My Very Worst Roommate was  Sue, a girl I was matched up with freshman year of college. She wasn’t messy or loud or anything like that. The problem was she was a know-it-all who knew nothing. In addition, she would often use me as a scapegoat for her problems. When things went bad for her, she would yell at me over some stupid thing that had nothing to do with her problem.

I didn’t move out of home until I was 21, and was lucky enough to move into a huge place with cheap rent that was close to the city. Even better, I got along well with my housemates (two guys and a girl, all friends prior to moving in) and we never had any problems bigger than whose turn it was to do the dishes. Unfortunately our female housemate wanted to move interstate and we couldn’t find anyone in our large circle of friends to take her room, so after weeks of covering the extra rent ourselves we bit the bullet and advertised in the local paper. We wanted a girl to keep the balance even, but as I worked a lot and my two male housemates were home during the day, I let them interview the potential candidates. They decided on “Ally”. She seemed nice, although a bit of a space cadet.

The first week should have been a dire warning. Although none of us were opposed to drugs, we didn’t really do anything harder than weed and especially not with any regularity. Ally spent the entire first week off her chops on ecstasy. Who gets high alone on a Tuesday afternoon just to celebrate moving in?

One night around 3 a.m. I was awakened suddenly by my bedroom door flying open and someone staggering over towards my bed. Luckily I had a clothes horse with fresh washing on it by the door and the intruder got tangled up in it, turned and walked out. When I asked Ally why she was in my room she denied it being her, although it quite clearly was. If that wasn’t creepy enough, a few weeks later I had smoked a joint and was just chilling out in my room watching some TV when Ally walked in and sat extremely close to me on the bed. She started up some small talk and then looked me in the eyes and asked if I liked girls. I’m not gay and I told her this, and she got up and left. One of my housemates later told me she had also come into his room one night while he was in bed, sat down and started telling him she liked him “more than she should.”

She wasn’t working, since she was meant to be studying, but it soon became obvious she wasn’t doing that either. Her parents, who were of some kind of Eastern European descent and didn’t speak much English, had been paying her rent and bills. We hooked her up with a job down at the local pub but she quit after two shifts for no apparent reason.

One Wednesday night she came home at 4 a.m. with two strange men and started blasting drum and bass music. They were running up and down our wooden hall that connected to all the bedrooms, yelling and shouting. One of the strange men burst into my room and asked in Ally was in there and I flipped out and screamed at him to get out.

The final straw came one weekend when both my male housemates were interstate playing a show with their band. Ally was spending a night at home with her friend and I had a night shift so I went out to work and came home straight to bed. The next morning as I was walking down the hall to the bathroom I heard two girls giggling coming from one of my absent housemates rooms. When I opened the door, Ally and her friend were laying in his bed talking. I asked why they were in there and Ally claimed her friend had felt unwell during the night so she slept in our housemates bed, and in the morning she had come over to visit. I asked if the housemate had ok’d this and she gave me an incredulous look and said “Why would he mind?”. Why would he mind you let a strange sick girl sleep on his sheets and invade his personal space and treat it like a common living area? He was furious when he found out.

We didn’t even have to kick her out in the end. She sulked about feeling unwelcome and left a week later. Sucks to be whoever she lives with next!

My Very Worst Roommate has since been dubbed the Rabbit Killer. A year after graduating from college, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a girl who had been one of my best friends in middle-school and high school. We hadn’t seen much of each other during college because we were on opposite ends of the country, but when we both ended up in the same town, it seemed like a perfect arrangement. After a few months of living with her, I discovered that she had never quite grown up. She didn’t have a high paying job but as soon as a new video game system, video game or DVD box set would come out she would instantly buy it. Then when the first of the month rolled around and I asked for her half of the rent and utilities, she would act like I was the biggest creep and would go into sob stories about how she didn’t even have enough money for food.

