People Recount Their Encounters With A Despicable Roomie
49. He Should Get His Own Trimmers
“In college, I walked into my dorm room between classes one day to find my roommate using my electric beard trimmer to shave his private parts.
He tried to turn away real fast and play it cool but I saw. I flipped out and made him buy me a new set and didn’t really speak to him unless I had to for the rest of the year. What kind of person does some nasty thing like that? I mean honestly, to this day I still have to convince myself that it had to be the first time and I wasn’t using hair-infested trimmers on my face…
Also, he was REALLY into StarCraft and WoW and stuff like that, which is fine by me although it’s not really my cup of tea, he would play those games literally all night every single night. I honestly have no idea how he pa*sed his classes because I can’t recall EVER seeing him go to class. All he ever seemed to do was play one of those two games or watch YouTube or Twitch about them.
He would play them until like 3 or 4 in the morning and go to bed, wake up around 2 in the afternoon, and repeat.
The part that really bothered me was that he quietly insisted on playing with his desk lamp on and never used earphones. Even on weeknights and during midterm and finals weeks he would play that thing with his volume up high and the desk lamp on until the early morning and if I asked or told him to turn it off and keep it quiet he would oblige for about 20 mins then go right back to it.
I ended up developing severe sleep problems and almost failed an entire semester’s worth of classes because of this idiot… I tried talking to my RA, building manager, etc., and ultimately none of them would actually do anything besides encouraging us to ‘communicate more and work it out’ even though we had already tried that multiple times and it clearly was not an option. I finally just said to myself screw it and moved most of my stuff into my friend’s dorm room in the next building over because his roommate had dropped out and the school had just kind of forgotten to a*sign someone new to the room I guess.
But yeah, the moral of the story is: screw that guy.”
48. The Chicken Was To Blame
“I own a trailer. Nice one. Newly renovated. Got a roommate. He was struggling with some things and had him pay $250 a month in rent. Cheap. Told him no smoking in the house. He got wasted and decided he wanted to make fried chicken. Started the process and then passed out on the couch.
To my surprise, it wasn’t his smoking that caught my trailer on fire… He burnt the chicken. Caught my stove on fire and slept through the whole thing. I work in a bar so I was just getting home around 4 A.M when I saw the paramedics, fire trucks, and police officers. He came out unscathed and moved out. next day. While I had no place to live considering the majority of my place was gone.
I had to move back home with my parents. It sucked.
He got his karma a few months later – got pulled over for a DUI in someone else’s truck with no insurance.”
47. Dude Tried To Hit On Our Ladies
“I used to live with 3 other dudes back in the day. I’ve met a fair amount of people in my day, some great, some… well let’s just call them interesting. This particular individual was, well, probably the biggest piece of interest I’ve ever met.
He was actually relocated from my workplace for sleeping with another guy’s wife who we all worked with while at his house for a Halloween party. Yes – that should’ve been a red flag right there, but the other guys I was living with vouched for the dude. Anyways – About one week into it – I discovered his serious anger issues. He would routinely decide that it was a good idea to punch holes through walls – at first, it was just in the garage, and then things escalated. I really couldn’t put a number on how many holes he inflicted on the walls – however, it did at one point go through both walls – which left a nice little drive-through window from the living room into one of my other roommate’s bedrooms.
He invited random girls from back home to live with him in our apartment. they usually lasted a few weeks until his random bouts of anger drove them away. He ended up hooking up with one of my other roommate’s significant others – hit on mine and was just all-around a really great guy… Soon after I moved out. That experience taught me an important lesson: Some people enjoy watching a doom show.
Other roommates were completely ok with how most of it went down.”
46. I Wish He'd Stay On Vacation Forever
“He was just the messiest person I’ve met. He would just leave his stuff everywhere in the apartment and wouldn’t clean up after cooking. He would use my pots, pans, dishes, etc then just leave them in the sink, so I would have to wash off caked-on food first in order to use them myself.
He was also substance dependent. He would drive after drinking to get food, come back, and run the paper bag under the sink to clean it out… then leave it there. We tried talking to him and he claimed he wasn’t that messy. He was then gone for a week on vacation and the apartment was spotless. None of my stuff was used without permission and everything was in cupboards, etc. He was home for 4 hours before the apartment was a big mess again.
At the end of our lease, he moved out before I did and left two garbage bags worth of food left in the fridge/freezer, and a ton of garbage sitting in his room. I emptied his stuff from the fridge, filled those garbage bags up, put them next to his bed, and left. He didn’t get his security deposit back.”
45. No One Made Breakfast
“Roommate got wasted. Roommate failed to come home.
Knock on dorm door asking me to retrieve roommate from a common area (kitchen) as people wanted to make breakfast. Opened door to a wave of feces and vomit and I immediately projectile vomit across half the room due to being mangled from the night before. I recover to find my roommate with his face squished into the corner of the couch, pants pulled down to knees with feces and vomit all around him.
Scraped him off the couch and tossed him in the shower where I had to pull off his clothes and there were feces all on the inside of his legs. Once he could see straight I took pictures of him cleaning up his feces and vomit (mine included). No one made breakfast for 5 days due to the smell.”
44. She Believes Our Roommate Is A Devil Worshipper
“I live with two friends and a random girl we found online.
