I don’t know what made me possibly made me think I could live with six girls during my freshman year of university. I attend a very Christian University. I can’t start to describe what it’s like here. I’m on overflow housing in the sophomore houses so it’s hard to change housing options. One of the girls already moved out yesterday, the only one who was on my side, stood up for me and I liked. I’m leaving at the end of the semester. Let’s just say I’ll sum it up like this. I’m not allowed to listen to rap music because it’s the devil’s music. They have an open door policy when using the bathroom so I walked in on one girl today taking a dump. They also talk about poop all the time! There’s period blood and poop around the toilet and when I brought it up I was called a princess. They talk to me behind my back about me stealing things because I do my homework at the suite but I never leave my room and most of the stealing occurred around the weekend when I wasn’t here, I never stay here on weekends. The reason me and my roommate don’t have stuff stolen from us is because we lock our things up.

I got yelled at for apparently using a girl’s hand towel which she left hanging over the shower and it fell in the tub. However, I thought hand towels were a universal thing anyways….apparently not. She found a black hair in her drawer while putting away her laundry and exclaimed the hair was mine, while yelling at me that I was going through her stuff. Well girl, maybe you shouldn’t leave your laundry in the laundry room sitting out for four hours. Yesterday one of the girls found one of her Dixie cups in the trash can and flipped out. I seriously thought the world was going to end the way she went on and basically had a witch hunt to see who used it. I was Skyping last night and I hear this intense bawling coming from outside so I run out to see what happened and my suite mates are around the girl comforting her and I exclaim what’s wrong and she’s like I just can’t be good enough for god, I know this kid and he’s so close to god and I’m just so depressed I can’t be like him. She’s in hysterics and can’t calm down so I go back in my room and I’m like did this just happen……this was the girl who tries to tell me how I need more faith in my life, like don’t tell me how to practice faith girl.

One of the girls is a total hippie and grabbed my Jif peanut butter from me because she said it has MSG in it along with all my other food and gave me a lecture on MSG and described her bowl movements in detail on what happens when she eats MSG. It’s gotten so bad I’ve had to contact the guy in charge of housing to help control this. So this is my story, there’s much more that has happened but I feel this is the just of it.

My string of horrible roommates is long and storied:

There was the waiter with delusions of ketchup-carrying grandeur who never seemed able to wear pants around the flat and who I caught taking the keys to my car to go get food at 3 am, after he’d been out drinking at a bar, and who later ran up a massive electricity bill in my name and refused to pay (I’d moved to another city, he let the company believe I was still living there and just never paid the bills)

There was the bipolar chick who went through holistic stages of ‘self medication’ that mostly meant drinking rum and coke after rum and coke, and who, at parties, would drink heavily, say horrible things to people (including telling me she hated me), before throwing up on someone’s rug and expecting me to clean it up, make apologies and get her home to bed safely (this is when she’d start telling me she loved me). Of course, that’s when she didn’t keep hold of herself to create her customary post-party goody bag: a selection of the host’s finest snacks, beer, wine and hard liquor, that would then ‘mysteriously’ make it’s way to our apartment.

There was the Crypt Keeper, an older lady who chained smoked in the living room with the window open (yes, that’s helping), and banned me from even eating meat outside the house because she could ‘smell death on my breathe’ and she didn’t want that in her house.

There was Captain Fantastic, the flamboyant gay man with the gorgeous house who would have nearly-nude Skype conversations with his long distance boyfriend in the middle of the living room, always signing off by having the teddy bears they’d named after each other say ‘night night’ to each other. It was almost a relief when by the end of my tenure with him, I was spending two to three weeks a month hiding on various friends sofas, as he didn’t want me staying in the flat I paid rent in while he was away on a mysterious business trip or jaunt, as apparently he wasn’t meant to sublet (he’d never told me that upon moving in, and his landlord lived in another city so I’m not quite sure how that worked, other than sending me on a whirlwind tour of the many ways to get sofa neck).

And most recently there’s Princess OCD and her minion, Spineless Sally, my two current roommates, one of whom I have literally caught vacuuming the ceiling while the other nods in agreement.

I really need to get my own place.

My Very Worst Roommates were two girls who my friend (and also roommate) referred to as Regina and Karen. Yes, the conniving, blonde, queen bee type (Regina) and the stupid blonde (Karen) from the film Mean Girls. We were all American exchange students living in a university affiliated, five-person, student flat. Our fifth roommate, J, although she wasn’t a menace as were Regina and Karen, her loyalty obviously laid with them. Things started out fine. It was orientation week, and our roommates were coming back every single night completely plastered. However, it being orientation week in an alcohol-loving country where the drinking age is 18, most students who lived in the university-affliated apartment complex were wasted. My friend and I attributed it to the hype of orientation week. The semester then began, and Regina and Karen’s drinking and partying habits continued. They would go out six nights a week and come back at 2AM with a bunch of strangers and drunkenly cooking because they wouldn’t eat much before they went out (so they could get drunk faster and consume fewer calories– so smart).

