MVWR was a girl that I lived with my junior year of college. Lets call her M. After transferring to a new school, I had decided to live in the dorms in order to meet new friends. However I ended up having to live with the most annoying, “OCD”, territorial and passive aggressive person I have ever met.

I had arrived first to move in to the dorms so I was pretty much already settled in when M moved in later. This girl was a petite blonde who liked the Ed Hardy/Jersey Shore Douche look. She also had the loudest voice I have ever heard! Now, I’m not a slob and I did some initial cleanup/sanitatition upon moving in to the apartment; but M went crazy with the cleaning. She scrubbed down all the walls, doors and doorknobs. She also cleaned both of the bathrooms including mopping. At first I thought it would be nice to live with someone so clean, but it did not turn out so great.

A week later, M asked me and the other roommate (X, who is a MVWR story all of her own) if one of the bathrooms could specificly belong to her while both of us shared the other one.  At first I said no, because it did not make any sense since there were three of us, and what if someone needed to use the bathroom while someone was in it etc. These logical statements made M burst into tears and cry/sniffle about how “it wasn’t respectful.” So we ended up letting her use the small bathroom while we used the big one.

A month into living with M, I noticed that her “OCD cleaning problem” appeared to not be a real issue because M was actually a very messy person! She would make ramen with my pots and never clean after (even though she somehow managed to burn the ramen and thus the pan). She would also clip her toenails on the living room coffee table and never clean it up. Gross! Then there was “her” bathroom. It was utterly disgusting, with the toilet never flushed, dust everywhere, used tampons on the floor etc. There were also red lipstick kiss marks on the mirror that were a bitch to clean off later.

The last problem was her psychotic ex-boyfriend, who shall be called Duke. She had broken up with him because he had abused her, so I have no idea why she would get back with him. The climatic moment was one morning when they got into a fight and Duke shoved M up against a wall. Somehow something glass was shattered, I found tiny shards of glass right in the hallway for months after.

Eventually X and I filed a police report against Duke because of his violent behaviour (he would try to start fights with us over imagined slights, even if we were sleeping or our doors were closed) and this was the final straw for M. She finally moved out, but never really cleaned up after herself and also left about 20 huge nails in the wall from pictures. We calculated that M probably got fined about $2,000 for her apartment damages.

My Very Worst Roommate odyssey began when a guy on my floor of the freshman dorm asked me to room with him the following year. He was having problems finding a roommate partly because he had gotten a job as an RA and was assigned to the most destructive floor of a well-known all-male party dorm at our college. We got along well and he was entertaining character so I figured what the hell? As it turned out, hell was exactly what was waiting for me.

A month or so into our happy living situation it became apparent that what I thought were fun quirks were actually surface indicators of a fascinating personality disorder. This kid–let’s call him “K”- was a mess to begin with and the pressures of college life made him slowly dissolve like a jello in the hot hot sun. Let’s begin with his experimentations with alcohol which were disastrous to say the least. I never knew this was a real problem for some people until that year, but K had a serious issue with sleepwalking and would frequently (whenever he drank) wander into the hallway in the middle of the night and urinate indiscriminately, sometimes in many directions like a sprinkler, often returning to the wrong room and passing out in the beds of the residents he was supposed to be responsible for.

He also had a penchant for drunk booting; he usually preferred sinks but one night he got queasy in bed and puked from the top bunk down onto my computer. He used my favorite hooded sweatshirt to clean it up and threw the poor thing behind a closet door where I found it months later on that joyous day when I finally moved out. On another memorable evening after K had attended a particularly raucous frat party I returned to our room and turned on the light to find him naked, on his back, in a classic spread eagle pose on our couch (which I never sat in again.) Why oh why did I flip that light switch? I almost wish I could go back in time and blind myself first.

Next lets discuss the “Abtronic.” You may remember seeing this device advertised on TV back in the day- it was essentially a felt pad with electronic nodes that you would strap around your waist to purportedly shock your stomach muscles into shape. K ordered his Abtronic before spring break in order to “firm up his hot abs” and for a month or so would wear the thing around the room in his boxer briefs, shocking himself to prep for the ladies. I would invite people over just to have witnesses for what I was dealing with here.

