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 met my My Very Worst Roommate, Tina, at work. We both worked at a restaurant together and she seemed cool. Turns out she lived very far from the restaurant and needed a place to stay. I lived only a few blocks away and offered to rent her my living room (we live in an expensive city where this is common). She saw it, happily agreed, then moved in.

At first, things were great. We got really close and became good friends. I ignored the fact that she wouldn’t bathe too often and sometimes smelled. I don’t know what I was thinking, that should have been a warning sign. She also always kept the room a mess and never helped me clean common areas. I had to beg her for a week to clean the kitchen and bathroom, which I had been cleaning all along, then got tired of waiting and just left the bathroom for her to clean, which she finally did after a week.

One day we decided to take a roadtrip together, and that’s when things went downhill. I guess the 12 hours of driving really got to her, and she started snapping at me for no reason. Throughout our trip, we only did what she wanted to do. She didn’t care that I had never been to that part of the country before (she used to live there) and barely took me sightseeing. It was my vacation, too. We got into a big argument on the last night of our trip. On the way back, we barely spoke. She was only 19 and a pretty bad driver, so when she stopped really short on the way home I screamed, thinking we would hit something. She told me, “I swear to God, if you scream like that again…” When we got closer to home, she became super agitated with the traffic and again took it out on me by giving me an attitude.

When we got home we went our separate ways. The next day I had to work, and she came to the restaurant to hang out. She apologized to me for her bad behavior, and we hugged it out. All seemed well. The day after that, we were scheduled to work together. At our preshift meeting, the manager was talking about something random. He turned to Tina to ask her a completely neutral subject (something like what her favorite dish was at the restaurant) and she snapped. She gave him a nasty look and stormed off. We were all baffled. The rest of the shift, she kept shooting me nasty looks and talking with a girl who didn’t like me. They kept looking my way and laughing. Real mature. This continued throughout the whole shift.

I got out earlier than her and ran home to cry. I texted her not to sleep at my apartment tonight. She came to pick up a night bag to stay at a friend’s house. When I asked her what her problem was she said she didn’t want to be rude (too late) and say what it was, then stormed out. She never agreed to talk it out with me and ended up moving out after that.

She did leave me a parting gift, though- a room full of trash and her body odor! The floor seemed to be her garbage can(though thank God there was at least no food on it) and I found everything from bank statements to condom wrappers on the floor. She also left anything she didn’t want for me to get rid of, including a futon stained with food and something that looked like a bodily fluid (I’l give you a hint- it was white).

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!

In first year university, I was paired up with three other girls.
While two were decent, if not a little messy, Mel was a disaster. She
never seemed to have any class or work, and spent most her time
tanning, drinking, partying loudly, watching “Bewitched” on her computer
in the common room, shopping for discount Juicy Couture, eating
McDonalds, playing Britney Spear’s “Womanizer” ad nauseum, and being a
general laze-about.

She never did the dishes, but instead would stash
her dirty cutlery in her room, depriving the other housemates of
dishes and glasses. Her blankets, shoes, hair accesories, hair balls
etc would be left scattered around the common room. Her own bedroom was an
utter disaster, and she would often bring over loud, drunken friends
at odd hours.

She left, mid-semester, to go on a trip to Florida and
returned with a Chihuahua puppy. Our apartment had a strict no pets
policy, and the other roommates were a little appalled she would bring
home a pet without telling anyone. The dog was untrained, scared
stupid by loud noises and she would use our dishes to feed it kibble,
not washing the smell of oily dog food off before dumping them off in
the sink for us to clean.

When we confronted her about the dog and the
lack of responsibilities on her part, she had a fit and said we didn’t
get her, that her dogs were the only creatures who truly loved and
understood her, and her awful childhood left her with such a void in
her life only a bug-eyed Chihuahua could fill it. Also, she wanted to
leave the school so the dog was a ploy to get kicked out of residence
without having to break her contract and pay a fine, although she (and
by she, I mean her parents) would have to pay a fee for having the dog
in the first place. Luckily by second semester she was gone and a nice
french girl had replaced her.

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.

When one of my housemates had to move interstate, my remaining housemate had a close friend, Bill, who was keen to take his place. I had my reservations, as his tight-arse reputation preceded him. But he seemed preferable to an unknown.

Upon moving in, a number of minor incidents began unfolding, including:

- A complete adversity to cleaning, leading to a stink cloud encompassing his bedroom so thick you could do backstroke through it.

- Rotating between a total of two meals when it was his turn to cook.

- Mysterious white stains found on the couch following a night out (no, he did not have company).