I’m normally pretty easy to live with, and until this girl, I haven’t had a problem roommate ever. Let’s see…
She doesn’t even clean up after herself, and will frequently leave food sitting in dishes on the counter/table for days until one of us cracks and does it, or asks her for the fifth time. When she takes out the trash, she leaves the bag leaning against the wall by the door even though our trash chute is 5 feet down the hall.
She is convinced that she is the only one who ‘does any cleaning around here at all.’ She had decided that our shower curtain is ‘moldy’ (it’s not) and refuses to shower with it closed/in the shower, leading to our floor being flooded every time she takes a shower.
She never replenishes the TP, instead choosing to use paper towels until one of us goes and buys new rolls.
This has, on several occasions, clogged the toilet. She removes still damp clothes from the washing machine and throws them on the ground in order to do her own laundry. She is convinced one of my roommates is a ‘devil worshiper’ because she has magnets that are ‘anti-Jesus’ (her words.)
She ‘sages’ the apartment to ‘cleanse the bad spirits’ from the aforementioned ‘devil worshiping’ roommate.
Returns at 2-3 am on any given weeknight, wasted then slams doors, messes up pots and pans, and generally is inconsiderate about her noise level on weeknights. On occasion, has turned on the stove and fallen asleep so that our roommates can be awoken at 4 am when the fire alarm goes off and she sleeps through it.
She ‘borrows’ clothes from a roommate 2 sizes smaller than she is, and she conveniently forgets to give them back or breaks them.
She has, on occasion, gone into our roommate’s rooms and taken clothes from their closets without asking. She smears her make-up on the walls, instead of wiping her dirty hands on a towel. She leaves her leftovers in the fridge for weeks at a time, until they spoil and begin to smell from across the room. She is under the impression that I ‘steal her stuff.’ Including her shampoo/conditioner, cookies, or hairspray.
(I don’t)
When cooking dinner, she plays loud EDM music in the kitchen, even if others are sitting in the living room 10 ft away watching TV. She doesn’t understand the concept of a lint trap, and she locks the door when asked to leave it open while I have gone on a run without my keys.”
43. Luckily, The Ferret Found A New Home
“She got a ferret after I explicitly told her I didn’t want one because they smell and I didn’t believe she was going to take care of it.
Lo and behold, two weeks later she is bored with it, has stopped cleaning and taking care of it, and leaves it in its cage with a blanket over it 24/7. I text her and let her know I’m going in her room to wash the poor thing and get it out of its cage for a minute and she releases a tirade of anger because the ferret is HER BABY and SHE’LL TAKE CARE OF IT!
A week later she asked me if I wouldn’t mind helping her out with it. I respectfully declined and luckily she found a good home for it not too long after that.
She leaves disgusting dishes everywhere, never contributed to the food bill and just ate whatever I bought for myself, neglected her rent and bills, much like the poor ferret, which led to us getting our heat shut off during the bitter New England December and following winter months we had.
One piece of petty revenge is that a pipe froze and burst all over her room but not mine. HA-HA!
She ‘moved out’ a month earlier than our lease let up, but didn’t move her furniture, so every few nights she would almost break in (almost pulled a chain lockout of the way) taking random booty calls into her dank, smelly old room while waking me up at midnight to let her in before she pulled the doorframe out trying to get inside.
Perhaps I was a bit of a pushover but I never expected that outrageous behavior from her as we had been friends for years prior. I don’t speak to her anymore, as you can see from those reasons. Never bunk with friends, kids!”
42. She Should've House-Trained Her Dog First
“Crazy, filthy, delusional, mooching, lying idiot. Lied about having a house-trained young dog. It peed and pooped everywhere, she didn’t keep it in her room at night, lied about forgetting to bring her kennel when she moved, barely cleaned up after the dog or took it outside.
I had to make a wall out of random stuff to keep it out of the living room because it would pee on the couch in front of me, or I’d wake up to poop on the carpet. Ate food without asking and didn’t pay me back for other food and booze. Kicked her out halfway through the first month. The only time I actually had to kick someone out.”
41. The Fleas Made It To The Bedrooms
“I was living with two roommates. We’ll call them D and T. T didn’t really do a d**n thing to keep it clean. He would use every d****d dish in the house to cook himself a meal, leave food out, used the living room as his hamper, and do the other standard spiteful roommate stuff.
About a month before our lease was up, T was taking care of his parent’s dog at our house.
D and I weren’t told about it ahead of time, but at that point, I didn’t really care. About a week and a half before we move out, T goes on vacation. I would like to note that he had not packed any of his stuff or cleaned anything prior to going out of town.
Anyways, D calls me and tells me there are fleas in the house.
I didn’t believe him… until I got home and my ankles were covered with the little idiots. They were isolated to the living room for the most part, but that’s where the front door was, so you were getting eaten alive no matter what.
D and I ended up trying every kind of spray and powder we could find to get rid of the fleas, or at least hurt their numbers.
We had to get rid of our couches because they were infested. Two days before we had to move out, the fleas made it to the bedrooms, but thankfully, D already had his stuff out and all of my stuff was packed a couple of days prior in some large Rubbermaid containers with tape covering any gaps. This is also the day that T came back from vacation and had to deal with all his stuff in two days.