Also, as is true with most VWRs, K was an utter slob. While obsessive about his own outward appearance to the point of obsession, he turned the room into a trash pit to the point where we even had cockroaches in the spring. Just as one example of the man’s tidy habits: he once left several packages of chicken breasts in his dormitory fridge and accidently unplugged it over break so that when we came back the room smelled like rotting chicken for weeks. You could actually smell it a quarter mile or so before you got to the building but I knew right away it had to be coming from our room–our friend K at work. He tried to clean it out and cover the smell by using bleach which only morphed the stench into something astronomically worse… yup I got to know the rest of campus pretty well that year.

Unfortunately when I was in the room I also had a front row seat for K’s blossoming sexual exploration as well. He was considerate about not locking me out of the room, and instead if I would return home from somewhere late at night he would sometimes stuff the girl he was hooking up with under his sheets up on the top bunk, pretend he was alone, wait (for three minutes or so) until he decided I was asleep and then resume his awkward thrusting and moaning, He literally lost his virginity early in the first semester about four feet from my face.

Meanwhile, the other residents on the floor grew to hate K, not just because he made their hallway smell like piss but also because of his obnoxious swagger (yup you’re picturing him correctly–he’s one of those guys that pops the collars of their pink polo shirts and constantly refers to themselves in the third person) and the fact that he took his RA job just barely seriously enough to spoil their fun antics by preventing them from raping drunk girls and tearing sinks out of the walls. He referred to them as “the mob” and was convinced they were conspiring against him and plotting to do him physical harm (he was right).

Eventually, having lost any hope for respect, he gave up on fulfilling any of his responsibilities and would hide out from the residents in our room, turning off the lights and pretending no one was there if they knocked on our door to get let into their rooms or borrow the floor’s vacuum cleaner. He was finally fired from the RA job when another RA (his arch nemesis from another frat) came across him crawling out a window to escape being caught in a dorm room party with an illegal keg. Well done dude… another of America’s future leaders caught squirming through the cracked walls of academia.

The only upside to this whole situation was that it used to win me sympathy from women on campus. K was relatively well-known because in addition to his terrible reputation for being overly aggressive with females he was also interfraternity council chair or president or something stupid like that, so if any girl happened to hear that he was my roommate they would give me this deeply sympathetic look as if I just told them my new puppy had bone cancer. Perhaps the most amazing part of his behaviour was the fact that for years he would retell some of these stories in front of other people as if they were things I had done to HIM instead of the other way around (like for example- “hey slapnuts remember that time you booted on my computer and used my favourite hoodie to clean it up?”) No, slapnuts- but remember that time I powned you on My Very Worst Roommate with a full posting of the truth…?

Well anyways I ended up surviving the year, and amazingly enough 10 years later, K is still one of my best friends although I will never, ever share a room with him again in any capacity. As for the Abtronic, you can probably find it on Ebay along with his dignity.

MVWR was the only roommate I ever had while attending college. Let’s call her D. I had spoken to her once before we moved down to start college. She agreed to bring an iron, mini fridge, and her computer. I agreed to bring, a TV, microwave, and an ironing board. She was in the band and so got to school two weeks before the incoming freshman arrived. We were paired to live in the smallest dorm on campus because it was considered housing for ‘Honor Female Students’ which by the way she kept study habits I found hard to believe that she had gotten into that dormitory.

One of my issues with D was that she would always invite her band mates back to our room after they had a long practice in the humid Southern heat. The only seating available was her bed, a computer chair, and my bed. I didn’t mind so much her band mates being there except for on several occasions I walked in from class to always find the fattest, sweatiest, band mate sitting on my pillow. The only pillow that I had where I laid my face on. I would usually leave and go to common area downstairs until they left. Not to mention that one of her band mates kept stealing my utensils. Over time, D’s hygiene and sloppiness really shined through. Being that there were only 16 girls on our floor, in a weeks time you would run into at all of the girls in the shower. No one ever saw her in the shower.

I didn’t think much of it until one morning I woke up to a weird sound. I opened my eyes and to my horror I saw D wiping her vagina with a baby wipe. And when she realized that I saw her, she just stared me down until I rolled over and pretended to go back to sleep. Her smell got so bad that even her band mates started calling her “Spoiled Milk.” One day I walked in from class only to find her wiping her vagina again and this time she had left a brown-stained baby wipe in front of my microwave. I told her to pick that shit up or we were going to have problems. On top of that she had a boyfriend who was a pothead and spent every possible moment he could in our room. To make matters worse, he smelled just like her.

