I was the winner of the 2010 Very Worst Date Contest, but this submission is all about the roommates. Well, actually a two-year succession of them through an apartment that I rented with my then-boyfriend. The two of us were the only constants in this parade of roommate horrors.

Longtime boyfriend and I started out renting a two-bedroom apartment. A friend had broken up with his girlfriend and needed a place to stay, and we needed help with the rent, so we let him move in. Then they got back together and she moved in too. She brought a cow collection with her. Her kitchen set–dishes, cannisters, burner covers, cream & sugar, towels, sponge–all cow. She even wore cow slippers that would moo if you pressed their noses. They would fight all hours of the day and night, and we would hear thumps and sobbing. Several times I asked her privately if she was being abused, but she said no. She got a kitten that they never let out of the room because she was afraid it would fight with my cat, and the poor thing clawed completely through the carpet and pad, down to the subfloor trying to get out. Eventually they decided to get a place of their own. (Thank heaven!) When they moved out we discovered holes in their walls and doors, and worse, they had used a humidifier 24/7 so there was mold growing in the carpet.

Next was Mike, a single guy who worked at a car wash drying cars for tips. He was nice enough, but soon I discovered all of our dishes disappearing, and a foul reek emanating from his room. My cat was obsessed and would lurk at his bedroom door, sniffing, for hours. Mike continued to faithfully pay the rent, usually in sticky ones and fives. He dyed his hair black and started listening to Marilyn Manson and NIN. He bacame more withdrawn over the months, never leaving the house except to go to work. If he heard us leaving for the grocery store, he would give us $20 and ask us to pick up Zima, Ramen, and pepperoni Hot Pockets. That is all we ever saw him consume. One day I noticed a clothesline on our balcony, draped in black clothing. He had stopped washing his clothes at the apartment laundry room, instead soaking them in the bathroom sink and hanging them to dry. One day Mike had not closed his door tightly and kitty ran in. I went in after her, gagging from the stench, eyes watering.

She was hiding under his bed, among a year’s worth of dirty dishes, Zima bottles, hot pocket sleeves, trash, laundry, along with piles of money and loose change. He had nailed black blankets over the windows, and moved all the furniture so it was reachable from his bed. It appeard he was trying to recreate the womb. There was no acrimony, but overcome by the smell, we asked Mike to move out. As a parting gift he left our moldy dishes soaking in the sink, but we threw them away and bought new ones.

I was looking forward to having the place to ourselves again, but my boyfriend could not say no to his friends. Two months later he ended up letting his friend B move in. Remember Puck on the Real World? How he was rude, crude, would say anything to anyone? That was B. Our dining room ceiling became covered with bottle caps, and a pyramid of Mountain Dew cans, started one day as a joke, continued to grow until it reached the ceiling. M, B’s best friend from high school came to visit one week, and never left. He slept and ate on the sofa, and soon it became greasy, sagging in the middle with the indent of his huge ass. M was even grosser than B. I would come home from work to find them watching porn all the time. One of them bought the other a blowup doll as a gag gift, and she took up permanent residence in the corner of the sofa. They took pride in passing room-clearing gas, and would have contests to see who was more disgusting.

They had a bet to see who could go the longest without bathing. Past roomates had been gross or destructive in their own rooms, but this was all over the apartment. I hid in my room, stopped having any of my friends over, and of course my parents never visited. I stopped cleaning because it seemed pointless, and told them that they should clean up after themselves. My boyfriend, surrounded by 20-year-old testosterone-fueled stupid, would make only feeble attempts to have them clean up. Occasionaly when things became truly horrible–like the time that flies started hatching in our trash–they would clean up. But their efforts were only temporary.

When the end of our two year lease was up, I removed myself from the lease, found a cute one-bedroom apartment across town and moved out. All the furniture had been mine, but I left everything upholstered, as it was beyond hope. As was my boyfriend. I left him behind too.

