My school assigned random roommates and revealed them on move-in day.

“Carrie” only drank Vanilla Coke and ate Rice-A-Roni. Twelve cans, three meals a day. Every day for eight months. She had a phobia of fruit flies, so she rarely left her room. She was a musical theater major with a weak voice and an inability to read music. Every time I colored my hair, she dyed hers to match. Brown to red to purple to black, and she never missed a beat. Her ultra-conservative views didn’t bother me, except when she tried to convert me to her cultish religion because I was doomed to burn in hell’s fire otherwise. But she was cake comparatively.

“Marky” gained 60lbs by the end of mid-terms. Despite this, she still managed to bring back and have sex with local raver-gangsters three times each week. These guys pissed all over the bathroom, but I can’t fully blame its rankness on Marky’s playmates. When she took out her synthetic hair extensions she left them to dry and shed everywhere. Her body was so filthy that a week after I scrubbed the shower it was completely black with dirt and hair dye. When she was on her period, blood spatters regularly covered the floor, toilet, shower, and sink. She only cooked tacos and empanadas, and insisted she would win over a rich husband with this skill. I’m vegetarian, but she insisted that chicken wasn’t meat and tried to slip some into my salad.

After months of compromise, the last straw came when she threw a Wednesday morning party at 4 a.m. I rang our R.A. and she was asked to leave the dorms. It didn’t really matter, though, because she failed academic probation and dropped out for next semester.

In particular, we want your Very Worst Job for our sister site. We know you bitch (or have done in the past) about your nine-to-five almost as much as you do about your love life and shared living arrangements. We’d love hear your tales. Guidelines on how to submit are here.

The weekend’s a mere memory.

It’s back to cubicle (or insert your unhappy workplace type here) hell.

We understand so we’re offering you some comfort at My Very Worst Job. Here’s the intro to our new-ish site:

Workers of the world might just be united by one conviction: work is a four-letter word. Of course it is when you have bitchy bosses, vicious water cooler gossips and menial assignments that make you feel about as big as a paperclip. It doesn’t matter if you’re a no-wage intern, middle-level salary man or even the boss, everyone suffers from the working (wo)man’s blues some time. But don’t fret too much because there’s workers’ comp in the form of hilarity and sympathy at My Very Worst Job™.

Sharing also lifts the burden of bitching off your shoulders (and keeps your partner/friends/family from getting a bad case of supportive listener fatigue). Send us your tales of workplace woes here.

I found a roommate via Craigslist to share a house during my last year of grad school. She seemed great at first, a little quirky but a breath of fresh air compared to my former roommates. We found two other girls to share a fabulous house, and for the first month, everything was great. Although she took weeks to unpack (and left her crap all over the house), the other three of us overlooked this and were having a great time.

Before we moved in, she was a foster mom for animals and had been caring for a large litter of kittens, but assured us they would be gone before we moved in. They were not, but she then assured us they would be adopted quickly. Aside from peeing all over my blankets on the couch, these kittens had raging fleas, which spread like wildfire through the house to her three dogs and another girl’s cat. She claimed she just “didn’t know what to do” and couldn’t afford an exterminator, so we would just have to deal with it until it got cold. It was mid July. While her dogs had fleas, she would keep two of them locked into one crate, and leave them in the basement while she went out. She wouldn’t come home until the morning and these dogs would bark the entire night in their crates, which happened to be right below my bedroom. I would often have go down there at 3 a.m. and yell at them to stop, to no avail. I still have scars on my legs from the flea bites, over a year and a half later.

Then she lost her job, and while telling us she would get a new one, got a waitressing job which she constantly called out of, making no money. She stopped paying rent and after about two months, the other girls and I realized she hadn’t informed us about the utility she was in charge of, the electric bill. We thought maybe she had been paying it herself and would get the money later. WRONG. Concerned, we called our landlord, who called the electric company, who informed us our electricity was about to be shut off in two days because we had a $500 balance that hadn’t been paid in months.

We decided that was the final straw (her room was a disaster, and she had never cleaned her bathroom once) and kicked her out, but then she proceeded to write psychotic emails to us proclaiming we had all conspired against her and that it was our fault she hadn’t paid the electricity bill. I found out later she had gotten her car repo’ed and was living in a place that smelled like cat litter…

Hello Dear Contributors, Commenters and Readers!

We have some exciting news for you! We are working with an Emmy-winning production company to develop TV shows based on our blogs, My Very Worst Date and My Very Worst Roommate. We couldn’t be more excited and wanted to let you know that we are calling for video Worst Date and Worst Roommate submissions. These clips will be used in the development process of the show (pitching to networks for example), but will not be aired on TV at this time. If you are okay with it, we may post your video on our blogs (if you’re not okay with that just let us know).

We thank you so much for making this blog so fun to run and read and look forward to seeing you in our email inboxes soon!

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Please email your submission via YouSendIt or other file sharing site if it’s too large to send regularly. Or you may post it to YouTube and send us the link. Please mark it so that only we may see it.

2. Aim to make your story around 90 seconds or less.

3. Sit right in front of the camera (head and shoulders is good) and tell the story as if you were telling your best friend.