D and I later found out that T’s parent’s dog broke out in fleas around the same time.”
40. She Has A Nickname For Me
“A lot of things that I ignored for a long time and just tried to be considerate about. I was probably a better friend to her than I had ever been to anyone and the final straw for me was finding out that she had been calling me ‘fatty’ to her other friends for well over a year and making fun of my weight constantly.
I paid her part of the bills when she needed it, I helped her buy her diabetic medicine when she didn’t have it, I left my last thanksgiving with my nana to make her and her family food when she was in the hospital. Before I moved in with her we worked at the same place and she lost her job so I gave her cash and took the blame for her almost losing my own job in the process.
I literally saved her life because of her stupid decisions with substances almost sending her into a diabetic coma… twice… I put up with all the strange men in and out of our apartment, I did all the cooking, cleaning, and buying of household items, I let her use my car and all of my personal things. There was just so much. It really hurt me for a long time.”
39. Didn't Know She Had A Pet Lizard
“Move in with her two kids under the condition her abusive deadbeat ex (father of the kids) was not allowed to be there. Of course, she would sneak him in and he would get wasted from stuff he stole from us and they would start fighting. She ‘couldn’t pay rent’ and someone conveniently at the same time ‘gave’ her a purebred German Shepard puppy. Who she later had to abandon because she couldn’t afford it.
Would frequently leave her kids and puppy with us under the pretense of an emergency only to come back later messed up. When finally leaving she left all her stuff at our house and still owes me like $1500. She lives in Hawaii now. Also, we found some sort of a lizard in a tank in her stuff that looked like it had broken legs and had obviously starved/been so dehydrated it died. I’m sure there was more.
We were what I thought were good friends before this. Obviously, I didn’t know the real her.
Just for a fun addition, the ex is now out as gay.”
38. She Talks To Herself In The Bathroom
“Awful roommate number 1: I lived in a quad dorm room. Literally, 4 girls in one room separated into individual quarters. 3 of us had moved in early and got on fine, they were respectful and quiet and didn’t do much.
Then roommate 4 arrives. The first thing she did was unload an apartment’s worth of furniture into her allocated space spilling it over into both mine and my other roommate’s side and then demanding we rearrange the whole room to fit her stuff in because it’s not fair that she moved in last so couldn’t pick and choose everything. Uh no.
Within hours of that, she had 5 of her friends round and started bragging to them that I was 21 and would therefore buy her drinks (I’m on a student visa and could have been deported if I was caught).
She also then went on to say she could have so many parties in our room and leave booze everywhere because if she got caught she could blame it on me! (I only found out that part after I had moved out.)
The final thing wrong with her was that, in her own words, ‘I don’t like headphones.’ So yep, no matter what time or how loud it was she would play music and watch tv/films on her laptop out loud while sharing a room with 3 other girls.
I moved out after 1 week straight of having to get up in the middle of the night to close her laptop (and leaving it on the very edge of her bed) because she fell asleep with it still blasting ‘Pretty Little Liars’.
All in all, I only lasted 3 weeks there.
So enter Roommate number 2! I moved into an entirely different building on campus after with a new layout, it was another ‘quad’ but this time it was two bedrooms with 2 people in each with a shared kitchen and other apartment-y stuff.
It was fine at first until the crazy started seeping in.
My roommate now is straight-up mentally ill, imagine living with a 15-year old in a 24-year-olds body. She is very messy, as am I, but I can leave it within my space in the room and I never get filthy. The entire apartment is treated as an extension of her space. You cannot move 5 feet without finding something of hers on the floor/walls/desk/what-have-you.
Which again would be fine if it wasn’t so disgusting. I have had to clean up on so many occasions moldy food between the sofa cushions, moldy food in the sink, and moldy food in the fridge.
I have never seen her clean, ever. I and the others are fairly good at keeping things clean, we may not have the place spotless all the time, but we keep it presentable.
She doesn’t.
Another thing is she has no friends. At all. She is in her 4th year of college and each time she has never had roommates to move in with at the end of the year, the other 3 of us here are all foreign exchange students, so while we didn’t know anyone at first we soon found friends and started socializing. I have never once met any of her friends.
She doesn’t have anyone come round ever, and she doesn’t leave the house apart from class or her following us around. We now have to stop discussing plans with each other out loud because she will invite herself to everything, which I get, being lonely sucks, but what sucks more is having an emotionally stunted 24-year-old latch herself onto one person per gathering and not leave them alone the whole night, making people like you less because she will come to any event you go to and do this.
She also takes food and denies it. All of us at one point or another have had substantial amounts of food go missing and she denies taking it even though we have found wrappers in her trash, and it has gone missing at times where none of us were in but her. In the last week she managed to use half of a bag of shredded mozzarella on a bowl of pasta, neither of which belonged to her, but magically appeared on her desk, and stayed there, for 5 days.
Probably the worst thing though is her mental issues. If I am in our room maybe wanting some space I’ll close the door, we share a room and it’s fine if she needs to come in and grab something, but we have a separate living space which she always hangs out in, and the moment our door is closed every 15 minutes she will walk into our room stop at her desk, look at it for 10 seconds and leave.
