C and I decided to move in together when we both found that we were getting out of long term relationships and needed places to live.  So whenever she was moody or upset or downright bitchy I chalked it up to the stress of a breakup, especially because she seemed so normal the rest of the time. Wrong! C was certifiably bipolar and damn proud of the fact that she was not taking medication. In her view medication was for wusses and nothing but sheer mental muscle should get you through the day. This from the same girl who bragged about how whatever music she listened to in the morning would set her mood for the day. When she was on a high she’d drive piss drunk, buy a ton of stuff she didn’t have money for and call it an investment (like $300 worth of makeup) and would berate her superiors at work for not doing her job for her – this last one she just couldn’t grasp why that was bad and would complain at length about them at home. When she was low she was usually straight up mean. After we had gotten to a certain point of crazy, she would call me at work and scream whatever nasty, personal, hurtful things she could think of and then hang up on me. For no reason other than she was having a bad day. I changed jobs and didn’t give her my new number.

Since neither of us had anything after our respective breakups I asked her if she wanted to go in on some inexpensive furniture with me. She said yes and then backed out at the last minute forcing me to do some creative financing. When I asked her about it she gave me a completely nonsensical answer and then asked if I was okay with it. I said I was a little disappointed but it worked out and all was fine. She proceeded to start screaming at me for being disappointed in her and how could I say that and she’s Daddy’s little girl and… wait, what? She did typical other roommate things like leaving unwrapped used sanitary napkins on top of the trash, throwing parties in the middle of the night which would wake me up and our kitchen reeked of stale beer that she would never clean up.

But the real kicker was her boyfriend, J. Our apartment building had a balcony that over looked our parking spot and we were only two stories up. I was sitting on the couch one day and I heard J yelling for her through the open door. I looked down and he was gripping his foot with blood gushing everywhere. He said she was on her way up, he’d just cut it on a can or something and needed her to take him to the hospital.  Just then she walked through the door and I yelled, “Your boyfriend needs to go to the ER right now!”  She gave a big sigh, sat down on the couch and started leafing through a magazine.  I ran and got a towel and through it over the railing to him to wrap around his foot. She sighed again and said, “I am so tired of being taken advantage of by people. All people ever want is to use you. And really, I’m just sick of it.” I was too shocked to say anything. She finally got up and took him to the hospital and was back 30 minutes later. She’d told him she had to change out of her work clothes and grab something to eat and would be right back. Instead, she went to our neighbor’s apt to smoke a couple blunts and party for a few hours before picking J up from the ER.

I couldn’t move out fast enough.

I will never forget MVWR, no matter how hard I try. I lived with my brother and as two of our old roommates moved out, we needed a replacement. We decided to give Craigslist a try, had a few potential people over and decided upon S.  S had only been living in the USA for about five years, he was originally from China. He came here for school and was going for a master’s degree at a nearby university. He seemed like a normal enough dude when we first met and even for the first week or so of him moving in, but things quickly went downhill.  S quickly became the most annoying person I have met in my life.

The first thing my brother and I noticed were the blinds. Every night we would find them all closed and in the morning opened as far as they would go. That’s not too bad, but he was going into our rooms to do it as well and he’d open the windows no matter what the weather was. Next came the coupons. He would only buy something he had a coupon for. He once came home with 12 cans of Pringles chips because he could get $1 off. It was like an obsession, he would take every coupon he could find, print them from the internet, put the ones he thought I’d use on my desk, leave them on the kitchen table. Sure, kind of annoying, but then we took him grocery shopping. My brother and I were finished within 45 minutes and then had to wait two hours for him to finish. His explanation was that he had to keep running back and forth for things he had coupons for. The wonderful ending to that shopping trip happened as we were sitting in a McDonald’s eating some McNuggets. He took a nugget and then said, in a very loud voice, “There are two things that all African-Americans like, fried chicken and…”  my brother and I cut him off before he could finish. He apparently didn’t notice that were the only three kind-of white kids in the place.

S also started to blow his nose in our sink (freaking gross), cook absurdly smelly food after midnight, spray Febreeze on our cat, talk incessantly during TV shows and movies (keep in mind the fact that his thick accent kept us from understanding much of what he said), pick through our trash can and the apartment building’s dumpster for recyclables and generally annoy the ever-loving shit out of us. After four months of what was supposed to be a year-long lease, S informed us that he would be moving out because he was attending a school 1.5 hours away, not the one just down the street as he told us originally. He offered to find someone to replace him, but after almost getting scammed out of $1000, we told him to forget it, we’d find someone. The best part?  He said he couldn’t move into his new place as soon as he though and ended up crashing in our living room for almost a month as we had already had his replacement move into his old room.

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’ve been pretty hit and miss with roommates over the years, but My Very Worst Roommate has to be C from my junior year of college. My junior year was shaping up to be the best yet, until one of my roommates ended up bailing at the last minute. In desperation, I turned to Craigs List to find a last-minute replacement.

