My Very Worst Roommate experience happened during my sophomore year in college. I was living in the dorms, and was randomly assigned to room with three people I didn’t know. Unfortunately, while they were all very nice, one of them was an alcoholic.

She was a freshman, but she still bought beer so she must have had a fake ID. Also, she would leave beer bottles (and once an enormous vodka jug) lying around our den, even though we kept telling her not to do so. At any time, the RAs could have looked in (or smelled) and told that there was someone drinking in the room, and they actually got a citation once.

She also brought her friends over, sometimes on weeknights when I had class in the morning, after they had all gone to bars or clubs and were drunk. Then they would drink more in her room until 3 or 4 in the morning. However, the worst thing that happened was one night at about 4:30 a.m., she and about five of her friends came back from a club drunk. They proceeded to drink more and woke me up by laughing really loudly.

I was about to go out and tell them to shut up for probably the third time that week, when a random guy I didn’t know BURST into my room, vomited all over the floor, and ran out. He them vomited into the toilet, loudly, for about five more minutes.

That’s not the worst part.

The next morning I went to brush my teeth and I only to realize (fortunately before I started brushing) that this random drunk guy had used my toothbrush and that it was covered in vomit.

First big mistake. I moved in with my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. At first, things were ok. That was the first two weeks.

And then I started to notice all her dirty habits. The dishwasher would be empty, and instead of taking the time to dump the rest of her food in the garbage, rinse the plate, and stick it in the dishwasher, she’d toss the plate (food and all) in the sink. There were multiple times when it would sit in the sink for 3-7 days and grow with mould and smells, that smelled worse then walking by a sewer plant. When she would cook food, instead of putting water or anything in it she’d leave it on the stove to sit and harden. One time, we had to throw a pot and spoon out because it had sat there so long they wouldn’t come apart from each other, even after soaking it.

You’d think that was the worst of it. But no, not at all!  It was her turn to buy the toilet paper, and she forgot, so I brought home a roll from work, but kept it in my room. So she went to the washroom to take a disgusting No. 2, came back and said, “I just showered the sh*t off my ass in the shower, because I forgot to buy toilet paper.” Oh and to top it off, she would brush her hair in the shower, and then dispose of it in the bottom of the shower/tub, which then ended up clogging up our water system and you had to wade in 2-3 inches of your own grimey water (and probably her feces too!) while trying to take a shower.

My husband and I have the Very Worst Roommate Ever right now. He was a co-worker of my husband’s at his former job. He currently has no job, no form of income whatsoever, and is convinced he is the next Eminem. He sits around all day writing these horrible songs about killing his ex-wife, random strangers, and other horrible situations. We’re helping him because we feel bad. But it’s starting to get really old. He eats our food, isn’t shy about taking seconds and even thirds, before we’ve finished our first helpings. He takes 30 minute-long showers, using every bit of hot water available. Turns the heat up to 80, when our gas bill is already over $200, and is completely ungrateful. When my husband isn’t home, I stay in my room with the door locked, because he freaks me out. When my son is born in April, I hope he goes insane from the crying.

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.

While living in the dorms on campus, I shared one medium-sized room with three other guys and when two of them moved out to cut costs, it was just D and I. So all was well, until two of D’s friend’s moved in unannounced. D flipped out when I called him since these guys never told him that they were moving in, but they were having roommate troubles so we agreed to let them stay. The two never showered, which only intensified their already pungent odor considering they played basketball every night. D and I ended up buying Febreze, Axe, whatever we could find just to get rid of their smells. Not only that, but they’d play video games until 7 in the morning, which was incredibly inconvenient considering I worked full time in the mornings and took night classes.

So it all came to a head one day when I was getting up in the morning like I normally did, and one of the new roommates was woken up by the noise I made. As I put on my work clothes, I watched him step out of his bunk, smell himself and bed sheets, then spray Febreze on said sheets and go back to bed. That’s right, he smelled so badly that he couldn’t stand his own scent. So that very day I got out of my housing contract and moved in with my sister. And apparently they’ve both dropped out of college, while D and I are still great friends.