Like clockwork. It’s really disconcerting, to say the least.
She also locks herself in the bathroom and talks to herself. We have really thin walls and we can all hear what she says even though she must think we can’t, here are some gems!
‘So yeah that guy I met, he has a toe-thumb. A literal toe for a thumb /monotone woody woodpecker laugh’ – Leaves bathroom.
‘I told you I’m not going to do that! OH FINE THEN! (starts throwing things around in the bathroom) /monotone woody woodpecker laugh’ – Leaves bathroom.
This happens twice a day when she wakes up (if she thinks we’re all asleep) and before she goes to bed.
I was once alone in the apartment with her not long after moving in, chilling in the living room and studying, and then she walks all through the apartment with a blank look on her face repeating ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ to no-one in particular.
I was really terrified and had to go to my friend’s place to feel alright again. No way was I staying alone with her doing anything like this.
Luckily though I’m moving out in a week and cannot wait to leave all this behind!”
37. Good Thing I Didn't Wipe His Computer Clean
“He asked me if I could wipe his new computer and reinstall Windows.
Luckily I was too busy to help because…
It turned out that he had broken into a college across the street with a group of people. Vandalized a bunch of things and stole over $20k worth of tech/music equipment. A bunch of the idiots tried to sell the CLEARLY LABELED (Property of a _____) items at several pawn shops. They had also taken a bunch of PCs/Macs that were all Low-Jacked and kept all of the stolen items in their room.
So I had the joyful pleasure of waking up to police busting into our STUDENT HOUSING APARTMENTS at 6 am after a night of serious drinking.
Had I wiped the computer for him, I probably would’ve been considered an accomplice to grand theft, breaking and entering, destruction of private property, possession of the stolen property, and/or aiding and abetting. And I’m sure he was well aware of that fact…”
36. He's Petty About His Clothes Being Moved
“It started by locking the apartment door and smearing ketchup and other condiments on our two guest mattresses when he found out that I was inviting a friend he could not stand into my room to sleep over for 2 nights.
The next step was to threaten to move out and reveal to the authorities, that we (a total of 4 persons with him included) were living in an apartment that was declared as an office space.
He sent his termination notice this same evening to our landlord, indicating that by inviting someone he doesn’t like, I harassed him so much, he would think about hurting himself.
Then he stopped paying his rent and utility bill – even though he was still living with us. On the last day of his rental contract he just left, the door to his room locked, and gave the keys to our landlord.
Once we got the keys to the room, we found an unhealthy mix of dirt, trash, and smoke-butts.
He also left his shirts in the washing machine for 2 days after they were done. So naturally, someone removed them from the machine and put them in his basket. The next thing we know, crazy dude is writing with bright orange spray-paint on our bathroom floor ‘Don’t touch my clothes.’
I have no idea where he is right now – and to be honest, I don’t really care too much. But word has it that he moved to another country. Those poor people over there.”
35. "If It's Yellow, Let It Mellow"
“College suite (6 people) on 9th floor of a building… I think… Can’t remember exactly. All year long: never flushes (‘if it’s yellow, let it mellow’), always left his dishes in the sink, spat on the floor.
Generally had a poor attitude towards everything, and started pre-med, switched to English, and dropped out to start a band.
One night, during the end of the school year, he and 2 of the slightly better roommates broke a leg off the kitchen table, sprayed maple syrup on the walls, cut open the metal mesh screen on the window, and tossed out a bag of flour and gallon of milk, pushed over the fridge and unplugged it causing the freezer to defrost…
Yeah… No more roommates after that…”
34. She Turns Nice Guys Into Jerks
“100 lb Russian girl that would insist on the heat being turned on to 85 degrees in the middle of summer.
She also flooded our entire apartment when the toilet in her bathroom was clogged with her tampons and continued pouring water for three hours before telling me or anyone else. I get woken up at midnight to her knocking on my bedroom door stating ‘I thought it would stop on its own, but it’s been a while now.’ After calling maintenance at 1 am because the water valve connected to the toilet was rusted in place, the guy begrudgingly came over.
At this point, there was so much water leaking, people two floors below us were woken up and coming out of their apartment asking what in the world is going on (they were garden-style apartments).
In general, she was a horrible person too. Would brag about going out with guys and just stringing them along until they bought her a Fendi purse, a new bed mattress, or other random things and then dump them.
I told her to her face that she was the type of person that turned nice guys into jerks. And she just maniacally laughed.
Trust me, there’s more..”
33. Lazy Roommate Ghosted Me After Losing His Job
“Them. All in our early 20’s (3 of us total). Friends since 15. Moved into a duplex together. I got one of them a job with me where I was the supervisor at a cabinet shop.
2 weeks in, a friend that didn’t work with me leaves me a random voicemail along the lines of ‘if someone shows up looking for me, don’t let them in.’ end of the message.
I and the other guy get home, and he’s gone. He’s at work, and just as we got in, 2 men approached the door. They identify as FBI and ask if he’s home. He isn’t, and they do not have a warrant and say they’ll be back later. Fast forward like 3 hours, they show back up this time with a dozen police units and close our street down pretty much.