On top of that, she was insanely dirty. I’m not the neatest person myself, but I try to be sanitary if not tidy. She would do the strangest things, like leave a completely untouched Jamba Juice in the middle of the living room floor until it molded over. Why would you buy a smoothie and not even drink any? Building management even had to come into her room once to fix a leak and wrote her up because she was so messy that they deemed the space dangerous.

It all came to a head when she decided she wanted to get a pet rabbit. I put my foot down and said no to pets because I knew that she wouldn’t be able to take care of it. She already was incredibly messy and I knew that it would just make the apartment even grosser. She argued that she could keep it outside on the balcony, but I told her that it would be too cold for something to live out there. A few months later, I walked out onto our shared balcony and discovered a pet rabbit. She told me that she knew I had said no, but that she knew that if I saw the rabbit, it would win me over. I was angry but decided to drop it. Fast forward to a particularly frosty Thanksgiving weekend, and my roommate came into my room crying and asking for a box with a lid. I asked why, and lo and behold, the rabbit had frozen to death. She insisted that she didn’t know how it died because she knew everything about rabbits and they are fine in the cold. I decided to not make matters worse by telling her “I told you so” and gave her a box and a hug.

Fast forward a month later when I had friends visiting over the Christmas holidays. I hadn’t been on the balcony in a while but the friends were smokers and so we went out there to have a smoke. Then I hear, “Hey, what’s in this box?” I look, and it’s the same box I had given the roommate for the bunny, with bunny still inside! I was completely mortified that a dead rabbit had been on our balcony for a month. When I brought it up with my roommate later and asked her to get rid of it, she started crying and said I was heartless and that it had to have a proper burial and there was no place to bury it where we live. I finally convinced her to take it with her when she went home for the holidays and bury it there.

The final straw came a few months later when I went back out on the balcony and discovered a new pet rabbit living there. I decided to move. A little while after moving out, I heard from some mutual friends that the new rabbit had killed itself by jumping off the balcony. Even it couldn’t stand to live with her anymore.

I went to a private Catholic university where most of the students come from a lot of money. My close friends and I come from modest backgrounds, but ended up being randomly assigned to a fourth roommate in our sophomore year. We decided to pair me with E because we shared the same major. Things were fine at first. She covered her side of the room with Grateful Dead, The Doors and Phish posters, plus she had an entire dresser drawer full of illegal Phish tapes she recorded from concerts. Basically she was a rich girl playing hippie, something we saw a lot at our school. And then things got weird.

One day I went to take a shower and saw a pair of men’s socks in the bathroom floor. Our other two roomies were gone for the weekend, but E swore they weren’t hers and didn’t know where they came from. Weeks later we discovered that she snuck a guy in and for some reason he left the socks there. She knew they were his, but refused to pick them up or even touch them. She used any pot or pan she came across, including my indoor grill. I pulled it out of the cabinet one day and saw cheese stuck to the top. I cleaned it and used it, but noticed that it kept happening. I confronted her and it turned out she was making grilled cheese sandwiches and then just putting it back in the cabinet. I demanded that she clean it every time and she didn’t get the big deal, saying that it was just cheese.

Then she stopped flushing the toilet, unless she had a bowel movement. We’d constantly find urine in the toilet. Her sister and several “friends” stopped by on their way home from a Phish concert and stayed. Not only did they not shave (anything), but they clearly hadn’t bathed and she never bothered to tell us they were coming. The kicker came when some random guy showed up at our apartment one night banging on the front door. When no one answered, he walked up to the windows and kept banging. We huddled in the living room at 3 am, waiting for security. Yeah, turns out that she met him at a party and told him to come by anytime to smoke pot. She fought with me about religion constantly, but made it clear that she had no idea what she was saying, just regurgitating what she heard.

