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.