Falling on hard times, my husband and I thought getting a roommate would ease our financial stress. We posted an ad on Craigslist, finding two guys who desperately needed a house (living in their car), and worked long hours.
The first month was perfect because we barely talked and they were both respectful and gone most of the day. The second was pure chaos. We quickly noticed they never cleaned their bathroom or room and left (our) dishes nasty in the sink until I cleaned them. Soon fed up, I asked them to start cleaning after themselves. Instead they never used them again (in front of us). They also started bringing girls into our home every day doubling the people in our household and singling out my husband and me. Trying to be nice we ignored it, but it got hard to ignore when we couldn’t even be in our own living room, kitchen or bathroom without someone there.
They also tripled both our water and electric bill and completely walked all over us. They started running our w/d every day and night and taking three showers each daily. Also completely ran our internet so we couldn’t even watch one movie. Again, we asked them to be more courteous, that I was pregnant and my husband worked thirteen hours a day, and we deserved both to sleep and a warm shower.
We paid double the rent and all the utilities and let them still use our stuff. Every time we had a discussion they nodded and said they were wrong and it would never happen again, it always continued. It got to the point where their lamp even burned holes straight through the shade. If I ever left the house the had many people cooking and the w/d was running and every light in the house was on. Eventually we said they had to use the l mat, that we could no longer afford it with a baby coming and again they just begged us and said it would change, we refused.
They always said they appreciated our honesty and we didn’t just avoid them and blow up because that’s happened in the past (not surprised). The best part is the pretended they didn’t know where stuff was when we were home even though I’ve seen them steal many times (even checked other drawers in front of us bahaha!) They never once bought their own products and used everything of our they were “entitled” to and acted like the nicest people you’d ever meet. Our three months are almost up finally and we see this moral as you can really never know people until you live with them and even then they could be acting.
I didn’t move out of home until I was 21, and was lucky enough to move into a huge place with cheap rent that was close to the city. Even better, I got along well with my housemates (two guys and a girl, all friends prior to moving in) and we never had any problems bigger than whose turn it was to do the dishes. Unfortunately our female housemate wanted to move interstate and we couldn’t find anyone in our large circle of friends to take her room, so after weeks of covering the extra rent ourselves we bit the bullet and advertised in the local paper. We wanted a girl to keep the balance even, but as I worked a lot and my two male housemates were home during the day, I let them interview the potential candidates. They decided on “Ally”. She seemed nice, although a bit of a space cadet.
The first week should have been a dire warning. Although none of us were opposed to drugs, we didn’t really do anything harder than weed and especially not with any regularity. Ally spent the entire first week off her chops on ecstasy. Who gets high alone on a Tuesday afternoon just to celebrate moving in?
One night around 3 a.m. I was awakened suddenly by my bedroom door flying open and someone staggering over towards my bed. Luckily I had a clothes horse with fresh washing on it by the door and the intruder got tangled up in it, turned and walked out. When I asked Ally why she was in my room she denied it being her, although it quite clearly was. If that wasn’t creepy enough, a few weeks later I had smoked a joint and was just chilling out in my room watching some TV when Ally walked in and sat extremely close to me on the bed. She started up some small talk and then looked me in the eyes and asked if I liked girls. I’m not gay and I told her this, and she got up and left. One of my housemates later told me she had also come into his room one night while he was in bed, sat down and started telling him she liked him “more than she should.”
She wasn’t working, since she was meant to be studying, but it soon became obvious she wasn’t doing that either. Her parents, who were of some kind of Eastern European descent and didn’t speak much English, had been paying her rent and bills. We hooked her up with a job down at the local pub but she quit after two shifts for no apparent reason.
One Wednesday night she came home at 4 a.m. with two strange men and started blasting drum and bass music. They were running up and down our wooden hall that connected to all the bedrooms, yelling and shouting. One of the strange men burst into my room and asked in Ally was in there and I flipped out and screamed at him to get out.
The final straw came one weekend when both my male housemates were interstate playing a show with their band. Ally was spending a night at home with her friend and I had a night shift so I went out to work and came home straight to bed. The next morning as I was walking down the hall to the bathroom I heard two girls giggling coming from one of my absent housemates rooms. When I opened the door, Ally and her friend were laying in his bed talking. I asked why they were in there and Ally claimed her friend had felt unwell during the night so she slept in our housemates bed, and in the morning she had come over to visit. I asked if the housemate had ok’d this and she gave me an incredulous look and said “Why would he mind?”. Why would he mind you let a strange sick girl sleep on his sheets and invade his personal space and treat it like a common living area? He was furious when he found out.
We didn’t even have to kick her out in the end. She sulked about feeling unwelcome and left a week later. Sucks to be whoever she lives with next!