Being best friends with my other roommates, we set up a Christmas tree and bought each other gifts. We decided to buy her a few things and put the packages under the trees. She saw them and even read the tags, but when it came time to exchange gifts, she claimed that she didn’t know we planned on giving out gifts. She left during Christmas break, supposedly to do an internship in another state the following semester. After a month, housing contacted us because she never went to class. She registered for classes and then just never told the school she wasn’t coming back. They had to change the locks because she didn’t turn in her keys.

As if that wasn’t enough, a friend of hers started calling all the time because she told him that she left a bunch of stuff there and he could have it. He wanted us to drop it off at his apartment and when we finally did, he exploded because she left “so much” and we were obviously keeping it. Apparently she gave him a list of stuff like furniture and housewares, when she really left a few pillows, dishes and a poster.We got a few emails and calls from her after that, where she insisted that she left a “ton” of stuff and we were just keeping it out of spite. The best part was when I ran into her the following semester and she didn’t recognize me! She went home for break and told her parents about the internship, only she never followed up on it like she should have months beforehand and obviously didn’t get it. She ended up living at home for a semester and coming back! Luckily it was the last time I saw her.

MVWR Sam lived with my boyfriend and I from December to April last year without incident. I actually considered him one of the best roommates I’ve had because he was never there. With my busy out-of-town work schedule and his job taking him up to Northern Canada, we maybe crossed paths two or three days out of the month. When he moved out for a job in a different city, he even left his nice couches, coffee table, and beer fridge because he didn’t want to rent another trailer to move them six hours away. Major score for us!

Fast forward to the summer: Sam’s job wasn’t all he had hoped and dreamed and he decided to quit and head back home and get a job back up in the north. Unfortunately, my place was directly between his last place and his hometown, making my place the favorable mid-way stop point. At first his stop-overs were fun. My boyfriend was working overseas and I didn’t have a lot of friends so it was nice to have someone to hang out with. This soon changed when he would start showing up every other week, with little or no notice (read: showing up in my driveway unannounced).

He decided to not get a new place while he was working up north, and rather couch surfed on his time off. Sam turned into my very worst house guest very fast. He had lived with me before, so all of the formalities that exist as a house guest didn’t seem to apply to him. He never once brought a bottle of wine or case of beer, but would always dip into my stash. He would get out of camp and not have time to pick up any weed, so he would smoke all of mine (note: I rarely smoke and a little baggy would last me months… he would go through mine in days). Because of his little addiction, he would constantly sleep on my couch even though he had his own room with a bed. I would come home after working triple shifts between my three jobs to find him passed out on the couch with my dog snoring loudly.

He never once bought groceries, instead he would get baked and eat spoonfuls of my peanut butter. He rarely showered, but when he did would use my towel, which I had been using for a week… gross. He even once left a big turd in the toilet. He would hit on my friends and creep them out to the point of them leaving the bar. I got sick of him and would avoid going home by staying at my shop or picking up extra shifts. He would come to visit me at work and overall just not take a hint.

His last stay was the worst. He showed up with a couple hours notice and stayed for over 10 days. I was working double waitressing shifts at the time and was exhausted when I got home. I sent him a text telling him to not be sleeping on my couch when I got home because I wanted to chill and watch some TV. He was passed out hard when I got home with several peanut butter spoons in the sink. No matter how many pots and pans I banged around, he didn’t budge. I even shook him and asked him to go to bed; he just rolled over and went back to sleep. I thought he was never going to leave! Luckily my new roommate was moving in that weekend so Sam disappeared the go couch surf somewhere else.

MVWR may not be what you would consider your normal VWR. She cooked and cleaned; in fact her idea of relaxation/therapy was cleaning. H and I had actually met through my former fiance four years prior. We hung out a lot and had a lot of very good times. In fact, I was even her maid of honor when she was married. The downfall of our friendship happened when I moved in with her when my fiance and I had a horrible breakup. At the time, H was in the middle of a divorce with her new husband, whom she had cheated on. Sadly, this was not much of a surprise considering that after they married she claimed they wouldn’t last longer that two years and she had only wanted her “dream wedding.”