- Leaving a 1kg block of cheese in direct 35°C sunlight for an entire day, which was returned to the fridge for consumption.

- After said block of cheese ended up in his bed overnight to teach him a lesson, the same block found its way back in the fridge the following morning, seemingly ready for consumption once more.

Enough to make you shake your head and laugh, but things you tend to expect having shared with various housemates in the past. This all escalated however when the other housemate moved out, and we found a new fun and attractive girl to move in.

I often found myself waking in the middle of the night to her yelling at him to get out of her room, after he’d crawled into her bed while she was asleep. As creepy and unfair as this was for her, this paled in comparison to the day the household was abruptly disbanded. One Sunday, Bill returned home at about 6 a.m. following a drug fueled bender at a music festival.

That Monday night, we returned home from work to find Bill on the couch having spent the day at home by himself, behaving as though nothing other than his almighty hangover was amiss. Until our new housemate went to her room to find belongings knocked about, picture frames smashed with shattered glass over the floor, her underwear draw strewn across the room and her covers pulled back with a load of white sticky mess sprayed across her mattress. One messed up individual.

I admit that I might’ve been a bad roommate to Sam. When she came to look at the apartment, I hadn’t cleaned before I left to go to my hometown, because my sister became suddenly ill and I needed to rush there to help take care of her son. I did warn her about it, and she told me it was OK. I thanked her and told her I’m not like that when I have roommates, and when she moved in, the place was spotless.

My first impression of Sam was that she was probably a bit spoiled. She talked to her parents in a baby voice, and she got all new, expensive furniture for her room. She seemed nice though, so I told myself to stop being like the bitch I usually am and roll with it, because it looked like we were going to live together for two years. Her father did “joke” that I had to clean out the balcony before he came to visit next time, since he thought that it wasn’t OK for me to have an ashtray with cigarette butts in it. That made me wonder who was going to live there, him or his daughter, but I just laughed. It wasn’t as if I would push her into becoming a smoker.

The problems I had with Sam started after I hurt my back. That afternoon, I went to the bathroom and saw that Sam had taken all of the toilet paper. I had bought two packs when she moved in, but I couldn’t use the roll she had bought, when she clearly used mine all the time? It felt so passive aggressive and I got really mad at her, but I didn’t confront her about it, since I wanted to avoid drama. I just went to the nearest store to buy toilet paper when my back was screaming in agony. Another time when I was sick, I left my plate in the sink after eating, thinking I would clean it when I felt like the walls weren’t spinning anymore. The next day, when the room was spinning less but wasn’t still enough for me to dare to get up, Sam texted me asking me if I could “please do the dishes” because she couldn’t do her dishes if a plate was in the sink. I asked her if she couldn’t just move the plate and do her dishes, but got no response.

Then my friend was going to visit. I forgot to tell Sam, so I texted her and told her when I was waiting for my friend’s train. She told me “no problem” and she had gone home for the weekend anyway. Now, this wouldn’t be weird if it wasn’t for the fact that the next day, I get a phone call from our landlord, telling me he has gotten complaints about the fact that Sam felt that the apartment was messy, and I needed to clean it up. Considering I had spent all of my time since she moved in inside my room and none in the common areas, where I always make sure to clean after myself, this was a very peculiar conversation. Thinking back, I’m pretty sure that she had complained about the previous mentioned plate to her parents, and they pushed her into calling the landlord. With the plate and the ashtray, I sure was messy.

To top it off, I woke up one morning to find that something was different. It took a while for me to realize what it was, but after looking through cabinets and knocking on Sam’s door, I realized she moved out, without warning, and without waking me up. She left me with a sense of WTF and a slow clap for beating me to it.

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.

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.

This story is from six years ago.

I decided I wanted to save some money faster than I had been, and in order to do so, I had to rent out my guest room.

I found someone I thought was suitable at the time from a reputable site. His references checked out, we were close in age, etc and he paid for his deposit before arriving.

The first month was great, then it got weird. Really weird.

Here are the next 3 months:

- Started putting the dishes away in very obscured places. Steak knives with the tupperware (there was a knife block)

- Somehow got the impression that rent, bills etc were all now negotiable. Many fights occurred over this.

- He had a date over once, and when she asked if everything in the apartment was mine, I relied “yes,” she responded with “are you sure?” (I started to wonder what he was telling this girl, who btw appeared to be way out of his league).

- When I was in the shower, he would yell through the door that there was a phone call for me. Instead of taking a message, he’d leave the phone on the floor outside the door.

- Other times, I’d be coming out of the bathroom for whatever reason, and he’d be sitting on the floor against the door, cos he needed the bathroom. Um, ever heard of knocking?

