I owned a house while going to university, and a year after graduation, all my sweet roomates had moved out and moved on with life. While looking for new roomates, I got an email from a girl who was looking for a place when she moved to town. I’ve had a few female roomates, and they were generally pretty good.
This girl passed all the initial tests by email and then by phone. Within two days of moving in, she had a job serving at a pretty classy restaurant in town. So initially, this looked pretty good. She was pretty good looking, and really looked hot every night as she went to work at this upscale restaurant.
One day I had to go through her room to get to the storage space. I couldn’t actually see the floor. There were three huge closets in the room (every girl’s dream I thought) and she had not used a single one. Everything she owned was just dumped on the floor. This was a month in, so there was definitely time to clean up. There was also a weird smell. The grossest part of the room was the underwear all over the floor with HUGE brown streaks on all of them. From that moment on, I could never look at her the same way, knowing how much of a pig this hot girl was.
It got worse though. The smell then started. Three months after she’d moved in, I’d decided to rent my house out to a family, instead of the hassle of having a constant stream of students and trying to find new roomates every semester. I’d show the house to potential tenants, who loved the house, until they walked down the stairs. When you started down the stairs, you could smell her room. I don’t know, or even want to try guess at what the smell was. But it got so bad that I eventually went in with a friend’s gasmask and threw out a bunch of stuff. (This was after I opened her door once, and then had to sprint to the nearest bathroom to throw up. I didn’t throw up, but definitely dry-heaved a few times)
I showed about 12 potential tenants through the house, who all said “we’ll call you later,” and of course, never did. Every one of them was completely grossed out by this basement room. I eventually got this girl out of the house, and after renting a carpet cleaner, and then getting professionals into the room, got the carpet relatively clean. (The girl also did laundry on her last day, which I realized was the first time she did laundry, in three months)
The next five showings I had all wanted the house after that, and now it’s rented to an OCD clean freak family, a great tenant to have.
College was a fantastic time in my life, but it certainly didn’t start off that way. Firstly, my mother contrived to stick me into an all-male dorm under some silly notion that I wouldn’t get into trouble. Truth be told, guys who live in coed dorms tend to be a lot more civilized than their animal counterparts in all-male dorms–but I guess that’s water under the bridge at this point.
Secondly, I had not one, not two, but THREE roommates, in what they called a “quad” (which was basically a slightly larger room–nowhere NEAR the same amount of square footage per person). Granted, I was a total nerd and a basket case (from never having to share personal living space as I grew up), but these guys were assholes, too. The nerd blood was in the water on day one–and these guys clearly relished in making my life miserable.
One of the aggravating factors was that I resisted partying with my roommates, which they correctly interpreted as a snub. They were able to get back at me, though. One night I got totally smashed with my friends, and paid the price in the hall bathroom (in these dorms, there was only one large shared bathroom per hall). The bathroom was a locker-room type setup, with benches in front of the showers. Anyway, after my stomach was sufficiently emptied, I stumbled to one of the benches and passed out. My next memory was my three roommates standing over me with the exact same smile on their faces. One of them finally spoke:
“Hey, do you realize some dude’s naked, hairy ass was pressed on that bench? Your face is right up on it, dude!”
I passed out again, and I remember thinking “he has a point.”
My best friend and I decided to move in together and we found a nice big three-bedroom home with one bathroom to share. She and I couldn’t afford to split the rent, so we decided to rent the last bedroom out to someone else who we decided wouldn’t sign a copy of the lease, just in case they turned out to be psycho. Ever heard of Murphy’s Law? We put a post up on Craigslist and heard back from G. She seemed cute, sweet and very quirky and was a textile major at the State University a few miles away from the house. She was moving in with us from a house down the street and even before she had brought her things over, she would drop by (she’d climb up over our fence and onto our front porch and hang out until we got home) because she was apparently miserable in her old living situation. As soon as she moved in, we figured out why she was so unhappy.