Aside from that, for the first month we got along fairly well. I rented out her spare bedroom and things seemed to be going okay until she met her new (complete douche) boyfriend through World of Warfcraft. At the same time, my mother, was having a mental breakdown. My parents and I were dealing with the loss of my brother, who had passed from brain cancer six years prior. It still affects me, but I sought help, while my parents felt that seeking help meant you were weak. So, I had to deal with my mom calling me and crying that she should be dead because her son was dead. It was very hard and I did my best to talk to her and deal with what she was saying. But, H, who was a nurse, was not very understanding. Once, I was crying in my room and she asked me why. I told her why and she told me that my mother and I should get over it because people die and it’s been six years, so what’s the big deal? I tried to swallow that response as being “tough love,” but then my mom started losing it.

She believed that my friends were trying to kidnap me and my roommate was in a sex ring, plus selling crack/cocaine. She showed up one night at 3am pounding on the door and begging me to leave with her. H told my mom that she would call the cops on her and to get out of the apartment. I agreed with H’s reaction and called my dad to tell him to get my mom help. Sadly, he did not. And he told me that my mom was just really upset and just worried about me. I actually talked to H about all that my mom was dealing with, and apologized for her behavior because I was really embarassed. I thought that since H was a nurse she could give me some insight. Instead she told me that she didn’t care what my mom was going through and that she would call the cops on her if she showed up again. The most disturbing part was the fact that H and her boyfriend found it hilarious and laughed in my face. She actually said to me, “Where is Steven Segal when you need him?”

Luckily she did get the help she needed and we found out she had a severe case of bipolar disorder which also caused her hallucinations. She simply reached her breaking point and it all came out. Yeah, I know that maybe it made me the VWR for having all this crap happen, but I thought that a friend of four years (plus having a nursing education) would be a little understanding. Instead, H told me that if my mom was released she was never allowed over and she would call the cops if my mom ever came over. I told H all that my mom’s doctors told me and H did not care. H’s boyfriend even told me that my mom was a psycho b*tch and should never be allowed back into society. I had enough and moved out. It’s been two years and H and I haven’t spoken since. I know that what happened did not make me a great roommate since I brought unwanted drama, but was more serious, and I suppose not everyone can deal with that. I’m simply still hurt that a supposed best friend/nurse could be so heartless and uncaring. On the upside, my mom is still seeking therapy and I’m trying to help my parents out the best I can. I also have a lot of very helpful and caring friends. So, I think it all turned out for the best.

To escape a horrendous living situation with my parents that I found myself in after my fiancé and I broke up, I moved in with a friend and her two other roommates in a four bedroom apartment in the city. So it was four girls in total. Everything actually started out great, there were clear rules and responsibilities and everyone did their fair share and respected each others space. There were no major personality conflicts either. As it happens though, all good things must come to an end. Out of the blue, one of our roommates moved all their stuff into the living room and informed us she was moving out within a week (we asked for a month notice in order to have time to fill the room). The rest of us scrambled to get up Craigslist postings and put up ads at the nearby university but after nearly a month we still hadn’t found anyone and had to cover that month ourselves.

I eventually found someone on Craigslist that was looking for a room. We met her and while sorta quiet, decided that she seemed reasonable enough and told her she could have the open room, we didn’t really have many other options and provided she didn’t come in reeking of booze and regaling us with tales of her days as a gang banger we would’ve said yes anyway. After that, we saw her move in some clothes and not much else. None of us saw her very much; I think I happened upon her a couple of times late at night cooking up sausages. In any case though she seemed to just stay in her room, or at least that’s what we thought. Anyway, the end of the month was nearing which meant rent time.

One of my other roommates knocked on my door one morning and motioned me to follow her. She led me to the new girl’s room and produced the apartment key and a completely empty room. Right at this point, “Flight of the Valkeryies” started blasting from my computer speakers, just to add to the drama apparently. That’s right, roomie spilt on us one night without so much as a goodnight kiss and thanks for the drinks.  Even hookers still get paid.