As a 22 year-old college senior, I had to give up the sweet one-bedroom apartment I had all to myself so I could quit my part-time job and blitz out my very last semester. I was driving around different apartment complexes near my university; at one that I liked, I spotted a tenant throwing trash in the dumspter, and rolled down my window to ask her where the leasing office was. She approached me and responded in a howlingly loud voice, “EETZ RIIIIGHT OVAH THEEEEEEEAH. DO YOU WAAANT TO MOOOVE HEEEAH AND BE MY ROOOOOOOM MAAAAATE?” Turns out, Svetka was a 32-year old community college student who was here from the Netherlands, studying herbology, operating on a theory that people could survive by ingesting only herbal supplements instead of eating actual food. She told me all this in the first 10 minutes of our meeting. And I agreed to move in with her anyway.

I soon found out that the herbal supplement-only diet wasn’t cutting it; about once every two weeks, Svetka would stop at the Burger King drive-through, order one of everything on the menu and bring it all home to eat over a period of three or four days. This meant rotting, nasty burgers and fries laying out on our kitchen counters, accumulating flies and ants; she would still eat all of it. Our kitchen smelled like grease and bad gas the entire time I lived there. She looked like the blonde girl from ABBA and carried a picture of ABBA in her wallet at all times. Her opening remarks to most new acquaintances was: “DOOONT YOO THIIIIINK I LOOOOOK LIKE ABBA?” Instead of staying in her own room to talk to her family back home in the middle of the night, she chose to roam the hall in front of my bedroom to talk loudly and even shout sometimes.

Most disturbingly, Svetka asked me for “relationship” advice all the time about her infatuation with a bartender in our town, who had a live-in girlfriend and showed no interest in her whatsoever. When I told her it sounded like she was wasting her time, she would literally pretend I hadn’t said anything and would ask me the question again. To attract his attention, she bought “naughty bunny”-themed lingerie and wore it to the bar on Halloween. With no clothes over it. She kissed a random stranger at the bar in an attempt to make him jealous; the stranger had a bad cold sore, and Svetka caught herpes from him. Then, one school night, I was woken up by the sound outside my bedroom door of someone dragging something heavy across the floor. I didn’t want to deal with whatever Svetka was doing at that moment and went back to bed. I awoke the next day to hear a man talking on the balcony that connected Svetka’s and my rooms. I eavesdropped enough to hear that it was the bartender, telling someone on his cell phone that he was unsure how he had gotten to Svetka’s apartment, that his head felt groggy. Svetka had apparently somehow drugged him at the bar and kidnapped him at our apartment!

The second my lease was up, I bolted from that apartment, passive-aggressively leaving most of my horribly tacky and heavy furniture for Svetka to deal with. I found out via e-mail about three months later that she had been deported for violating the terms of her visa.

I was moved into the freshman dorms with a randomly assigned roommate, a quiet blonde girl who had transferred to the school. For a few weeks, nothing of note happened, except she started smoking in the dorm room. I hated it, but other than mention to her once that it bothered me, I was too nice to do anything about it. I became accustomed to coming home every day to my room which reeked of smoke, although I was a non-smoker. Then the pictures started. First it was just a simple pencil drawing of a mushroom above her bed. A few days later, a watercolored painting of the mushroom appeared, in which it had partially melted into the grass. I complimented her on her artistic talent and went about my business. A few days thereafter, a new painting appeared. It was of the same mushroom, but now it had melted into a boiling mass. Then one of a mushroom with people standing around it. Okay. Then a mushroom melting with screaming people standing around it. In the next picture, the people had begun to melt along with the mushroom.