My friend and I started getting paranoid and were locking our bedroom doors every night for fear a drunken stranger would try to open it while we were sleeping. Our front door was also constantly propped open because a few roommates lost their keys, and also, who wants to carry a key card around? I mean, it’s so annoying. Also, after having friends over, drinking and whatnot, Regina and Karen would never clean up after themselves. Our floor was covered in goon, the slang term for cheap, disgusting boxed wine. Now, it wasn’t just these minor things that made Regina and Karen my very worst roommates, there were a number of incidences that left my friend and I flabbergasted. During the first incident, our roommates had people over to smoke pot. Now, this wouldn’t normally be a big deal, but when you’re in a foreign country on a visa, if anyone in your living area is caught with drugs everyone in that apartment is at risk of being deported. We all spent a lot of money to get where we were, and we weren’t about to lose that by the stupidity of people we didn’t even like. My friend talked to Karen and asked that no more drugs be brought into our apartment. A week later there was a kid sorting pot on our coffee table.

One night, my wonderful roommates came back from a local tavern with some friends studying in another city. A friend of a friend of Regina was preposterously drunk and fell on the floor. I was laying in bed, annoyed by their drunken chatter and yells when I heard a bang and “Are you okay? Did you hit your head?” I ignored it for a bit, until I heard more drunken questions about this injury. Being one of two sober people in the apartment, I got out of bed and went to check to make sure everything was alright. As I went into the common room, the kid passed out again and hit his head again. He lost consciousness, but regained it within a few second, however he was very confused. When I looked around to tell someone to call security, I recognized no one in my apartment. Finally, Regina came in and I looked at her and told her to call security while my friend called the ambulance. When the ambulance arrived, he refused medical attention. Security told him they were going to call him a cab to take him back to his hostel, and then left. I went back to my room assuming this nightmare was over. Wrong. I heard my roommates say to him “Do you want to go back to your hostel or do you want to stay here?” Of course, he opted to stay in our apartment. All I could think of was what a liability it would be if he had some kind of head injury and was dead on the couch in the morning.

The morning after the incident, my friend and I went to the office to ask for bleach, as our lovely roommates had so kindly left our apartment for a weekend away, leaving goon and blood stains on our floor. The office didn’t have bleach, but the receptionist told us to contact management about the incident. I did immediately afterwards, asking for action to be taken against my roommates. I also contacted my study abroad program manager to tell her about the incident, as I had kept her updated on our problems with our roommates. My program manager worked her magic and got our bad roommates moved out after a significant amount of drama. We then had two quiet, kind and respectful girls move in in their place. Taking it to management was the best and most stressful decision I could have made.

My Very Worst Roommate(s) was a few years ago when I moved from my city to a much larger one in a different state. I found the house online and that’s how I met J and L, who were a couple. At the flatmate interview they both seemed nice, stable, the house was clean, they were both gainfully employed and offered me the room straight away, which I happily accepted. Everything went fine for the first few weeks, until they suddenly started having very loud late-night quarrels and screaming at each other that they were “finished” and they were breaking up, which never seemed to happen, but kept me on my toes, as I was worried that they would break up and I would have to find myself a new place to live. L even showed me a bruise on her shoulder one morning, where J had bitten her, however it seems that must have been in a fit of passion at some point when they were not fighting, as he never showed any signs of violence while I lived there.

I worked for an airline and would be away for three to five days at a time and every time I returned from a trip I would find all my duty-free alcohol consumed, even the stuff I had hidden in bags at the back of my wardrobe, not to mention the dirty dishes piled in the sink, along with six or seven pizza boxes crammed into the fridge. J was the main perpetrator of the alcohol consumption and often stayed up all night, drinking bottle after bottle of wine and sleeping on the couch instead of his and L’s room. I also came home from trips to find my bed had been slept in and my room clearly had been used while I was away, but both L and J denied anyone using it. After returning home from a trip one day, J and L informed me that they’d decided to move (two streets over for some reason), but that I was welcome to move with them, which I accepted, as I was working too much to have time to find another place.

This was when everything went really downhill. They set the moving date in January, despite me giving them my work roster, clearly stating that I would be in Vietnam at that time, and would not be able to help them move, yet J stated ad nauseum that I was “Just trying to get out of helping with the move.” I ignored it and when I returned from Vietnam everything had been moved into the new place and things seemed fine. Until I found out that both of them had quit their jobs while I had been away and now they were in the living room or drinking on the balcony 24/7. Their horrible cat shat all over the house, garage and bathrooms, which they refused to clean up and it baked and festered in 45 degrees celsius heat. After six months of me paying for all the toilet paper because they never bought any, I resorted to keeping it in my room. It was two weeks before they bought some for themselves and I shudder to think how they were wiping.