My Very Worst Roommate (we’ll call him “R”) was actually my best friend all through high school. I always thought he’d be a blast to live with. After school, he moved to the city and I stayed in town and got a killer place to myself. One night, R called me up and told me how miserable he was living in the city and how he wanted to move back to our town. So, I drove to the city, picked him up and he moved in. Now R needed a job. I told him I could get him some food and he didn’t have to worry about rent until he got a job.

It wasn’t long after he moved in that I started to see his disgusting habits–not using plates, sandwiches on the couch, dripping toothpaste in the living room without realizing it, never picking up anything, you name it! Finally, about three months in, I helped get him a job at the same store I worked at and he finally started paying rent. Things have been pretty fun so far.

However, R had a friend. A homeless friend. This kid finished high school and has couch surfed for four years. R started having this homeless kid over and letting him sleep on the couch. Night after night after night! They would trash the place every night, and every morning I would be woken up before my alarm by them doing some fantasy role playing wizard stuff. Oh yeah, this kid stunk up the whole place!

So enough is enough, right? I put my foot down and said this kid can only come over once in a while but never stay the night. Now R thought this was like rollover minutes. Homeless kid wouldn’t be there for a while, and then three days straight. R would find every loophole to have this kid over, not to mention buy him food every night. I don’t hate homeless people, but this kid could have easily got a job. He didn’t because people like R would enable him to coast through life on handouts. The problem pretty much tore apart our friendship for a while. R thought I was the bad guy. So R moved in with our other friend. Of course, the same thing happened and homeless kid is now banned from that place too. Get a job dude!

Part II from yesterday’s post…

My Very, Very Worst Roommate was a girl I lived with for the next three years. (Why would I do this to myself, you ask? Because I’m a “nice person” and we were friends.) My second roommate, call her A, was a slob. I was not the neatest person my first year, but after the catastrophe that was B (yesterday’s story), I got clean. So, I’m a tidy person living with a slob. Not such a huge deal. Until you add the manipulative, passive-aggressive component, which made everything so much worse. I couldn’t even talk to her about trying to tidy up because she chalked it all up to her “terrible childhood” and the fact that she had Asperger’s, which she neglected to seek treatment for. Finally, once she had left bloody underwear out, left raw chicken on the counters for hours, “forgotten” to lock the door all semester and neglected to pay laundry money, I decided it was past time to ditch the friendship, and my other roommate, E–who is fabulous–agreed that it was time for A to find new housing. A drew it out for many weeks, but finally she was safely moved out and E and I were able to live in a clean, happy apartment. E and I expect to be friends for many years to come, but nothing can erase the terrible images that have been seared into my mind by the terrible roommates I’ve survived.

Which roommate do you think us is the Worst one?  Tell us below.

Continued from yesterday...

J also liked to sleep in the living room instead of his bedroom. This was a huge problem. He slept odd hours and sometimes we would have company over to watch a movie and he would refuse to leave to go and sleep in his bedroom.We would end up having to sit on the floor and listen to loud snoring while trying to hear the movie. Also, he liked to sleep in pajama bottoms with a huge hole in the crotch and wear no underwear underneath.

The only way I got him to sometimes sleep in his room was when I threatened to start up a website called “Where did J sleep last night?” And take a picture everyday. If he slept in his room, I would only show his bedroom door. If not he would have a picture posted of him on the couch. That pissed him off and did get him to occasionally sleep in his own room and I never actually followed through with the website.

We also had got a new puppy and J really, really liked him. That was fine. Except he would fall asleep with the puppy on the couch and then almost kill him by suffocating him or rolling on top of him So we had to absolutely insist that he did not have him on the couch with him!

Eventually we found somewhere else to live. My ex is still friends with him and I still keep sort of in touch. He’s not a bad person really. Just the Very Worst roommate!