I only lived with MVWR for about five weeks. My lease was coming up and I was going abroad on excavation a month later; not wanting to pay for two months rent on a new flat while I was away, I moved in with my boyfriend A and his 4 other flatmates, on the express understanding I’d only be there for a month while I had a monster load of exams at university; I’d move out once I came back, pay rent and bills while I was there and keep out of the way. The landlady was fine with this, as were all the other flatmates, 3 guys and a girl.

Except one. The only other girl there, L, started out fine, chatting (mostly about herself, but not obnoxiously) and socialising with us. She spent most of her time on MMORPGS and talking to her online buddies, but was fine talking to us when we were around. Then one day, total radio silence. She walked out of the room when I entered, spread unpleasant and easily-refutable rumours about me to the other guys and stopped washing her dishes, leaving them all over my stuff in the kitchen. She’d take hour-long baths in the only bathroom with her laptop blaring music, then leave the floor swamped and hair and dirty water everywhere. Hundreds of other niggling annoyances appeared out of nowhere, to the point where the other guys were commenting on this sudden onset of bitchy behaviour. Confronting her did nothing, she insisted there was nothing wrong but continued being horrible.

Then the calls from the landlady started. L had been sending her emails, signed from the whole flat, about my misconduct and filthy habits, and how I was planning to kick L out of her room and move in permanently. No-one else knew anything about this, she had included them without asking. As it was the middle of the exam period, I was staying in the room A and I shared all day when I wasn’t at the library, only venturing out to clean the disgusting mess the other guys were leaving. For instance: I vacuumed the hall, which was the first time it had been done in two years. The hair, oh god, the hair. The bathroom took a whole bottle of bleach alone.

Anyway, A and I called a flat meeting, during which she denied any knowledge of the emails (despite being sent from her address), but then proceeded to blame me for every little thing that had gone wrong with the flat, even before I’d moved in! Enough was enough and we moved out before I went abroad. That wasn’t the end of her drama, however. A had been living there for two years and owned the phone, most of the AV cables and the crockery/cutley/pans, as well as the phone and internet line. Everyone had backed up their laptops on his external harddrive as well.

We gave the others a month’s notice that we were going, to give them time to recover their data, sort out new internet etc. This was reiterated several times to everyone, face-to-face. The day we move into our new flat (just the two of us, blissful), we get a series of screaming phone calls and abusive texts about how we’d stolen a load of stuff, and how dare we cut off the internet without telling anyone, and how we owed bills for the time we weren’t going to be living there. A quick text to her other flatmates soon sorted it out, and we haven’t spoken to her since. Now it’s just us, and the peace and quiet is fantastic.

S was a nice and fun guy and we became friends really fast so when he got kicked out from school and needed a place to crash, I thought, sure I’ll help out a friend in need. And you see, friendship is a tricky thing. Because sometimes you get lucky, but most of the time you’ve set yourself up for a mountain of disappointment. So S moves in, simply crashing on my couch and we decide on $80 per month( The entire rent was $500) and at first everything is great. The apartment is clean when I come home from school, S welcomes me in the door and says, “Hey how was your day.” This last for about two weeks. After that (I let him stay for about one year), he owes me a total $5000 for food, rent and smokes that I have so ignorantly given him. He can’t clean up after himself, my apartment literally looks like a dumpster simply because I can’t clean faster than he can make it messy.

So one day I tell him help me clean this up or he is gonna have to move out. Turns out he had gotten his money that same week (Approximately $2000). So when I asked him to help clean he runs for the hills faster then you can say the word “rent” and leaves me without my $5000, debts over my ears and several years of friendship behind. Still to this day, not a word from him. The only thing I’ve heard is when people have met him and he’s been telling them that I was suffocating him, asking him to clean up. I just want to tell S to give me my money and I’ll never speak to him again.