4. Tell your Worst Date or Worst Roommate story as if it just happened or  just go right into telling the story if it was years ago. There is no need to introduce your video or give your name.

Any questions? Just email us at myveryworstdate@gmail.com.

Thank you so much!

Over at our sis site, MVWD, we’re in Search for the Very Worst Date in America and we want yours. Whether you are single or coupled-up, you must have at least one cringe-worthy, laugh-out-loud, WTF! story in the archives of your dating life. As we approach the love fest that is Valentine’s Day, we urge you to dig out your tale and write us for the chance to win the $1,000 cash prize.

So here’s the (short) deal:

1. It’s free to enter.

2. Submission guidelines are as usual. One exception: word count. Go ahead and go crazy with gory/funny/gross details but please keep it under 500 words.

3. It has to be your own story. Refrain from using real names for offenders. Initials will do.

4. Please include your name and phone as we might need to get in touch. We won’t hand out your digits to anyone. Promise.

5. Send it in to myveryworstdate@gmail.com by 12 p.m. EST on February 12, 2010. Winners will be announced on February 14, 2010. Wouldn’t a cool grand be the best Valentine’s pressie of all?

For the longer deal and full contest guidelines, please see here. Of course, we’d love it if you tell all your friends (real, Facebook, Twitter) about it.

We made MVWR (and My Very Worst Date) happen with you! Thanks for your support, stories and comments. Here’s to lots more comedy in 2010! xx

A few days after moving in My (soon-to-be) Very Worst Roommate  and I decided to throw away all of the old food left in the fridge by the old tenants. There was a dumpster near where we went to toss it in. The landlord was outside and told us to walk away – which I started to do. But my roommate had to assert herself and make up lies saying she was legally allowed to dump the trash, which obviously we weren’t. The landlord called the cops on her. Afterwards when she told the story, she acted like I was a coward for walking away and she was a hardass, I just figured we could come back after the landlord left, no?

The two months in our lease, she broke her foot and would always sigh and crutch into the house like it was the worst day of her life. She then got pregnant from a one-night stand. If she wasn’t chemically imbalanced before, she sure as hell was after this. She hid all of her food in her room along with the toilet paper. Her room smelled like she hadn’t showered in days, probably because she didn’t. She would hardly leave her room unless it was to go into the kitchen (no complaints here) to heat up one of her nasty TV dinners, I’m pretty sure those were recommended by her doctor.

My Very Worst Roommate(s) were three girls I lived with over a summer at college. I had decided to stay and take a summer class so I was subleasing a room in a 4-bedroom apartment. I shared one bathroom with two of them (who were a couple) in the room next to mine, and the third roommate was a girl that worked at the gym on campus. All seemed well enough to begin with.

Only problem I had with the couple was that one day I went to take a shower and found the tub absolutely coated with hair – as if someone had shaved and not bothered to wash it out. And they had extremely loud sex almost every night.

The second girl, the one who worked at the gym, was much more problematic. She would go to the grocery store down the street, purchase huge amounts of food and absolutely stuff our refrigerator with her food. Then she would nonchalantly eat our food instead while her food rotted. About a month before the sublease was over, this roommate lost her key, but did not feel like paying to replace it.

I locked the door when I left and when I came home because it was a fairly unsafe neighborhood. One morning at 2 a.m., I woke up to someone banging on my window. I ignored it and then I heard a commotion in the living room. I went out with a flashlight and mace and found third roommate breaking into our living room through the window. After this, whenever she would leave the apartment she would leave the door completely unlocked plus leave the living room window unlocked – so I began locking my bedroom door.

Two weeks before the sublease ended, she decided to get a puppy, go on vacation for the weekend and leave the puppy locked in their bathroom with no food, water, or place to relieve itself. It barked and whined the whole time.

The day before I was set to move out, I packed my boxes and labeled them neatly and went to work. When I came home I was exhausted so I crashed in my room. The next morning when I came out to finish packing, two of my boxes were missing (containing all of my video games and computer equipment) plus they had stolen my dartboard and my darts. Ditzy roommate was no where to be found.

I was lying on the couch one day when my roommate came home and started stomping around and slamming doors. Then, she looked at me and said, “Where the f*** is my bottle of Irn-Bru?” Irn-Bru, for you non-Scottish folk, is an orange-coloured soft drink. I looked at her and replied that I had no idea. I proceeded to enquire, “What’s with the attitude?” This unleashed her. She began ranting and raving. “I don’t give a f*** about attitude.Where the fuck is it?” She continued slamming doors while I got up to meet our other roommate. As I lifted myself from the couch, I casually told her to just get another bottle of Irn-Bru. She informed me she had no money and began to argue with me about everything. Suddenly, she flipped and shoved me against the wall. Then, she kicked me and started hitting my head. I hit back. A crazy people fight ensued. Eventually, I managed to call the police. When the arrived, she played victim and was full of ‘woe is me, I’m bullied’ lines. I then told the police that she started the fight over a can of Irn-Bru. Their reaction was: “Really?”