As the year progressed, her side of the room became unbearable to look at. Unfortunately, the computer was on her side and so I had to suck it up and sit over there to do reports. I sat down to do a report one day when I felt something on my leg. I looked down real quick and thought that it was her windbreakers rubbing on my leg. I took a second look to find the biggest daddy long legs I’d ever seen. I screamed and ran out. All her filthiness had worn out my patience and by the end of the first semester we weren’t speaking to each other.

But that didn’t stop her from helping herself to my food in her fridge (that was clearly labeled) and my pantry as well as moving my TV to her side of the room because as she put it, “It looks better on my side.” After a few weeks of going back and forth, I’d had enough. She had just purchased books for the new semester and had complained that she spend $572 for four books. I sold them and made $350. It was the least I was due for putting up with her ‘Spoiled Milk’ smell and pothead boyfriend.

MVWR happened when I went to school overseas for a year. I moved into a dorm that was all single rooms. I am very shy and made very few friends until I met T. We hung out a few times but I didn’t think we were very close. Then one night she was complaining about how she was having trouble sleeping and asked to stay in my room as I was one of the random rooms who got double beds. I reluctantly said yes; it was a horrible night. She kept getting up and at one point told me that if I stopped moving around I would probably sleep better.

She eventually left in the morning and I thought it was over. However she kept coming back night after night. She was starting to leave things in my room even though I would ask her to take them with her. If I would go out, somehow she would be at my door around 5 to 10 minutes after I got home. I would lock my door to have some peace and quiet while studying.

I told her that I couldn’t sleep with anyone else in my bed as I like to stretch out across the whole bed and she asked me if she could sleep on the end of my bed. I let her for one night and then the next night I told her that wasn’t working either. She then asked to sleep on my floor. Eventually I managed to get rid of her by lying and saying that I couldn’t sleep with anyone else in the room. I avoided her for the rest of the year.

There were other incidents that I can’t fit in here. I know I shouldn’t have been so passive but I am working on that.

For the majority of college, I had a wonderful roommate (L) who is also now my best friend. However, before L had the chance to move across the hall into my room at the end of the fall semester our freshman year, I was luck enough to have my worst roommate experience.

N and I were assigned to be roommates through the normal, random college system our freshman year. We were place in a small dorm building, all of which was used to house students in a living-learning program for the arts at our school. This living-learning environment caused much of our floor and dorm to become friendly and bond quickly because we were taking classes and colloquium together several times a week in addition to living together. This is how I met and became friends with L and many other peers that I still keep in close touch with.

N, however, did not take to the fostered sense of friendship the way most of the other students in our program did. She barely socialized with anyone, and hardly spoke to me. When our door was open, my friends would stick their head in to see if she was there before fully entering the room. She moved in using mostly garbage bags. Many of these bags were never unpacked in the 4 months we lived together. The rest were dumped in piles next to her bed that she never really cleaned.

N kept increasingly bizarre hours, including sleeping all afternoon once, only to get up and start writing a 10-page paper at 11:00pm. Now, I wouldn’t have minded these weird work hours or long midday naps, but she insisted on listening to gospel music while she studied. Although she used headphones, she would hum and sing along while I was sleeping. When I finally commented, she stopped singing, but the music was up so loud that I could still here it even though she had headphones on.

While overall N’s behavior was a little weird and fairly inconsiderate of others, it’s not particularly out of the ordinary in terms of college random roomie experiences. But wait! The kicker came on parents’ weekend. My family came down, took me shopping for things I needed, went out to dinner, and participated in some of the events going on around campus that weekend. And stayed at a hotel down the road. That’s common sense, right? That my adult parents were planning on staying in a hotel for the weekend?

Wrong. Imagine my shock when N told me that not only would her mother be coming for the weekend, but that her mom would also be staying in our 12′x12′ dorm room with us. I though it was strange, but tried not to judge. Anytime I came back to the room that weekend, she and her mother were always there, watching TV while sitting on N’s bed eating from take-out containers. Again, to me this was weird, but I tried not to judge.

However, all attempts at not judging went WAY out the window when the evening’s sleeping arrangements became evident. N’s mother was not only staying in our room, but was sleeping with N in her bed. A smaller-than-twin, plastic-covered, less than 5 feet from me bed. I had assumed N was going to take the floor while her mom took the bed, but you know what they say about when you assume…Our bed were in no way comfortable to sleep in with 2 people without spooning. And while I love my mother to death, spooning her is a little weird.