He’s being investigated for illegal videos trafficking. Over the next 3 hours, every inch of our duplex is searched and scoured. They ran searches on my computer so they didn’t confiscate it (warrant specifically stated to seize everything in the residence, but the FBI guys were chill), and proceeded to pack up all his belongings. Sometime during the raid, he shows up and just sits there talking to them.
No arrest was made at the time, but he did end up serving prison time over it. The second half of the worst roommate ever is that one of my bosses lived in a duplex just down the road and saw the entire thing. It took like a year for them to stop bringing it up at work.
Second friend. Also worst roommate ever. This is the one that worked with me, who I got a job.
His job was simple, run raw boards through a table saw/router/planer at work and prepare stock for our cabinet frames/doors/trim/drawer fronts. One day, he just isn’t around. I know he was at work because he came with me, but we can’t find him. We all assume he’s just taken a smoke break/early lunch and he’ll be back at some point.
An hour passes and he hasn’t returned, so people start looking cause we ran out of something and wonder what’s the hold-up. We’re calling his phone, checking all around the building, I actually went home at one point to see if he had walked all the way home.
Finally, we find him, he had crawled up on top of a pallet of boards and was sleeping out of sight between the pallet and a rack surrounded by a bunch of plywood.
He just decided he didn’t like the job and was going to take a nap. My supervisor ends up coming out and getting involved. He takes him outside and pretty much says that he’ll forget the entire incident, just finish your smoke and get back to work please, and while you do please think if you want to continue being employed. After another 30 minutes, he quits.
With no income now, I urge him just to get a part-time job to cover his portion of the rent, and I’ll cover the utilities. Several weeks later, I come home on a Tuesday and he’s just gone. No warning no note no nothing, just up and leaves.”
32. Her Daughter Was Vain And Rude
“I moved in with my buddy’s significant other. I think she meant well, but it was rough.
She and her mother were from China. Her mother was one of the kindest sweetest women I had ever met. She didn’t speak much English. She worked 5 days a week as a live-in nurse for old people to pay for the house and her daughter’s education. The two days that she was home, the weekends, she spent all her waking hours cleaning the house, doing laundry (she tried to do mine, I wouldn’t let her), and cooking.
She would FILL the fridge with food, fresh wonderful delicious food (I was in year 6 of being a broke college kid). I can’t say it enough, she was so sweet. She found what I liked that she made and would always make extra and label it as mine in the fridge.
The daughter though was the most shallow, materialistic, fake person I have ever spent more than ten minutes with.
She wasn’t mean to me, but she was so rude and demanding of her mother. That woman sacrificed her family, her life, to bring her daughter to the US and get her the best education she could find. She worked 60+ hours a week and gave her daughter everything she could. Her daughter was vain, rude, and unappreciative of what she had. It just started to upset me so much I couldn’t bear it.
I had to leave.”
31. I Prefer The Dealer Roommate
“I had one roommate at uni who was a dealer and was always hooking up in the bedroom, so I had to sleep on the couch many nights. But he wasn’t the worst.
The worst was this one friend of mine. She, another friend, and I lived in the same apartment for a few months. She claimed both hallway closets as her own, she claimed half of the kitchen cabinets as her own, her desk was all makeup so the dining table was her own, she always had her significant other over and they did gross PDA stuff in the living room, so she claimed that as her own too.
She always left a mess everywhere. As soon as I cleaned, the next day it would be back to what it was. The thing that got me though was dishes. She never washed her dishes or my pots and pans when she used them to cook. So I would go into the kitchen to cook and then have to clean stuff before that.
My other friend and I kept telling her to be cleaner and she claimed we never picked up our stuff or did our dishes (which was a complete lie).
In fact, after the second time she flipped out at us (yeah she got mad at us for no reason just because she would be stressed about her classes), I took a break from cooking and using dishes. I also just left things she dropped on the floor. After two weeks of dishes and pans constantly in the sink, trash, and junk on the floor, we confronted her again.
She got mad at us for being ‘hypocritical’ because ‘you guys leave stuff in the sink too.’ Again, we hadn’t used any dishes or done any cooking in our apartment for two weeks.
So the final straw was that she hooked up with her significant other. The walls are very thin, everyone could hear it, we set ground rules against that. No one wanted to hear that.
So the next day we confronted her. She confronted us. She claimed I and our other friend were against her and that I was sleeping with said friend. Claimed that we wanted her to move out so she (the other friend) and I could hook up.
We tried so hard to make living with her work and in the end, she claimed to be the one trying hard and got mad enough to just move out.
She has always had roommate problems in the past, we thought since she was our friend at the time, she would be fine. Nope. Lost a friend and I do not miss her one bit. She always thought of herself and never even considered the other two people living with her. At least the dealer roommate was kind of nice and tidy.”
30. There's Pee Everywhere
“We lived in a semi (longhouse that shares a wall with next door) and my housemate’s room had a window to a small outdoor atrium, which was divided by an ugly wooden fence with the neighbors that shared the same space.
So from our house, it was surrounded by the window to his room, a window to the lounge room, a wall/small window to the linen closet, and the fence. On their side, it was – Bedroom, lounge room, fence, and where we had a linen closet they had a shower for some reason. The total area was maybe 2meters x 2meters.