My second roommate I picked a girl instead. I thought girls are cleaner and will actually listen. But man I was wrong. When she moves in I tell her that the only rules I have is that the apartment will be hygienic and you’ll pay the rent on time because I don’t have the money to cover your share of the rent. Of course is all she says. I have now lived with this girl for six months (she only got to stay because I haven’t found a new roommate) and all she does is lie to my face, use my stuff, make a mess, play loud music, steal my stuff and not once been on time with the rent. But the most disturbing part is her room. It’s insane, this person must have seriously lived in a dumpster before my apartment. There’s stuff everywhere, it stinks so much that once I actually threw up after going in there. She has at least 10 trash bags in there that’s been standing there for months with rotten food in them. The floor is covered in dirt, food, rat poo and old Q-tips. Oh and did I forget to mention that she collects dead animals? And not the stuffed sanitized kind, no, the “this is the skin of a fox, hey look it still got its eyes left” kind. It smelled better in the elevator at the train station where I lived for a month. A lot better!

Safe to say I’m giving up on roommates completely!

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.

I never had a great relationship with my male best friend N’s mother, but we were always civil. A few years back I was unable to afford my expensive rent and unwilling to deal with the junkie stalker I had acquired, I moved in with N and his mother. The house was actually N’s and his mum had moved in with him due to some circumstances, but it had been a few years and he was keen to have her out. She promised it would only be a few weeks.

I mean, two mid-twenties goths living with a devout Christian in her fifties? What could go wrong? It would be like some kind of wacky sitcom, and it was only a few weeks, right?

To begin with, N’s mum was filthy. The house was a mess when I got there, and I’m pretty clean, so my first act was to clean it up. It took three days. Eight hours a day of scrubbing. When it was done, she vowed to keep it that way. I even received a gift for all my hard work. But soon things were back to the way they were. The fridge was filled with mould, the dishes went unwashed for weeks, and the coffee table was cluttered with old mugs, food wrappers and crumbs.

N’s mother was also really dumb. She once unplugged the fridge to plug in her mobile phone charger. She used to turn the oven on and open the door for hours because she was “cold and wanted to warm the place up.” She would leave food out on the bench overnight and then eat it the next day. She locked her door every time she left her room so “nothing got stolen.” We all found this very insulting.

The worst habit she had was leaving the front door open all night. Not just unlocked, but wide open. She would open it in the early evening as she needed “air,” and would often stay up later than the rest of us as she didn’t have a job to go to in the morning. If we didn’t catch on and close it ourselves before we went to bed, we would quite often wake up in the middle of the night or the next morning to find the door standing wide open. I confronted her about this after the second time it happened and it turned into her yelling about how I was turning her son against her. It ended with me screaming “Just close the f**king door at night so we don’t all get murdered in our sleep!”

She made endless excuses to not move out, and would sob to N about how dismal her life was and how he must hate her as he wanted her out. Finally, after ten months, she found a place. On the day she moved, she had not packed a single box. She had people from her church over to help her move and while they packed everything for her, she sat on the couch drinking tea.

Needless to say, she wasn’t popular at her church after that and N has not spoken a word to her since she left, three or so years ago.

My Very Worst Roommate is my older brother, C. Due to our mom’s obsessively clean tendencies, he has no idea how to maintain a household. I didn’t know how extreme it would be until we started sharing a house with roommates. He has cleaned literally three times in the year we have lived here. The first time I was at work when I got a text from him declaring: “I cleaned the hardwood! Tell me what you think when you get home.” When he asked me a few days later I said they looked fine.

Him: “Thanks. There’s still some smudges…”

Me: “Hmm. Did you mop?” (Note: our Swiffer Sweeper and Clorox WetJet live right next to each other.)

Him:”We’re supposed to mop?”

I heard about his second brush with chores from another roommate. She cleaned frequently and told me, “Once I was doing the floors and I asked C if he wanted to help. He ran the vacuum for literally three minutes, then went, ‘Whew! That was hard!’ and went back into his room.” The most recent time was about a month ago: I got another text from him saying, “I cleaned the bathroom so try not to mess it up.” When I got home the only difference I could see was that he had rinsed his whiskers out of the sink, something he has not learned to do consistently despite being 27. By his next shave it already looked “normal” again, but that didn’t stop him from talking about cleaning the bathroom over and over for next few weeks including bragging to our parents.

