Night after night after night! They would trash the place every night, and every morning I would be woken up before my alarm by them doing some fantasy role playing wizard stuff. Oh yeah, this kid stunk up the whole place!

So enough is enough, right? I put my foot down and said this kid can only come over once in a while but never stay the night. Now R thought this was like rollover minutes. Homeless kid wouldn’t be there for a while, and then three days straight. R would find every loophole to have this kid over, not to mention buy him food every night. I don’t hate homeless people, but this kid could have easily got a job. He didn’t because people like R would enable him to coast through life on handouts. The problem pretty much tore apart our friendship for a while. R thought I was the bad guy. So R moved in with our other friend. Of course, the same thing happened and homeless kid is now banned from that place too. Get a job dude!

I worked at a summer camp where the staff worked and lived together during the summers. I had to share close quarters with my roommate who was very sweet, but socially unaware. D slept on the top bunk and whenever she would get up in the mornings, instead of climbing down the ladder, she would just jump off the bed. And she is not graceful, so I would constantly be awoken to a sound similar to that of an elephant falling to the floor. For some unknown reason, she did not bring her cell phone or an alarm clock to the camp, so she began asking to use my phone as an alarm clock. Letting her borrow my cell phone was okay at first, until she began to take advantage of my generosity and kept taking my cell phone from my bedside table whenever she wanted. She kept it in bed with her when she needed it and then neglected to put it back.

D could not contain her belongings. Her hair products and makeup were strewn all over the sink counter, she would leave her fallen hair in the sink and she spilled globs of liquid concealer in the sink and wouldn’t clean it. She would literally kick her shoes off in the air and wherever they landed is where she left them. I would keep finding her clothes, especially her dirty socks, under my bed and mixed in with my clothes. While packing my things to go home, I found an armful of her clothes mixed in with mine and even after trying desperately to separate our belongings, I ended up finding one of her socks in my suitcase days later. It is still on my shelf as a memory of the most unaware roommate I have ever had.