- He couldn’t be bothered to wash dishes of mine he used to cook for his date, I came home to find all my pots and pans in the garbage.

- When I had female friends over, he’d go to his bedroom and then come out in with only a towel on, sit on the edge of the couch and life one leg up etc (the same way you would if you were dressed). When asked if he was taking a shower, he’d look at me like I was stupid and say “No.”

- I’d be sharing a bottle of wine with a friend, he’d walked up and say, “I wish I had some wine to enjoy.” Ignoring him, since we’d asked if he’d like any before we opened the bottle.

- I decided to eat dinner at work during late shifts for a week. When asking him why he only did part of the dishes, he would jump up and scream at me that the rest were mine. Impossible as I had been eating lunch and dinner at work for a week. Shuts up and does the dishes. “Accidently” breaking a few in the process.

- G/f’s and I be doing finale touch-ups in the bathroom to go out for the night, leaving in mere minutes, and he’d barge in and start to prepare for a shower. When asked to wait til we were done, he’d yell, “I have to shower NOW.”

- He had decided he no longer wanted to pay for his share of cable and insisted that I move the living room TV into another room. (living room and both bedrooms had tvs)

-Same with the phone, but would use it anyways and forget to erase the outgoing calls.

- He would leave the apartment for whatever reason and leave the door wide open. Thankfully I have great neighbours.

- He stood over me whilst I was on the couch, with his finger in my face, yelling that HE’D be very patient with me and that I better find “my place” as a female, cos I was too aggressive as a woman. As hard as it was, calmly as I could, I advised him to put his finger away and step back, or he would see just how aggressive I could be as a female. This was repeated twice as he did not believe me, until I stood up and walked towards him, with all intentions of breaking his finger.

- He’d bought a car, and with in 48 hours had two hit and runs. He couldn’t stick around, cos 1- he was late for work the first time, 2- he had a date.

I had blogged about it, used some key words and shortly afterwards I got a call from an insurance person from this particular company. Told him everything I knew. A few weeks later and all this weird shit getting to me, he mentioned he was going camping and was going to “trade” in his car for a truck for the weekend, then take it back and say he didn’t like it. I called the dealership where he bought his car, and the insurance guy that called me and informed them both. He didn’t get the truck.

- I was away on holidays and he called to asked if he could use my computer for Powerpoint etc for his job, but needed access to my part of the computer. I had him set up as a guest user on it with restricted access. I agreed because I knew about the project for work he had. Upon returning home, I quickly learned that he made me the guest and himself the administrator, changed all passwords.

At this point we’re 4 months in, and I’ve decided to evict him. The weekend before I had planned to do so, some weird stuff happened.

- My car had been broken into, but nothing had been taken.

- My computer suddenly needed a bioss password. It ended up frying my motherboard, resulting in a new computer, but not til after he was out of the apartment.

- Filling my gas tank up on my way to work. I usually pay cash and drive off, but that day, I had to use the debit machine as I’m about to turn on my car, a gas station attendant punched out my driver-side window screaming not to turn on my car! There was 60 litres of gasoline spewing from the undercarriage of my car. Hazmat, police etc were all called. It was later learned by my mechanic that the new tank we put on a few months earlier had indeed been tampered with.

Of course I’m hysterical at this point. I evict him. He refuses and claims as I rent, not own, I did not have authority to evict him and he would take this up with the building management. Where the hell is guy from? They laughed at him of course.

Moving day arrived, and he refused to leave. I called the police to advise what was taking place and that I was actually becoming afraid. (I do not scare easily). They arrived and were out of sight from the hallway when he returned. I had just finished explaining everything that had been taking place and could not prove he was responsible for any of it etc.

He walked in the door and it must have been the look I gave him, because he started beeking off about how I was lucky to still be alive etc after all the things he did and not to mention my car etc and that he’d still “get” me. The police out of direct view heard. The female officer walked down the hallway and he postured up to her, challenging her in a way. That is until the male officer walked down the hallway. He changed his tune. He was advised to pick up what he could carry and would be escorted from the building.

But he didn’t go quietly. They had to forcibly take the keys from him and issued him a no contact order. I changed my locks that hour.

It was months before I started to relax. Even though the police had told me, if he was to return I could do what was in my power to defend myself.

Thankfully I’ve never heard from him again directly, but did hear from his old employers, as he took a personal loan of substantial amounts and never returned the cash. Same with insurance people regarding his car and defaulting on his payments.

About a year later a girl called me to check his references as a former roommate etc. Poor girl, I had her on the phone for over 20 mins.

I’m pretty sure she didn’t accept his application.