I lived in an apartment that my campus owned my senior year in college. My best friends “C”, “K” and I decided that we wanted to move in to one of these apartment together, and we asked one of our friends, let’s call them “Sal,” to live in the other half of the apartment.
Everything started out just fine, we all got along well and we set up clear rules and boundaries for community spaces. It wasn’t long until things went south though. Sal was fairly messy, and after the first few weeks of living together, this became a bigger issue. He was constantly leaving dirty dishes (all of which I provided) all over the apartment to sit for days on end until old food was dried, crusted and sometimes moldy. We consistently had problems of mold in our trashcan because he would throw away old rotting food and not take the bag out, causing the apartment to smell. Sal was particularly bad with leaving dirty pots and pans (again, provided by me) on the stove after cooking, and being from the south, he often pan fried things in grease, and left it all out to make the whole apartment smell like greasy fried food for days. We talked about it and he would promise to be better about it, and then go right back to his old ways a few days later. We would try to passive-agressively leave notes about it, or wait until he finally took care of his dishes, but many times one of us would finally get sick of the smell or would need to use a pan and we would scrub pans he had left lying around. He started using our food without asking and promising to repay us for it, but never would. He would mysteriously be very hard to get a hold of when the electric was due (thankfully, that was the only bill that didn’t come directly out of our student accounts)
Occasionally, we would host small gatherings with friends at our apartment (only after hours of cleaning up, largely cleaning up messes Sal had left). One particular occasion included a surprise birthday party for a friend whom Sal did not know, but he joined in anyway. He took the liberty of eating an entire pizza that night, along with partaking in all the other food and drinks we had bought for the occasion. We had bought a family size tub of ice cream and it was hardly touched by guests the night of the party, but Sal managed to finish of the entire tub by himself over the span of just a few days. Sal also took advantage of C’s TV and game systems in the living room, and would leave them on and running when he left the house. We were all consistently picking up after him, and K always had to buy the toilet paper for their shared bathroom and Sal never cleaned it, not once the entire year.
The final straw came when Sal left the house early one morning and locked his bedroom door, apparently forgetting he had set his alarm. His alarm began going off at 7:30am. He did not return home until 9pm. This was just a few weeks before the end of the semester and all of us had tests, projects, and papers. The alarm would have gone off all day if after several hours or beeping frustration, I took matters into my own hands. I discovered that you could open the locked doors pretty easily with a credit card (yes, like they do in the movies) and I went in a turned off his alarm clock. When he returned home, I was upfront about the incident and I apologized for the intrusion, but explained that the alarm was hindering everyone’s work.
Sal was outraged. He immediately searched through everything in his room to ensure that nothing was taken. He then began making wild accusations that I stole some money out of his desk, and that a lighter was missing. He began claiming that we were all conspiring against him and all the passive-agressive notes were attacking him, specifically because we all hated him (which may have been partly true). The fight wrapped up and everyone went to bed. The next day, he had suddenly written his name on all of his food along with messages like “Don’t touch!” and “This is not ‘apartment property’”. He was out of the apartment or shut in his room most of the time (which helped with the TV issue, but only worsened the dishes issue).
At the end of the year K, C, and I spent hours cleaning up the apartment after Sal moved out so that we could get our security deposit back, even going as far as to break into Sal’s room and clean up all the trash he left behind and taking all the pictures of nude women off the walls (which it’s fortunate that I did, because I found two of my cups, dirty, in the bottom of his closet. Ew!). Sal never paid for the last electricity bill, because he had stopped speaking to any of us after the big blow-out fight, but it was worth the extra the three of us paid to never have to speak to him again!
My Very Worst Roommate was a girl I met on Craigslist. At first “Liz” seemed super cool and normal. I should have been concerned the first night she asked me to borrow $20 for gas. I said “sure.” The next day she comes home and she has no car. Liz said it won’t start and she thinks it ran out of gas. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to start problems.
Liz told me she had a nephew, who she loved and would be over a lot. I found out after she moved in that this nephew was actually her son, and her ex-boyfriend was keeping her from him and refusing to let her see him. I found out later that MVWR made no effort to see her son in three months. One day Liz decides to go and kidnap her son. This was about a month after she moved in. This resulted in Liz getting 50/50 custody.
About a month and a half later, about seven cops came to our house. Apparently Liz got a DUI a year before and never paid her fines and they were looking for her. Her dad found out, and took back the car he bought her and that’s why she actually had no car.
The entire time we lived together Liz had a hard time paying bills, even though she made more than I did. The solution for her was I would give her my half of the money for bills and she would pay them and give me the receipts. That was working at first. She gave me all the receipts and everything was well documented until about 3 months later when I got a call from the rental agency saying they realized we were three months behind in rent (the last month I paid is the last payment they got there.) Liz admitted she just kept the money and was forging receipts and was just going to move out and get her own place. I sued her and won, but never saw a penny of the money. There are a lot of other things that were awful about this living situation, but that would be a book I’d have to write. She was just bad. I was only 19 at the time. After that, I grew a backbone, which I guess is the good thing that came from it.