My housemate developed a serious drinking problem (i.e a bottle of booze a night) and would pee into the atrium every night.
It permeated the neighbor’s house and their shower would smell like booze heavy pee. We had the same agent and they obviously complained about it – which led to us being evicted. I cried my way out of the eviction/begged the neighbors for forgiveness (real estate in the area is hard to come by in my area, especially when you have a pee-related eviction on your record) and they let us stay under the condition that my housemate cleans out their atrium and block his window so he couldn’t do it again.
He cleaned their atrium but didn’t block his window, and sure enough, it happened again. You would think the humiliation we BOTH suffered would stop him from even thinking about doing it, but nope. I moved out shortly after.”
29. He Almost Burned Down Our Place
“This guy in my freshman year lived in my building, (not technically a roommate, but he made my life and all those around us a living nightmare).
We were good friends the first half of the year, but the second semester came around and he SNAPPED. Seriously, he suddenly was convinced that he ran a gang, commanded a battalion in the US military, was the biggest dealer in the CITY. Absolute looney toon.
I came home to our dorm with a few friends one night and he was walking the halls wasted, with a baseball bat, slapping it against the walls, threatening people, etc.
I returned home one time, and the whole building was full of smoke after he attempted to cook something while cruising at 30,000 feet, lit his food on fire, proceeded to throw it into the bathroom garbage can full of paper towels, and setting up a huge blaze.
He threatened to have his guys kill me and my friend because we wouldn’t sell him any substances?
He spent literally every. last. dollar. that he had on giant gold chains, stunner shades, snapbacks, and what I can only assume were large amounts of illegal substances.
To top it off, he was convinced and I kid you not, that he was some sort of philosopher-king. I mean seriously, he was talking about the all-seeing eye, and how he could move walls with his mind.
I have a phone video of him slamming into a wall as hard as he possibly could in an attempt to move it.
The girls in our house were horrified and scared to death, and the school could not/would not do anything about it for 2-3 months… nightmare…
I could write a novel honestly….”
28. He Went To Nevada And Fell In Love
“I went to school in Boston and had one steady roommate.
We rented a killer 4 bdrm apartment. We had great roommates, but here are the two that really left their mark.
Number one was a nice enough guy, he worked at a bar, but wouldn’t drink until he got home. The problem is that he would get off work after the stores closed, then would proceed to drink any and all booze he found. We started keeping the booze in our rooms, so he would go in when we weren’t there to take it.
He also bought a snake instead of paying for utilities. The cherry was us waking up one Saturday morning to a hallway and stairway covered in b***d. Complete with footsteps and handprints going from the front door to all over the place. Apparently, he got crunk then punched through a window, he told us while he was gluing himself back together with superglue, the next morning.
He followed this up by running across the street to a yard sale, negotiating to buy this really creepy, black, armless, child mannequin… Then didn’t have any cash and somehow got my significant other to go buy the thing. We woke up one morning and he had moved out without a sound. We called his mom, who said he had run out of cash and had come home to (I kid you not) work in the mines.
This guy had a degree in radio something or other. Pretty epic fizzle.
Now, the creme de la creme: John B.
Where to start. This guy just moved back to the east coast from LA where he went to film school. He had applied himself in school, gotten great grades, and graduated with an $80,000 gig for some company. He wanted to live with us because he had missed out on college life, he wanted to let loose and have a good time.
In our minds, he had cash, a car, and expensive taste in booze and everything else. Were we in for a treat.
The mechanics of a shower curtain would baffle this guy, like every single time he took a shower. He would flood our bathroom every other day.
This guy would buy clothes and stuff without trying it on, then just give it away saying ‘I really thought I was a medium.’ I got more than one $80 dress shirt.
I went ‘shopping’ with him once and it was astounding how much cash he spent in such a short amount of time. At the end of the day, the only thing he liked was the $12 hoodie I bought myself.
This is who John B was, let me tell you now what he did.
After his first 2 weeks or so, the neighbors downstairs had another one of their massive get the cops called parties.
So he goes down ahead of us. We get there 10 minutes later to A FIGHT!!! we push through to the front to see the nicest most pacifist huge guy we’ve ever met, with both his hands wrapped around John B’s neck, trying to kill the guy. After stopping the fight and sending John B to his room, we find out he was talking about the guy’s mom and some other stuff about weight loss and how he’s boss.
John B was subsequently exiled back home to their mom for 2 weeks, for his own safety.
It gets better.
The end of the summer approaches, and we have miraculously survived living with this idiot. It was one of those weird summers during college when we all went home to see the folks, all at the same time, for a month. John B is the only one who was going to stay, and ‘hold down the fort.’
We all leave, John B stays. I get a call one day out of the blue from one of my significant other’s friends (super weird because I’m abroad), who tells me that John B called the cops on my significant other for squatting in the spider-webbed, booze covered mess that was our attic. He had then proceeded to change all the locks and then, he disappeared.
Two weeks later I return at the same time as my other roommate, we somehow get the keys and enter into… an explosion of mess, food, clothes, trash, empties. There are where 8-inch paths through the piles of garbage. All of our computers had been accessed and used, our stuff had been riffled through. As it turns out, he had done substances, flipped out, called the cops.