In the next picture, the people were screaming and melted tortured faces were hanging from the mushroom. They kept coming. At first, they were just next to her bed. Within a few weeks, they encompassed all the walls, then the ceiling. Then they were hanging from the dressers, mine as well as hers, the desks, my bed, the door. The entire room, from floor to ceiling was covered in hundreds of pictures of screaming tortured souls, with blood and intestines and brain matter dripping from them, each one somewhere featuring a mushroom. Eventually these pictures were covered with more pictures since there was no wall or ceiling space left. These new pictures featured male genitalia, usually mutilated or on fire. I was 17, a virgin, had never tried drugs of any kind and was a fairly conservative practicing Jew. Having never seen an actual penis, these pictures seriously bothered me. Nowhere in the dorms policy did it say anything about artwork, so I simply ignored it, not knowing how to ask her not to hang pictures of melting penises on my bed.

Near the end of the first semester in a two semester year, I was diligently studying for my finals. I had two finals on Friday morning and went to bed early Thursday night having studied all day and most of the previous week, during which I’d barely had time to sleep. I awoke at 4 a.m. with a naked man’s ass pressed to my faced. As in, my nose was actually inside of his crack and I couldn’t breathe. I kicked and screamed, and the man fell laughing to the floor. I looked over in the darkness to discover my roommate, naked on the floor, involved in a threesome with two other men I’d never seen, while the third I’d thrown off of myself was lying on the floor next to them, naked, laughing like a madman. Always being entirely too nice for my own good, I picked up my pillow and blanket, gingerly stepped around the orgy on the floor of my tiny bedroom and slept in the common hallway that night.

Interestingly enough, I never saw the roommate again. For the following two days, I saw she’d been there, like her stuff had moved, a drawer was opened or closed, but she was never around when I was in the room. On the third day I came home and the room was empty. Her bedding was gone, her dresser was empty, and the hundreds of pictures, as well as the tape that held them to the walls and ceiling were gone. The only thing I had left of her was a simple sketch of a melting mushroom, that had one day appeared on the back of my Calculus notebook when I’d left it sitting on my desk.

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.

My absolute Very Worst Roommate was a friend of mine from work. I met her during my training class and we got along well enough. We enjoyed much of the same music and we both frequented a somewhat divey bar downtown.

Just before Christmas, her jerky roommate pulled some drama and forced her out of the apartment. She had no family in the area and I was the only one of her friends that had enough space to have another person in their apartment. I figured it would be horrible for her to have to shack up in some nasty hostel at Christmas so I told her that she could pay a quarter of the rent and half the utilities since she wouldn’t be getting an actual bedroom but would be sleeping on my day-bed in my living room.

Well, as it turned out she was an alcoholic with an ulcer so she would barf neon green bile all over the bathroom and ONLY clean it up on the toilet despite the fact it was up the wall and behind the toilet and under the sink. She would also use really cheap black hair dye all over the bathroom and “miss” spots while she was cleaning it up.

She also ate all of my food, which was fairly high-end because I just prefer good quality food that has actual flavor. And considering I had to troop these groceries up a significant hill there was more than just the price of food to account for. What little she replaced she did with cut-rate brands and she never even bothered replacing my produce. She did buy inordinate amounts of ketchup even though I almost never use ketchup.

She also broke my glassware and plates. Most of which were vintage because I like collecting things like that. I’ve moved about eight times in the last ten years and never have I broken an item. Yet she lived with me for maybe two months and broke a third of my kitchenware. The worst had to be a vintage glass martini shaker that had recipes printed on it. It was about 1 litre and she used it (despite my protestations) as a water glass. She put it on the counter and it slipped off “somehow” and sheared off the bottom of it.

Oh, and whenever I’d come home to broken things and the oven still on while she was out of the house she would say “I think your apartment is haunted!” I convinced her to get the hell out shortly after that.

A month or so later, my mom and I were watching the Planet Earth series and saw a piece about these deepsea fish called Hagfish that are about the size of your forearm and prowl the depths looking for whale carcasses which they can strip down to bone in about a week. They’re nasty things and all covered with mucous and mom said, “wow that reminds me of [roommate whose name rhymes with Hagfish]!” We’ve called her that ever since.

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…