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.
My Very Worst Roommate was my friend’s friend at the time. Let’s call her L. At the beginning she was fine, but then we started noticing small irritations about her, like watching a TV show for six hours in the lounge room so we couldn’t, even though she had her own TV in her own room. She explained that she did this because she still wanted to be around everyone, even though we’d end up going into the other rooms as she watched TV shows we didn’t like. She was obsessed with TV, and if you were watching something, she would come into the room and pretty much demand to know what you were watching, and what was going on and then just stare at it really intently, it was weird… She also kept a collection of dead batteries, and then when the TV remote went dead she would try each one in with a different combo to see if they worked, and then put them back and would try the next time something went dead. At one time, she had over 15 dead batteries that I just threw out.
Me and my sister were vegetarians at the time, transitioning to a vegan diet, but we didn’t mind her eating meat or cooking her food with our pans and pots, as long as she cleaned it really well, but sometimes she would make mincemeat spaghetti sauce and leave it in our pans for ages and we’d have to clean up old meat. And then she would also badly wrap her meat and let it drip though out the fridge, which to a vego, smells awful.
She was also a bit overweight and was obsessed over it. Every week she was talking about dieting, but nothing would come of it. She would buy TV dinners all the time and just really unhealthy processed food. She would then always bring up that my sister and me were so slim and that she wished she could be like us, which was just awkward. It then began to get weird, as she suddenly turned against my boyfriend and whenever he spoke to her or around her, she tried to twist his words into insinuating that he was saying she was fat. For example, at the table once I was sitting at an angle on my chair and was behind her chair. My boyfriend tried to speak to me and so he just moved his head to one side so he could see me past her. She then attacked him saying that he was trying to make it look like he couldn’t see past her because she’s so fat. My boyfriend couldn’t even reply as it was just so ludicrous.
She then also got angry believing that he should be paying rent as he sometimes spent the night at the house, I thought this was silly as we each had our own room and mine was the smallest (half the size of hers). I still paid the same and when he was over we spent most the time in my room and went to his house to watch movies together, but I said that he should pay some bills like for water as he does have a shower there sometimes. But she didn’t want to do that and instead just started watching his power consumption. She walked into the kitchen and saw his phone charging and literally ripped it out of the socket. This still didn’t phase me though as I understood she felt like she was paying for his power, until I realized that she left the TV on in her room ALL NIGHT LONG as she couldn’t sleep without it.
She also couldn’t ever turn off a light and would constantly re-wash her clothes as she would leave them in the washing machine until they smelt funky, then just wash them again and doing the same thing! The other thing that pissed me off, was that through all her complaining about my boyfriend, he had helped me to do some paving out the back and also helped out with heaps of gardening and cleaning. When we had a rent inspection, he would come over and help, even though none of it was his mess apart from some dishes! He also went vegan and she was trying to convince him not to.
The thing though, although small, that pissed me off the most was that she would make a milo (chocolate drink) with milk, drink it, and then fill it up with water (not rinse it) and then drink the water in it. This murky browny water was disgusting. My boyfriend moved in after she left. And soon my friend will be moving out. My boyfriend and I have decided that instead of getting another roommate, we’d rather be poor. As we don’t want another L experience ever again!
My Very Worst Roommate, was a guy I will call P. I moved to Singapore and needed someone to help pay expenses on a good apartment. I was in the middle of a difficult divorce and one of the only conditions I made to P when he moved in was, “No hookers or drugs, this house is my sanctuary, it’s where my son comes and I need the house to be safe.” I should note that prostitution is not illegal in Singapore. P had moved to Singapore on the pretext of working for a big cable channel. It turned out that he didn’t have any work at all. He wasn’t missing rent, but he was looking awfully worried and I was concerned about missing rent if he didn’t find work. I made a call and got him a job on oil rigs making good money. He started the job and I headed to China the following week.