Showed the cops the previously described attic where my significant other was not living, then made a scene about how we were all up there looking through the light at him. Somehow he did not get arrested. He then got the management company to change the locks before he disappeared. This wasn’t the usual one though, all his things were still there.
Another week goes by, and I get a phone call from John B.
He’s in Nevada, he met a woman and fell in love. He gave her $8,000 and is going to drive her to New Orleans, then give her another $8,000. He said he was having a blast and would be back at some point to pay rent.
When John B returned, he paid rent, I told him he had failed as a roommate and had to move out, he told us that he had given this woman all his cash, was broke, and was going back home to live with mom.
All this to get the college experience.
By far the most spectacular fail I’ve ever been able to Sherlock Holmes back together.”
27. I Wish I Was Making This Up
“I lived with this guy for 1 year, noped out so fast it would have given Usain Bolt a run for his cash.
After he moved into the apartment we noticed this odd smell, figured it was something he owned, turns out he WAS the smell.
It got so bad that we could literally tell when he was in the apartment simply by breathing in. No amount of Febreze would help.
In the year that I spent at that apartment I never once saw him take a shower, it got to a point where it became a joke for the other roommates and myself to run to the washroom to see if the shower was turned on every time he was in there.
Since he never used the shower, it was the one safe spot in that war zone of a washroom. Almost everything else fell victim to something horrible at least once.
The toilet seat had his feces spread all over it as if he squatted over the thing, started pooping, missed, and then said ‘whatever’ then sat on said poop after which he must have tried to dance his way back to his room.
The sink was constantly sprinkled with short hair… except the dude had a full neckbeard.
He projectile vomited at the mirror once and left it there.
He chewed loudly. Yes, it was accompanied by an assortment of wonderful noises that made Fat Albert’s farts sound like Beethoven.
The dude was a big guy… like doughy and tall… close to 7ft. Stealth was impossible for the man, but he insisted on stomping around the apartment late at night almost as if he was constantly trying to summon rain.
His diet consisted of Mac & Cheese with hot dogs, Cinnamon toast crunch (he had a stockpile of which he kept in his room), ice-cream sandwiches and to wash it down, chocolate milk. The remains of which were left all over the apartment.
His room was literally one big garbage can, it smelt horrible. Rotting food and scraps of garbage were all over the floors.
He refused to clean, saying the building cleaning staff (responsible for cleaning the main areas) should do it. We pooled in and bought one of those automatic glade dispensers which we hung right beside his door. When moving out I stopped by the dump, got a big whiff of manure and rotting garbage and the first thought that came into my mind was ‘…hm, still not as bad as his room.’
On the rare occasion we would bring people over, he would come and stand near us but would not say anything, just stare. When we tried to add him to the conversation he would provide one-word answers and go back to blankly staring at our friends. Once, while a friend was mid-sentence he let out a horrendous fart, almost comically long, and then just muttered something while walking away.”
26. They Soaked My Towel In The Sink
“I once lived in the school dorms with two inexplicably horrible jerks. In each dorm room, there were three bedrooms and two bathrooms. I was taking a shower one wintry day and brought my fresh change of clothes with me into the bathroom (which I always did). When I got out of the shower, my clothes were gone, my bedroom door was shut and locked (I didn’t have my key because I didn’t shut/lock it), and my towel was in the sink, nearly entirely soaked through.
I asked both of them WHAT IS HAPPENING! They both claimed ignorance of my plight and refused to help me, lend me clothes, or call the RA to come to unlock my door.
My building’s s RA was out of town that week, so I had to trek across the dorm property (which was actually quite big) to the dorm community center, soaking wet with no clothes or shoes to find another RA.
I transferred rooms the next day.”
25. Nasty Roommate Took Dumps In The Bathtub
“I was a theatre minor in college and my college had an exchange program with a British theatre department. One of the professors involved with the exchange program knew I needed a roommate and asked if I would be willing to take on one of these exchange students. I said, ‘Sure!’ But little did I know I was in for some nasty nasty things.
This kid had a problem with looking in the mirror. He didn’t want to brush his teeth in his own bathroom so he used the kitchen sink. Not a huge deal but he spits his toothpaste all over the sink and the faucet. I mean all over. Also, he had a problem sleeping in a bed. Not sure why but he took a liking to sleep in the lazy boy right outside my bedroom door.
Every time I came out of my room, there he was in that chair. That’s not the least of it. This kid had a mental breakdown and had to go back to England. So I was left with the chore of cleaning up his room so I could find a new roommate. What I found was the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. He had been pooping and peeing in his bathtub… for months.
The smell was unbearable. He had one pair of crusty undies he’d been using over and over to wipe his butt. The bathtub was full to the brim with this filth. It took everything I had not to add my puke to the pool of poop and urine.
I eventually got everything clean and my best friend moved in with me but I will never forget that kid and what I had to live through.
Nastiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
24. Among All These Hateful Things, Only One Is A Big Deal
“Skink. Poor dude had his partner bolt on him and needed a roomie to make rent. Enter me. Skink seemed socially stunted, dad drove 40 minutes every day to give him a three-minute drive to the train and collect his dirty laundry, but that wasn’t a big deal. He wasn’t much into cleaning – he left his partner’s hair stuck to the shower walls – but we all grieve differently, so that wasn’t a big deal. He would only eat two different (frozen) meals, but that didn’t affect me, and it was no big deal. He slept with Care Bears in a bed of Leopard Skin silk sheets.