The worst, however, is his inability to handle dishes/food-related garbage. He leaves dirty soup cans, to-go boxes, frozen food packages and dishes everywhere. One time he cooked stew, ate about half of it, and left the rest in a huge pot in the sink for three weeks until I threatened to leave it in his bed because despite the lid I could smell it rotting. It gets so bad that my boyfriend (who doesn’t even live with us) would clean up the kitchen while waiting for me to get home from school. After C got sick of me requesting he not leave crusty dishes in the sink until they’re evolving into intelligent life (and we HAVE a dishwasher!), he decided the best solution is to eat in his room and leave everything there. Multiple times I’d go in to collect trash and would find a precarious tower of fossilized/molding food-crusted plates and bowls and utensils in the middle of a forest of old fast-food cups, some leaking soda-sludge through their soaked bottom seams.

I don’t go in his room to take care of his garbage anymore. And I’m so glad our lease is almost up.

For my sophomore year of college, I was randomly assigned a roommate in the dorms because I didn’t have anyone else to room with. I ended up living on a floor of all freshman girls including my roommate, J. The day I moved in, I tried making small talk with her because we hadn’t talked during the summer when we were given our roommate assignments. She seemed nice at first and very quiet but I’m also pretty quiet so it wasn’t a huge issue.

I brought the TV, DVD player and refrigerator for our room and told her the first day that she’s welcome to use any of it. But, I noticed shortly after moving in that something wasn’t right. For some reason, she would never watch TV in our room. If she wanted to watch TV, she would go into the main lobby of the dorm where there was a big screen TV. This wasn’t because I was already watching TV or studying, I’d be on Facebook or talking to someone online but not using the TV. She also didn’t buy food to put in the fridge. She would buy pop but would drink it warm. I just thought this was very odd, especially when I brought all of that for both of us to share. It wasn’t that I told her she couldn’t use any of it.

All of this went on for the entire first semester of school. When we returned in January, the last straw came when one of my friends told me that our room smelled like a mixture of BO and popcorn. I knew this was because this girl did not shower. She would go a few days without showering and lived in sweat clothes. I was so grossed out that I had become used to the smell in our room and ended up moving to a completely different dorm and getting my own room. For the rest of the college, that girl and I never spoke again!

My Very Worst Roommate was also my best friend from high school. I was a pretty sheltered and passive person, so I attracted controlling personalities. She had one for sure. She had a pretty messed up family, but I didn’t know the half of it until we moved in together. We moved into a pretty nice dorm room that had its own bathroom. She had family in the area, so she got there early and claimed all the space she wanted. There were two wardrobes but only one dresser, so she took the entire dresser. She had her entire half of the room decorated by the time I arrived.

None of this was too bad, but I also discovered that she only showered about once a week. She did not shave the tops of her feet, so there was a huge patch of hair there. She had this really long, really thick hair that really did only need to be washed about once a week, but she didn’t take a shower unless she was washing her hair. She would let it get to the point where her hair was itchy and smelly. If she wore makeup one day or evening, she would just wipe it off with a washcloth (liquid foundation).

As I said, she had a very controlling personality. She thought it was OK for her to have a boyfriend, but not me because then I wasn’t available to meet her every need. She told my mom that my boyfriend hit me (he didn’t). She complained endlessly about my boyfriend (who’s now my husband) to our other friends, my mom, her mom, her boyfriend and really anyone who would listen. Before I met my boyfriend, she set me up with this weird friend of her boyfriend’s who had been utterly destroyed by his previous break-up. Also, she had a tendency to only date guys of a different religious persuasion than she was. Two examples were the Mormon and the Jehovah’s Witness dudes she dated. She disagreed with both religions and tried to get both of them to promise they would quit those religions.