When I was young, I shared a house with a few friends. Our worst roommate was a drifter named Todd. He was bone thin and had hair like Jesus. He carried all of his belongings in a bulky backpack. Except for his bongo drums, which he kept tied around his neck with a leather thong. Because he didn’t have a job, he had nothing better to do than get stoned, put on a Yes album, and invite other drifters over for a drum circle. They played the stereo at full volume so they could hear it over the drums. The windows shuddered, the floor vibrated and the room stank of a dozen homeless men. They had drug-induced stamina and could play all night.
Todd was obsessed with the zodiac and mentioned it as often as possible. It was the lens through which he viewed every social interaction, from meeting a woman at a bar to purchasing a soda at Kwik Mart, to having a conversation about paying a little rent once in awhile. The first time he met me, he asked my birthday. When I answered, he sneered, “I hate Libras.” From that moment forward, he viewed me with eyes narrowed in suspicion.
Todd enjoyed dropping acid in the morning. When everyone else was getting ready for work or enjoying a cup of coffee, he’d sit on the living room floor, listlessly petting his bongo drum with his mouth hanging open. During one such trip, my roommate and I made the mistake of trying to speak to him about a housekeeping matter (late bill). He cried that we were sending off bad vibes and insisted that he could see our black, nasty auras swirling all around the room. He pulled frantically at his Jesus hair and said, “Uh oh. Now you’ve done it. I am having a bad trip.” He backed away from us, his dilated eyes shining with terror. “Get away from me, Libra!” He diverted all conversations about rent and utilities in this manner.
Todd was always gone, in one way or another, when conversations about money were afoot. But when a meal was prepared, he could sense it from miles away. He would skulk around the sidelines of the kitchen, rubbing his stomach and discussing his acute case of munchies. If I didn’t offer him a plate, he sulked and complained that Libras were bastards.
Todd also had plenty of homeless, damaged friends that he invited to live in the house. There was a leering, thick-necked giant with a bald head and a foot long beard. He thought I was cute and told me with stories that were geared to impress. For example, he told me that he had acquired some rohypnol (aka the date rape drug) and had gone downtown to the bars. After a few hours of drinking, he got bored and tried to get high off of the rohypnol. He dosed himself, blacked out immediately, and woke up the next morning in a municipal flowerbed. I could only be thankful that he was too dull-witted to follow through with his horrible plan. Because I couldn’t really get away from him, I told him he was a jackass and went upstairs to bed. Later, he scared the crap out of me by breaking into my room and trying to cuddle with my unconscious body.
There was also a young hippie who had a wolf for a pet. Of course he named her Luna. Luna was not a domesticated animal. She was lanky, she was clever, and she had a set of razor sharp fangs set in a jawbone as long as my forearm. She put up with being walked on a hemp leash and tied to a park bench, but Luna was only biding her time. The wolf and her owner started squatting at our house on invitation from Todd. “Why do you have this animal?” I asked. “You don’t even have a home! How are you going to take care of her? Can’t you tell she thinks you’re an asshole and wants to eat you?” Todd rose up, his eyes dilated, his hair swishing around, his skinny finger poking in my face. “How dare you talk to one of my friends like that,” he screamed. “You are so close-minded!” A few days later, he banned Luna from the house himself because she had taken a nice acrid wolf piss on his backpack.
Another awful Todd friend was a popular downtown begger. He could always be found sitting on a bench downtown, strumming random chords and taking handouts. He had a rough mane of red hair, a bushy beard, and a heavy leather jacket. Todd invited him to the house, and he soon became a regular. This one also thought I was cute and would not accept no for an answer. After a particularly frightening encounter with him, I fled the house. For days, I either slept in a booth at the restaurant where I worked or at my boyfriend’s place because I was scared to go home.
At last, I was able to talk to my other roommates. We voted to ban the creep from our house. Todd thought this was highly unfair. He discredited me, saying that I had probably given his friend mixed signals since that was a classic Libra trait. It was all I could do not to strangle him and smash his bongo drums over his head. It was not long after this incident that we jettisoned Todd. He had never paid rent or utilities, and his bongos wore on everybody’s nerves. Nobody cared for his choice of company. I saw him a few summers ago. It had been a decade since we lived together. I was rummaging through a bin of nails in front of a hardware store when he approached me. His Jesus hair was shorter, but his face was unmistakable. He looked at me hard, but he didn’t remember me. “You have great legs,” he said. “I’m a Libra,” I replied.
