I moved to San Diego from small town Indiana in 2005 right after graduating high school to live with my boyfriend (who is now my husband). He and I had it rough at first, but finally scored jobs and enough money to stop living in our car and get a room somewhere. We found M on Craigslist and were pleasantly surprised when we went to see his house and it was gorgeous! The rent was reasonable and M seemed like an OK guy. We signed a lease and moved in.

We didn’t know there would be other roommates also until move in day. They were two Amazonian women straight off the boat from Poland. M said they had showed up move in ready and he couldn’t turn them away because they had no place to go. Whatever, we just wanted a place to live! S and C were crazy, crazy ladies.

One night they decided to have a loud party in the backyard with eight Marines. The next morning all eight Marines walked out of their bedroom nonchalantly like nothing had gone on. They smoked and drank and constantly got tickets for being drunk in public. One night, they had got drunk and walked on the beach and tracked sand through the entire house. They made potato and pickle soup at least twice a week and then told us, “You Americans don’t know how to cook!”

The final straw was that they started to refuse to buy toilet paper. I got tired of furnishing it for them and told my boyfriend to keep the TP in our room and take it in and out of the bathroom with us. Guess what? THEY NEVER BOUGHT TOILET PAPER! What the hell were they doing in there?I don’t even want to think about it. Finally, things got too tense and M kicked them out. Things with M were great and totally chill for about 2 years, believe it or not!

Then one day, M decides to hook up with his boss, who was 4’11″ and probably 180 pounds with a Farrah Fawcett hairdo. This was a big mistake as she totally moved in one night and took over. She would wreck the house and scream at everything M did as if he were a child. She constantly bossed him around and was a complete tyrant to everyone. She never picked up her feet when she walked and would shuffle around the house. That sound seriously haunted my dreams.

They also thought it was a great idea one day to get a puppy and let it shit all over everything and not clean it up. Things got so ridiculous but we stuck it out. However, after they started having extremely loud butt sex every night, my boyfriend and I quickly escaped to an apartment of our own where we currently reside. NO ROOMMATES EVER AGAIN.

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.

College was a fantastic time in my life, but it certainly didn’t start off that way. Firstly, my mother contrived to stick me into an all-male dorm under some silly notion that I wouldn’t get into trouble. Truth be told, guys who live in coed dorms tend to be a lot more civilized than their animal counterparts in all-male dorms–but I guess that’s water under the bridge at this point.

Secondly, I had not one, not two, but THREE roommates, in what they called a “quad” (which was basically a slightly larger room–nowhere NEAR the same amount of square footage per person). Granted, I was a total nerd and a basket case (from never having to share personal living space as I grew up), but these guys were assholes, too. The nerd blood was in the water on day one–and these guys clearly relished in making my life miserable.

One of the aggravating factors was that I resisted partying with my roommates, which they correctly interpreted as a snub. They were able to get back at me, though. One night I got totally smashed with my friends, and paid the price in the hall bathroom (in these dorms, there was only one large shared bathroom per hall). The bathroom was a locker-room type setup, with benches in front of the showers. Anyway, after my stomach was sufficiently emptied, I stumbled to one of the benches and passed out. My next memory was my three roommates standing over me with the exact same smile on their faces. One of them finally spoke:

“Hey, do you realize some dude’s naked, hairy ass was pressed on that bench? Your face is right up on it, dude!”

I passed out again, and I remember thinking “he has a point.”

K moved into my 4-bedroom condo less than a month ago and is being evicted this month.

On Saturday, I came home at 6:30 p.m. from a friend’s house and found 20 people in my house dancing to techno music. Each was high on either GHB, coke, MDMA, ketamine, or a combination. I was asked multiple times if I “needed something” as a tray of various white substances and pills was placed in front of me. I was a bit stressed and needed to get out of there. I escaped to the park with my my dog to process what I walked in on. After an hour, I walked back home as I needed to speak with a few clients in Taiwan. When I went to my room, I found a girl passed out in my bed. I walked downstairs to the closest muscular man and politely asked him to remove the girl from my room.

On this day, one of the other housemates, M was away, and another, R, was hiding in his bedroom from the craziness. At a loss of what to do, I do my work and lock the dog and cat in my room with me. I spoke to K around 9 p.m. when he told me that everyone was leaving. At 11 p.m., he told me the same thing. At 12, R invited me to go out with him while he advertises for a club. We returned home around 4:30 a.m. The party was still going. I found K and told him he must remove everyone from the house and that I’m not comfortable with this many drugs and people (whom he just met the previous night) in the house. He told me that because he did the dishes that I should let him have his friends over. I attributed his apathetic response to him being high. Everyone left shortly thereafter to go to another party. A few days later, I explained why I was upset. He told me that his party was no different than when R and I have our three mutual friends over for cocktails as he ‘didn’t know them’. He didn’t understand why it was a bit dangerous to a woman to have 20 strangers drugged out in her home,

I found out later that that this party at my place was the after-party from their partying the previous night, They had gone straight from the after hours place to the rooftop of my condo building then into our home.