After our bizarre parents’ weekend, I decided it was time to look for a new roommate. N actually volunteered to move in with L’s old roommate, as that girl was probably the only person in our program N ever spoke to. Lucky for me, it ended up working out perfectly, but not without a weird and uncomfortable few months to deal with first!

My Very Worst Roommate was one of three other girls that I lived with during my sophomore year of college. At first we all got along well, but it didn’t take long for things to get ugly.

Three of us were good about putting our dishes in the dishwasher right away and running it when it got full, but MVWR would leave her gross dishes “soaking” in the sink until my stainless steel silverware rusted and left rust spots all over my dishes. We would come home and the apartment would be like a sauna because she would turn the heat up all the way and then leave (no matter what the weather was like outside). She would constantly take our clothes out of the dryer when they were still damp so she could do things like warm up her towels before a shower, and then didn’t even put our stuff back in after.

The crowning glory of the experience happened on one night when she went out drinking with some of her friends, as she frequently did. When she came home later that night, she had lost her key and was thumping on the door for someone to come and let her in. When we opened the door, she was sitting, bare-assed, on the gross carpet of the hallway, pissing on the floor. At least it wasn’t in our living room, I guess, but it was still disgusting.

I moved out the second that I could afford to. One thing I will say is that the VWR’s mother came and cleaned all the common areas of the apartment after we all moved out. But it didn’t quite make up for half of my kitchen things needing replacement.

I was a serious science student at an Institute of Technology, and everybody I’d met in my first year had been serious also. But women were scarce and I didn’t know any who didn’t already have a roommate, so I had to take my luck with the random roommate slot.

Imagine my shock when my second year roommate at this serious Tech school appeared to be a bubblehead there to get her MRS degree. I don’t know if she attended classes; she never seemed to study. Within a few minutes of meeting me she announced that she’d spent the summer working for (some trendy clothing store) and she would teach me to Fold My Shirts Properly.

Again, I was a focused student, in a difficult field, with large projects. I often studied late into the night. My roommate wanted to go to sleep at 9PM (really!) and insisted she absolutely could not sleep with my desk light on or me tapping on my keyboard. After the first few days, where she demanded I go to bed when she did, and I told her “I need to keep working,” her complaints turned into all-day nagfests. The whole time we were both in the room, she was either whining at me about it or trying to convince me that it was somehow my problem. It never stopped!

To this day I don’t understand what she thought was going to happen in a college dorm–and *I* was a much more pleasant roommate than many. I was studying and was relatively quiet. I wasn’t noisily making out with a guy in the next bunkbed, I wasn’t drinking (or out getting drunk and coming in late and loud), I wasn’t playing loud music or video games. But hey, I was a college student paying for my own tuition; I was damn well going to do the work I needed to do for my classes…but she’d whine and nag and screech. She blew off my suggestions (curtains around her bed, eye covers and earplugs, etc). I *had* to go to bed at 9PM and shut off all my lights, just like she did, or I would Ruin her Life.

Eventually I went to Housing and told them I just couldn’t work like this, and they let me move into a private apartment room that had just opened up. Usually they only let juniors and seniors into those rooms, but they took pity on me with my idiot of a roommate. I hope whoever they put in the room after I left DID come in noisy and drunk at 3AM.

MVWR was this past year when I was a freshman in college. We had found each other on Facebook because we were too scared to random room at our very large university. We were the only two people on the facebook group from the same city so we decided to meet up a few months before move in. We got a long great until we got to school in August. She never let on to how filthy she was. She would sleep with plates of food in her bed, and threw soda cans and trash all over the ground. She brought her entire wardrobe with her, and more. It took over not only her half of the room but mine as well.

For the first week of school, she blocked the door with her stuff until I finally made her move it. She stole my food, clothes, shoes, and purses without asking. She would boss me around and tell what I could and couldn’t do. At some point my TV had broken and she demanded I call my mother up to buy me a new one (didnt happen!). Next, I came home one night to find her passed out. When I woke her she admitted to drinking all my Nyquil, alcohol, Advil, and her pain meds. I was fed up with her obnoxious, snobby, and bossy behavior let alone her problems with pain meds.

The next day I told her I couldnt live with her any longer and addressed my RA. I came back to the room after her incident to find her throwing up in my trash can (that didnt have a liner) she said she would clean it, so when I left and came back 5 hours later it still wasn’t clean and my room reeked of vomit. So I had to clean it. Later that night I had left the room to take a shower and stupidly left without my key. When I tried to get back into the room, she locked me out. Luckily, another girl was in the bathroom and ran downstairs to get me an extra key. When K returned she claimed she forgot I didn’t have a key (yeah right).