The worst was when my sister came to stay for two weeks from our hometown. The day she arrived I was still at work until 4pm, so she made her way from the airport to our house and was greeted by J and L, who said they were going to the local shopping center, a gigantic three-story place in the next suburb, so she went along with them. They went their separate ways and L said she would call her when they were ready to leave and that they would get her home before 4pm to meet me. After two and a half hours of shopping she was tired of it, but there was still no phone call to say they were leaving, so she sat down on a bench to wait for J and L to finish up, not wanting to call and disturb them if they still had things to do. Over an hour and a half later, it was nearly 4pm, and there was still no phone call, so she she finally decided to call them herself and see what was going on. My sister mentioned that it was nearly 4pm and that four hours had passed since they’d gone to the shopping center.

J said, “Oh, yeah, we went home.” They had finished up what they needed to do, and just driven home without her, stranding her in a suburb she had never been to in a city she had never been to, with no car and no knowledge of how to get back to my house. She asked J to come back and pick her up, and he did so grudgingly. Their appalling behaviour continued the whole time I lived there: fighting, drinking, quitting their jobs every two weeks, eating all my food and stealing from me and after about eight months I moved out. L tried to add me on Facebook about a year later. I declined.

I was in Spain for an exchange with two girls I knew from my previous major. Me and J (who arrived with me to Spain first) shared a room in a chalet with another 20 people. The first sign that things weren’t going to be easy was at the end of the first week when my roommate got really drunk and wasn’t allowed into the club we all went to. So she went home and I entrusted our keys to the guy she left with, who also a housemate. When we got back home the next morning I found out they had lost our keys and I had to sleep on the floor of another girl’s room while she slept with the guy in his room in his warm bed.

After that, roommate #2 who will be called M arrived and she gave away all of our food. She wasn’t so bad because she wasn’t as drunk as J but she was also lazy and didn’t care about anything. Our room was an eternal cloud of smoke. A month later P joined in so we were four in the same room. P was a pretty cool chick but had another guy in the house chasing after her so we often had him creeping into our room at night. It was five months of living with girls who respected nothing, often had guys sleeping over, went to the bathroom with the door wide open, smoked all the time, stole my food and clothes.

We had many arguments, I cried, threw their clothes out the window onto the trees and many of their bras ended up in the freezer. On Christmas I was away with my boyfriend and saw on Facebook that M had uploaded photos of her outside on the snow with my pajamas on. When I got back I asked her if she had at least washed them and she laughed and said she hadn’t. I told her she could keep them. In the end we all apologized for everything and they let me live off their food for our last few weeks in Spain, My Very Worst Roommates became my really good friends and we still keep in touch.

It was summer of 2000, and I was living in southern California with my roommate DP and her boyfriend JD in a two bedroom, two bath. Both DP and JD had dropped out of school and DP was working full time to support herself and JD. I often had problems with getting them to pay the bills that we were mutually sharing on time. Eventually, DP lost her job because JD would hang around her work until she was off. I would get annoyed that she would let him take advantage of her like this, but at the same time I would like to think that she was smart enough to know what he was doing.

To add even more drama, DP’s parents did not know she was living with JD until one day they paid a random surprise visit and found out. All I remember was being in my room with the doors closed as DP’s father was yelling in Spanish. Ultimately we ended up getting evicted from that place when DP’s rent check bounced for the billionth time. I was angry that their irresponsibility had caused an eviction notice to appear on my credit report which prevented me from being able to rent anywhere, so I moved back home and never spoke to them again.

My Very Worst Roommates happened to be two of my really good friends from my college days. When I got a job across state (where they lived), I moved in with them to make it simple, not ever really thinking too much of their living habits. Immediately I was really disgusted by the smell of body odor saturating the apartment. On top of that, the bathroom I shared had nearly no counter space. My roommates didn’t think the medicine cabinet or sink drawers were easy enough access to their toiletries, so they just left their family size Listerine, Q-tips, toothpaste, etc. all on the top of the toilet and sink counter. The shower curtain was crawling with mildew and the tub floor was stained from who knows what. Oh and the toilet had been destroyed by many patrons throwing up after drinking or eating too much Taco Bell and one of them who had terrible IBS I later learned.

The worst was the kitchen though. I don’t think my roommates understood that after using a George Foreman grill, or quesadilla maker that they had to clean the insides of them. Those things hadn’t been cleaned since they were first used, so there was fat cemented on the inside and outside. Crumbs were all over the kitchen counter, the microwave inside looked almost exactly like the toilet did — splatters everywhere. And the coup de grace was the fact that we had items in our fridge that had been there for months. When I first moved in I noticed a really foul smell from the fridge, but I attributed it to rotten milk or and figured it would be thrown away soon enough. A month and a half passed and I finally got fed up and looked through the entire fridge. One of my roommates loved to buy fresh meat and cheese from the deli, only he forgot to ever come back to them after purchase. There were roast beef and ham that, after I checked the date, had been there over two months.  Of course they were completely rotting. Believe me, those were not the only molded foods that were in the fridge. On top of that, one of my roommates liked to leave the door open when he banged his girlfriend, so I got to hear every moan and grunt!

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!