The girl didn’t have a car and would rely on us to give her rides everywhere. She went to school full-time and worked at a children’s party facility full-time. She came home sweating and stinking like crazy and never took showers. Did I mention we all shared one bathroom? The smell became overwhelming when G went in there to pee or change her grody pad. She was perpetually broke and would hover over us as we made dinner, hoping we would offer her some, and the few times we did go to out to eat, she’d weasel her way out of paying her share of the check. G’s money issues became too much to handle, especially when she stiffed me on basic necessities that I paid for (“Oh, I owe you $27.43? Why don’t I just go ahead and give you $25 for the gas bill?”). The last straw was when she met my good friend E, a guy I’ve known since childhood, and she decided she was in love. She stalked him incessantly to the point where he never wanted to come over to visit, for fear that she would rape him upon site.
We eventually asked when she’d be moving out, and she begrudgingly took all stuff out of the house and over to her mother’s place about a month before she planned to leave. My best friend and I lucked out because she wasn’t on the lease, and therefore paid us a $500 deposit directly, which we had no problem keeping to subsidize the tab she had racked up over the course of her six months living with us.
I was the cause of my four university flatmates Very Worst Roommate, and arguably, mine. I started university and had just turned 18, was horribly naïve and was living away from home for the first time. It had also been instilled in me by my parents that being “passive” equaled “polite” and being confrontational was just unacceptable in a woman, as this equated being a bitch.
I met my ex-boyfriend, who we’ll call Fuzzy, almost immediately. He began to hang out at my halls of residence. Twice a week. Three times. Four. Then all day, all night, all week. He stayed in my room during this time, and whilst I really, really liked him, I didn’t have the cajones to tell him that staying this frequently was unacceptable and that I needed my own space. To make matters worse, Fuzzy had poor personal hygiene. I mean, really, really poor. He was with me 24/7 so I knew that he showered, at most, once a month. He also only cleaned his teeth once a week. He got sweaty very frequently, but didn’t wash his clothes at all. Eventually, I did it myself as I couldn’t stand the smell, and his white t-shirts were yellowing.
My flatmates and I shared the cost of food between us, as we all got on well together. However, Fuzzy also ate this food, but never contributed, until about two months in when I literally had to spell it out for him to do so. I felt horrendously guilty for burdening my poor, patient flatmates with Fuzzy as I was such a walking doormat, and did, eventually, through life-experience of living on my own and realising that actually, being honest with someone doesn’t equate being a horrible person.
I have never been treated as poorly as I was by my MVWR and I can’t believe that I didn’t see the sucker punch coming. We were both college freshmen and she tried to get along with me at first. But soon I was getting prank phone calls from my roommate and her friends while she was up partying and I was sleeping. She also liked to blast rock music early in the morning. She said I was lame because I didn’t want her to store alcohol in my fridge. I didn’t have a problem with her drinking or even illegally drinking in our dorm room. I just thought it would be best to be sneaky about it, but she didn’t want to hear it from me.
She then requested that I leave the dorm room after she got off from class because she needed some alone time or she would get bitchy. I stupidly agreed and started studying for hours in common room. She did me a favor at the end of the semester though. She found me a new roommate down the hall since she didn’t think that we were the best roommates for each other. I agreed, packed my bags and left. A few weeks later, I walked past our old room only to see her packing her belongings. I asked her what was going on and she told me that she was moving out of the dorms into a house with her friends. The same friends who would prank call me while I was sleeping. I have never felt so stupid in my life.
So she moved out and I moved back. At least I got my own room for a semester.
I had a housemate that was dating an English professor at the college in our town. He must have made quite an impression with the girls because another friend of mind used to rave about how great he was. He was from Ireland or Wales and had a charming accent, etc. When my housemate called it off, the prof couldn’t take the rejection and started getting all dramatic. He called saying that he was dying, so when she went over to his place he said, “I knew you would come back to me.” When that little ploy didn’t work, he tried showing up on our porch raving drunk in the middle of and demanding to be let in. She ignored this and began entertaining a string of gentlemen callers that I started running into in the mornings in our kitchen. The house was an old wooden one, so it was pretty clear what they were doing late into the night. I moved out as soon as I could.