I was in China when I got a call from our condo manager at 3 a.m. The manager was furious. “Mr Smith, why are you throwing things out of your 11th story window? You will hit someone! You will get in trouble.” I told him I was in China, and he should call the police because there was nothing I could do. Five minutes later I get a call from my maid. She said, “Sir, P wants me to come and let him into the apartment, what should I do?” Not having any idea of what was going on, I told her I suppose she should but, I could not figure out how P could be locked out – the door needed the key to be turned from the outside to lock it. I texted P and said, “Mate, I don’t know what you’re doing but throwing shit out the window is illegal in Singapore” and decided to ignore the problem.
I get back a week later from China to face a shit storm of trouble. The stuff that had been thrown out was obviously destroyed, but had also damaged the lower ground unit patio roofs – to the tune of $40,000!
Not only that, but there was a lot of stuff missing from the flat including all the chess pieces from my set, a beautiful brass compass and presents from the under the Christmas tree. P would not own up to what had happened and it was only with the help of the security guards and police that I worked out what might have happened.
He had brought a hooker home, probably to celebrate his first paycheck – we saw her coming in on the CCTV tapes. She wasn’t a she though – even I could tell that on the tapes. I assume some sort of dispute over payment or the hooker’s gender had broken out. She had forced P out of the apartment, locked the door and proceeded to trash the place. To give him due credit, he cleaned up a lot of the mess, but tell tale signs were there. He paid for the damages and managed to get off the criminal charges (the cops confirmed he blamed a girl for the damage, but could not provide her name.) When he was locked out and called the maid, she later confirmed to me that when she helped him get back in, he had gone in and there was yelling but he had refused to let her in.
P still works in the oil and gas industry – he’s called the “Chess Master” by all who know this story.
My Very Worst Roommate has since been dubbed the Rabbit Killer. A year after graduating from college, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a girl who had been one of my best friends in middle-school and high school. We hadn’t seen much of each other during college because we were on opposite ends of the country, but when we both ended up in the same town, it seemed like a perfect arrangement. After a few months of living with her, I discovered that she had never quite grown up. She didn’t have a high paying job but as soon as a new video game system, video game or DVD box set would come out she would instantly buy it. Then when the first of the month rolled around and I asked for her half of the rent and utilities, she would act like I was the biggest creep and would go into sob stories about how she didn’t even have enough money for food.
On top of that, she was insanely dirty. I’m not the neatest person myself, but I try to be sanitary if not tidy. She would do the strangest things, like leave a completely untouched Jamba Juice in the middle of the living room floor until it molded over. Why would you buy a smoothie and not even drink any? Building management even had to come into her room once to fix a leak and wrote her up because she was so messy that they deemed the space dangerous.
It all came to a head when she decided she wanted to get a pet rabbit. I put my foot down and said no to pets because I knew that she wouldn’t be able to take care of it. She already was incredibly messy and I knew that it would just make the apartment even grosser. She argued that she could keep it outside on the balcony, but I told her that it would be too cold for something to live out there. A few months later, I walked out onto our shared balcony and discovered a pet rabbit. She told me that she knew I had said no, but that she knew that if I saw the rabbit, it would win me over. I was angry but decided to drop it. Fast forward to a particularly frosty Thanksgiving weekend, and my roommate came into my room crying and asking for a box with a lid. I asked why, and lo and behold, the rabbit had frozen to death. She insisted that she didn’t know how it died because she knew everything about rabbits and they are fine in the cold. I decided to not make matters worse by telling her “I told you so” and gave her a box and a hug.
Fast forward a month later when I had friends visiting over the Christmas holidays. I hadn’t been on the balcony in a while but the friends were smokers and so we went out there to have a smoke. Then I hear, “Hey, what’s in this box?” I look, and it’s the same box I had given the roommate for the bunny, with bunny still inside! I was completely mortified that a dead rabbit had been on our balcony for a month. When I brought it up with my roommate later and asked her to get rid of it, she started crying and said I was heartless and that it had to have a proper burial and there was no place to bury it where we live. I finally convinced her to take it with her when she went home for the holidays and bury it there.
The final straw came a few months later when I went back out on the balcony and discovered a new pet rabbit living there. I decided to move. A little while after moving out, I heard from some mutual friends that the new rabbit had killed itself by jumping off the balcony. Even it couldn’t stand to live with her anymore.