A few days I decided to leave the school…now she’s following in my footsteps and also moving back to our hometown and getting an apartment 10 minutes from mine.

H was my randomly-assigned roommate during my freshman year of college. From the moment she asked me who my favorite character on The Hills was, I deduced that we did not have much in common, but still, I was hopeful that we could at the least get along well. As we were moving in on the first day, she asked if it would be okay with me if her friend who was coming to visit her the next weekend stayed in our room for a night. I said sure, and since she said that he would be sleeping on the floor, I assumed that it was not that type of relationship and didn’t make plans to crash anywhere else that night.

A week later, I opened the door to the room at 10 at night to find H clinging to her much-bigger friend like a spider monkey, their mouths locked, surrounded by empty bottles of Mike’s Hard. Well. Okay. Shit happens, I understand, and I found other places to be. By 1 that night, I was tired of hanging out in the lounge, and my friend and I walked back to my room…where I opened the door to them having sex on her desk chair.

Finally, by 3 a.m., I had had enough (and had been busted by security for sleeping in the lobby), so I went back and got into bed as loudly as possible in the hopes that they would not continue with any unsavory activities in my presence.

In the morning, I felt distinctly awkward because they were both still in her bunk, giggling. I could see, in the light, that the room was a wreck and a bunch of stuff on my desk had been broken. I gathered up my books and headed to the library for a few hours, but eventually I had to go back. H, inexplicably, spent most of the day curled in the fetal position, surrounded by her friends, loudly bemoaning her hickies. Her guest stayed, too, reclining shirtless on her bed while she was out of the room.

That night, I was wondering when he was going to leave because we both had class in the morning, but I really didn’t want to say anything at that point. When I left the room, they were watching TV. When I came back ten minutes later, they were having sex on my rug. I slammed the door and yelled, “WHAT THE FUCK, DUDE?” She stormed out with him and came back alone at midnight, turned on all the lights and screamed “I AM NOT A WHORE.”

The next morning, I calmly explained that I did not think she was a whore and didn’t care how many people she slept with, just as long as she gave me forewarning and didn’t break my stuff. Everything was fine until the next weekend, when I opened the door at 3 a.m. to a different guy spread-eagle on her bed. That’s when I decided we had irreconcilable differences and we both found new living arrangements.

I should have seen the red flags when my freshman roommate, V, insisted on taking a picture of us together, printing, it out, and hanging it on the door for all to see before I had even finished unpacking. I was quite shy though, so I was glad to have at least person who was happy to see me.

But almost immediately, things got strange. V treated me to an extensive listing of all her psychological and physical problems, claimed she had been horribly bullied during her orientation, and a number of other things that made me quite uncomfortable. She began following me everywhere, insisting she eat her meals with me and once tracking me down in a friend’s room and screaming at me because she thought I was “off getting drunk somewhere.”

Soon V began having what she describes as panic attacks, where she would spend 20-30 minutes at a time on the floor shaking and whimpering. Several times I stayed up late holding her hand. The attack happened several times a week.

Things got progressively worse. V began claiming that people were writing her hate messages on our door (no one saw them but her), that she had an eating disorder, that she had terrible insomnia and severe narcolepsy at the same time. She would routinely collapse on the floor and talk to herself when I had visitors. She once hit her head and started hallucinating, but was sent back from the ER after an hour with no concussion bracelet (strange since she said her concussion was severe.) She told me she had a second personality and once she even hid under her bed for most of two days. There are too many bizarre stories to list them all.

On top of all this, V had been telling all of her other friends that I was a horrible person, telling lies about how I yelled at and ignored her, and was generally abusive. During all of this. she continued to cling to me. If I got upset at all the drama she caused, she would cry and yell at me for not realizing “how hard this was for her.”

The final straw was when she told a bunch of her friends that she was planning to commit suicide. The dean asked her to leave at Thanskgiving and not come back (yes, this all took place in less than a semester).

I genuinely do feel bad for her; she clearly needed help and was not ready for college life, but I can’t help but resent the way she effectively ruined my freshman year. I am now a psychology major, and convinced that although some of them were legitimate, most of V’s problems were mostly invented in order to draw attention. Living with her was an absolutely unbelievable experience.