My year of MVWR hell started on day one. I was living in a 3/2 apartment during my sophomore year of college when my friend D from high school and his friend J came to live with me. J was cool, but D was an absolute nightmare. Prior to moving in, he asked if he could bring his one cat and I agreed. On D-day, he arrived with his one cat, the cat’s sister, and her six kittens! And to make things worse, he already owed me over $400 for rent, utilities etc. After arriving, the bastard only had $80 to his name, proceeded to give me 40 of it, and then nonchalantly informed me that he needed the rest for food. This is definitely one of the times I regret not consulting the magic 8-ball!
Things only got worse. The eight cats he kept coralled in his room decided to use his dirty pile of clothes and streek-marked tighty-whiteys on the floor as their litter box and filled the entire apartment with the stench of cat piss and crap. He then spent the next two weeks sitting on his “6″ watching my TV (when he was supposed to be looking for a job of course). He eventually managed to secure work at Taco Bell for five days before he decided that it just wasn’t for him. Meanwhile, his debt to me kept rising and the eight mangy cats succesfuly shredded not only the newly shampooed carpet throughout the apartment, but the covers to my brand-new tower speakers.
Why keep this idiot around one might ask? Well, if J and I could have afforded the place ourselves, we would have given him the boot. D’s answer to this financial dilemma (with him now earning a wopping $400 per month in 1999 at a local playhouse) was to invite his friend M to live with us too, thereby splitting expenses four ways instead of three (because this of course was the only way D’s sorry butt could afford to live there). M, of course, slept on the pull-out couch and promptly awoke at the first bit of sunlight to loudly play final fantasy on MY tv and my now-shredded speakers on most mornings. One time when I made the “mistake” of asking D for his portion of the bills, he actually threw his wallet directly at my face. He blamed low blood sugar. But wait, there’s more!
M’s cat got fleas somehow, and of course M could not afford the medicine as he was in penury. I ended up buying the poor cat’s medicine, and the fleas soon dissapeared. I added the cost of the medicine to his debt which I now realized will probably never be repaid. My requests to D and M (J pretty much stayed in his room all day eating ice cream and playing video games) to help out with the horrendous mess they created daily around the apartment went unanswered, effectively turning me into their maid. D also slept nude (don’t ask me how I found out!). And then his dad and brother visited for Thanksgiving!
His dad bought stuff for the meal and they cooked and ate it while I was at work (leaving nothing for me of course). I came home from work to find his dad standing in front of the TV–like he was expecting poltergeists to fly out at him at any moment. My new DVD player was definitely to his liking. Fast forward one week: I sat in the living room watching TV and J had returned to place his pizza in the pre-heated oven. The oven door openned, and I heard a loud, “Ooohhhh…Myyyyyyy…God!” As I looked over at the oven, I could plainly see the massive chia-pet that used to be a turkey still sitting in the oven. If it had been left in the oven any longer, it might have sprouted legs and impregnated us all with its spores as we slept. Or maybe it already had…
Things from that point onward pretty much remained as crappy as they had been since he moved in. Towards the end of the year, D decided to move out (as in, decided to leave before I could tell him his sorry debt-ridden butt had to go), taking M with him. Watching him leave was bittersweet. I was relieved to see him go, but was annoyed knowing that I would never see the $500 he owed me. The douche tried to “friend” me on Facebook awhile back. He probably needed some money or worse, a place to stay.
June 23rd,2010
Bills Bills Bills,
Doing The Dirty,
Pet Problem,
Really? | tags:
cats,
college roommate,
roommate and bills,
roommate and Facebook,
roommate and food,
roommates with pets,
sleeping on the couch,
tighty whities,
unemployed roommates |
9 Comments
During my sophomore and junior years of college, I had the extreme misfortune of living with my three Very Worst Roommates.
R was a spoiled brat. She would always call her mom and yell at her to give her more money, and said many times, “If I can throw money at a problem to make it go away, I’ll totally do it.” If I was going to the store half a block away, she would whine for me to get candy for her. When I couldn’t find it, she’d blame me instead of getting it herself. She required total silence from 9 p.m. onwards, but would be blasting her music at 7 a.m. She was a slob, too, never doing any dishes, and letting piles of them get moldy under her bed. She was extremely fat, and her doctor told her to watch her calorie intake. R took this to mean that every morning for breakfast, she could have a bagel slathered with cream cheese, bacon, more cheese and several eggs. Not exactly Jenny Craig.