When I first met him, C seemed totally normal if a bit on the quiet side. I should tell you that we had this crazy idea that instead of having two rooms with two guys in each, we were going to have one bedroom with four guys sleeping in it and then one room with just our desks for studying. We thought it was a good idea and C seemed down with it, so he became our new roommate. Things started off normal enough. C took really long showers (like an hour and a half) and then would spend an hour in the bathroom before he went to bed. It seemed a bit weird, but to each their own.

The real reason C was MVWR came one morning when one of the other guys in the room informed me that he heard some “solo activity” in C’s bed the previous night. I didn’t believe him until the next night when I woke up to hear the unmistakable sound of someone enjoying themselves. There was no doubt in my mind that C was pleasuring himself in a room with three other people. This became an ongoing thing. I was on the bottom bunk and C was on the top, so I would regularly wake up and cough or loudly roll over to try and give him the hint that we knew what was going on, but he would only stop for a minute before continuing. We were all too embarrassed to say anything to him, so it just went on like this for a couple months.

When it came time for winter break, C told me that he was going to take his desk home to get a smaller one. I said it was fine, but he insisted that his took up too much room. I thought this was strange, but at this point I was accustomed to C’s strangeness. When school started back up again, C didn’t come back. He didn’t my calls and when we looked around, we realized that he took all of his stuff home. I was actually pretty relieved that he wasn’t going to come back, but it was just so bizarre that he decided to sneak away.

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.

My Very Worst Roommate was also my best friend from high school. I was a pretty sheltered and passive person, so I attracted controlling personalities. She had one for sure. She had a pretty messed up family, but I didn’t know the half of it until we moved in together. We moved into a pretty nice dorm room that had its own bathroom. She had family in the area, so she got there early and claimed all the space she wanted. There were two wardrobes but only one dresser, so she took the entire dresser. She had her entire half of the room decorated by the time I arrived.

None of this was too bad, but I also discovered that she only showered about once a week. She did not shave the tops of her feet, so there was a huge patch of hair there. She had this really long, really thick hair that really did only need to be washed about once a week, but she didn’t take a shower unless she was washing her hair. She would let it get to the point where her hair was itchy and smelly. If she wore makeup one day or evening, she would just wipe it off with a washcloth (liquid foundation).

As I said, she had a very controlling personality. She thought it was OK for her to have a boyfriend, but not me because then I wasn’t available to meet her every need. She told my mom that my boyfriend hit me (he didn’t). She complained endlessly about my boyfriend (who’s now my husband) to our other friends, my mom, her mom, her boyfriend and really anyone who would listen. Before I met my boyfriend, she set me up with this weird friend of her boyfriend’s who had been utterly destroyed by his previous break-up. Also, she had a tendency to only date guys of a different religious persuasion than she was. Two examples were the Mormon and the Jehovah’s Witness dudes she dated. She disagreed with both religions and tried to get both of them to promise they would quit those religions.

We lived together for one year and then I moved in with another high school friend who was also pretty damaged, but by then, I was mostly living with my boyfriend so it didn’t matter. I never had a roommate again!

It was my first time not living at home or in a dorm and I was excited that I would be moving in with three of my friends, one of whom was my roommate the past year in the dorms. But things got ugly very fast. I would never call myself a messy person, but I’m also not a neat freak; I don’t mind a bit of untidiness here or there. But  M and K would freak out if a dirtied dish was not cleaned right away and to them “right away” meant cleaning the dish used to cook something before you even ate the food. They would also get mad if anyone left something of theirs sitting out in the living room or hallway area, if it even sat there for a few minutes too long it would be thrown into your room and I mean THROWN. Once they even threw my laptop rather roughly onto the floor of my room. They would also act like they were in charge of me and the other roommate, B. They would assign us chores to do and leave us notes calling us to “roommate meetings” if we didn’t comply. They went so far as to leave a note telling us that were not allowed to touch the thermostat, as if we were children.

K had long bushy hair and after she brushed it would be all over the bathroom sink, tying in perfectly with all the makeup that would be smeared on the counter from M caking it on every morning. M also had the habit of not wrapping up her tampons when she threw them out, which is not only gross to look at but in the summer is was a magnet for insects. Another one of M’s habits was to take the TV remote from you when she decided she needed to watch something and tell you to leave of you weren’t going to sit in complete silence while she watched her shows. Also, if anyone ever made M mad her solution was to call her mom and cry and then threaten to sue us with parent’s lawyers. K, for her part, had no common sense whatsoever and would do the dumbest things, such as catching her hair on fire, exploding wax in the microwave and coming home drunk off of two beers and try to make muffins.

The next year we all went out separate ways, but not before M warned that if we got any money knocked off of our security deposit it was not her fault so she wasn’t going to help pay for it and K trying to roll a couch out to the curb and almost taking out a railing. To this day I’m not sure what changed about them between freshman to sophomore year to turn them into complete crazies, but living with them has certainly made me appreciate my new roommates much more.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.