We lived together for one year and then I moved in with another high school friend who was also pretty damaged, but by then, I was mostly living with my boyfriend so it didn’t matter. I never had a roommate again!

A was randomly assigned to me in my freshman year of college, and I could tell on the very first day of school that we were not going to be best buddies.

As I began to settle into a group of friends, MVWR usually tagged along with us wherever we went, generally alienating everyone in the group with backhanded insults. For example, my friend K mentioned that she was considering rushing a sorority, and A asked, “So you can be, like, a dumb sorority girl?” in a valley girl voice.  She also asked awkward questions, like whether we thought sex outside of missionary position was sinful. Whenever someone said “fuck you” to anyone, she would respond with, “Right here, on the table?”

One night about a week into school we hung out and drank in a guy friend’s dorm room. I left early, and A ended up staying the night. When A arrived the next morning, she looked as though she’d been strangled. Her neck was covered in about 30 hickeys, which she had received from our friend’s roommate, who’d been passed out drunk when I left.  The guy later reported that at some point during the make-out session she told him, “I think I’ve just been bitten by a vampire!”

All of her weirdness might have been tolerable, had it not been for the smell in our room. A loved to eat salmon-flavored cream cheese, which she would spread on crackers with the same crusty knife that she never washed. The knife would sit out on a cardboard box that she used as a table, which was also covered in crusty salmon dip and made the whole room smell like fish. The smell was so bad that my friends refused to hang out in my room at all. To counter the stench, I went out and bought some air freshener.

One day, I came into the room and was met with a particularly pungent odor, so I sprayed some air freshener, and A poked her head out of her loft bed and looked at me like I’d just killed a puppy. About 20 minutes later she posted a note on Facebook titled “Air Freshener,” which never specifically mentioned me, but discussed how she generally felt unwanted (I’ll admit that by this point I had stopped inviting her to hang out with my friends and me), and friends posted comments saying things like “Don’t let her get to you!” To this day I have no idea why my spraying air freshener was so offensive to her. It was a very long rest of the year after that incident.

During my freshman year of college, I was placed in a double with a random roommate, A. We started emailing each other before school started, and at first it seemed like a good match. We had similar taste in music and we generally agreed about what we would and would not have in the room. She was a little bit of an oversharer, telling me all about her experience skinny-dipping on a hiking trip with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend (“you feel so free in nature!”) but I was willing to overlook that.

When we met at the beginning of the school year, she wouldn’t speak more than one or two sentences. She was perfectly nice and polite and sociable with other people, but I was lucky if I could get more than two words from her. An above average conversation would go as follows:‬

Me: So, how’s it going?‬

‪A: *shrugs*‬

‪Me: Do you like your classes?‬

‪A: *nods*‬

‪Me: What are you taking this semester?‬

‪A: Some philosophy classes‬

‪Me: That sounds like fun. Are they interesting?‬

‪A: *shrugs and turns to face away from me*

I’m a quiet person myself, but this was ridiculous! I spent over a semester living in a room with a girl who would barely deign to speak to me. She also had some quirky and annoying habits. I tended to go to sleep at 2 a.m., which was when she would arrive, turn on the light, start typing, and rock her chair back and forth on top of a plastic bag. A plastic bag which she would not remove. Every night, I went to sleep to the sound of tapping keys and crinkling plastic.‬

‪She also wouldn’t clean her part of the room. She would occasionally pile wet laundry on her bed, which would start to mildew and smell, but the worst was The Pile of stuff by the side of her bed. It started with an open box of dry spaghetti that had fallen. Over time, The Pile acquired various items of clothing, a multitude of books, office supplies, and the contents of care packages.

I moved out of the room when literally thousands of ants made The Pile their happy communal home and started sending ant expeditions out to my side of the room. It took a month for housing to place me in a new room, and for that month I removed all edible items from my side of the room but continued to find ants on my desk and in my bed and in the keyboard of my laptop.