C was a self-righteous prima donna. She was constantly dating, and cheating on, new guys and using them for their cars. She was super messy most of the time, except when she went on cleaning kicks for the entire apartment (though not nearly often enough). I’m pretty neat and usually helped out when she did this, except she would scream at all of us for not helping her. She slept with my boyfriend between sophomore and junior years, and apparently all three of MVWRs knew for months and didn’t tell me. C was self-absorbed, and convinced she was the next Janis Joplin, spending hours practicing with her lame reggae band of white kids.
L was the best of the three because she was constantly with her boyfriend and out of the house. But when she was back, her and C were inseparable- gossiping about me and my friends behind my back, and generally being catty and spiteful. Halfway through my junior year, all three of MVWR sat me down and explained to me that they didn’t like me as a person (me!) and asked me to move out when the lease was up. I spent a couple weeks miserable in my room, alone and abusing painkillers, before realizing it was a blessing in disguise. I now live with two wonderful girls, and am dating a much better guy. I just hope I never have to live with anyone like the last MVWR crew again.
June 21st,2010
Doing The Dirty,
Irreconcilable Differences,
Really?,
Stuff Left Around The Homestead | tags:
Janis Joplin,
mean girls,
My roommate slept with my boyfriend,
My Very Worst Roommate,
Roommate Drugs,
roommates with a musician,
roommates with a rich kid |
17 Comments
My freshman year of college, I was randomly paired with this girl. By the end of our first week her side of the room was a total mess. There was clothes and food everywhere. She was even sleeping with trash and leftover takeout in her bed. Finally, I asked her if she could please clean up. She then called her mom and started screaming that she couldn’t “stand the white bitch anymore,” and demanded that her mother come and take care of things. Whatever her mom said, she must not have liked because she began to cry and scream that I was oppressing her and that her mother didn’t love her and didn’t care. She started ripping up her books, pulling at her hair, smacking herself, throwing things and smearing old food on the walls, the whole time explaining to her mom what she was doing and telling her it was her fault. At least point I was seriously freaked out so I went down the hall to a friend’s dorm and called housing who evicted her right then and there.
I found this posting that seemed too good to be true. It was five minutes from my work, allowed pets and it was $100 under my budget. I met the guy who has posted the listing and he seemed pretty decent. He was a student and it sounded like it would be a quiet house, with not much partying going on. The first month went fine, with only minor incidents. However, as time progressed, things got really bad. As I got to know my fellow housemates, the drama just seemed to explode. One of the housemates was a girl who worked as a personal trainer, but turned out to be doing some stripping on the side. I normally wouldn’t be bothered by that, but she was so inconsiderate of everyone else that I lost any respect for her. She had a cat that she took very poor care of. I have two cats of my own and she blamed my cat for peeing all over the place, even though it was her cat. She never cleaned its litter box and it took her several weeks to take it into to vet to get care for a urinary tract infection.
I work with animals for a living and it pained me to see this. She would also be gone for four days out of the week due to her stripping job and the cat would be left in her room, without food or water. I would sneak into her room to take care of it and let it out of her hell-hole of a room. She would repeatedly clog the toilet and wouldn’t unclog it. She wouldn’t buy toilet paper, even though we had made it perfectly clear we would take turns supplying such communal items. She even wiped her ass on my hand towel, denied it and then blamed it on me because I had left it out (hanging on the towel rod). The entire time I lived there, I saw her do dishes once, even though she probably used the most dishes out of anyone.
This same girl also decided to take in another girl she “worked” with, telling us that it would only be a few weeks. This girl would hog the bathroom for hours, blasted awful music at 3am on a Tuesday and she would leave used pregnancy tests on the kitchen counter. After leaving the bathroom, the tub would be filled with brownish water and tons of floating little curly hairs. Yum yum. I left three months into a year lease. The last I heard, the girl who was only supposed to be there for a few weeks had moved into my old room with a guy she’d been dating for three weeks.