We didn’t share a bed, so it was no big deal. He stole illegal substances from a dealer and they came looking for their funds to collect by any means necessary. This was kind of a big deal.”
23. We Stayed In Awkwardness Until 7 AM
“After listening to these I guess I’m lucky… so it’s exam season and I’ve been cramming all couple days out from the exam, I went to bed at like 1-2 am.
At around 5 in the morning, I hear music blasting downstairs, I wake up and go check it out. My roommate is with two random guys doing substances. I grab some water and am about to head off to bed when she pleads with me to stay downstairs and talk with them… when I go to grab a jumper she and one of the dudes head upstairs to hook up, leaving the other stranger alone in my living room.
Feeling guilty (and not trusting a random around my stuff) I sit in the room awkwardly making conversation with this messed-up stranger, as my roommate has, what I can only describe as the most animalistic hook up I’ve ever heard. Come 7 am, this guy is fed up, I am fed up and he heads upstairs to grab his friend and they leave…”
22. She Had Stinky Cats And A Cold Room
“I rented a room from this woman for a month last winter in some ugly town in southern Manitoba when I worked on an oil rig.
I needed a room immediately so I couldn’t be too picky. Well, she had the countertop filled with stinking rotting dirty dishes, she had 2 cats that tracked cat litter everywhere that the lazy fat slob wouldn’t clean up, and she kept the house at 12 degrees Celsius.
My room had its own thermostat so I set it to room temperature so I wouldn’t freeze at night.
Taking showers in the cold bathroom was terrible.
Anyway, near the end of the month, I get a text from her (even though we lived in the same house) that I owe extra on what we agreed on because I had set the temperature in my room to a bearable level. I was annoyed so I moved out with a week left in the month and just said whatever, let her keep the full month’s rent.
When I was moving out I forgot my portable hard drive and when I texted her about it she said it wasn’t there. I’ve never seen it since and I hope I never venture near that town again.”
21. He Doesn't Trust Me With His Computer
“One time, I’m on the other side of campus and I just got to my class. Roomie texts me, saying he went to take a shower and locked himself out.
I sigh and head out to bail out his fat, wet butt and I let him in. Then, passive and aggressively, he rants at me, asking me why I locked the door. HE had locked the door. HE was the one that was afraid that someone would break in and steal his precious gaming computer. A couple of days later, my garbage phone’s firmware breaks down.
I ask him if I could use his iTunes as my google Chromebook doesn’t run iOS programs. Halfway into the thirty-minute or so download and installation process, he tells me that he needs to go to class so I have to stop. He says he doesn’t trust me with his computer.
This idiot never showers so he smells like rotten cheese, blasts his music at 2 in the morning, constantly makes passive-aggressive remarks about things that don’t concern him, and the only hobbies he has are smoking and sleeping.
I have never seen him hang out with anyone and everybody I know who knows him HATES his guts.”
20. He Tried But Only Made The Scent Worse
“When I left for undergrad, I moved to one of the largest public colleges in the country. I’m from a small-ish desert town, and there was a handful of us going to this big college.
Of all the dorms at this school, it just so happened that right across the hall was a friend of mine that I had gone to school with since elementary school. Literally, directly across the hall.
His roommate, whom I will call Joe, was not big on going to class. Or taking care of himself. He would oftentimes stay up all night, playing a random online game, and then skip school in the morning recovering.
My friend is one of the most decent men that I know. A good, intelligent, religious man, who I have never seen say or do a hurtful thing to another person. For many years growing up, he was someone I used to compete with–to try and be like him, so I could be a little bit better myself.
Now, he has never been one for confrontation (at least, I never have seen it if he is).
And his roommate, Joe, was apparently not one for showering. Or really proper hygiene of any kind. There was once a time where his washcloth fell in the shower (two rooms, each with two students, sharing one bathroom) and did not move for thirteen (13) days. During this time, the smell in our hall became bad enough that people would actively avoid having to come upstairs if they could meet us downstairs instead.
One day at the end of this run, I was sitting on my friend’s bed, and he was working on his computer. I was sitting there, with my shirt pulled up over my mouth, wondering why I hadn’t had the good sense to suggest we go literally anywhere else. My friend looked over at Joe, and told him ‘you need to take a shower.’
I was rather surprised to see that he would say something that came off so… rude. Joe, still playing his game, said nothing… didn’t even really acknowledge what my friend had said. I was sitting there, kind of taken aback, but intrigued as to what was to come.
My friend stood up, looked over to Joe, and said, louder and more intensely than before, ‘You need to take a shower now.’
I wasn’t really sure how to react, or what to think of this dramatic change from my friend’s usually reserved demeanor. I just sat there, watching this private spectacle unfold.
Joe meekly nodded, not bothering to look away from his game. Then, as a sudden follow-on to my friend’s sudden outburst, he said ‘if you don’t get up and take a shower right now, I’m going to spray you with Febreeze.’
There was a stunned silence. Well… I was stunned silent. My friend just stood there. And Joe continued playing his game. It seemed like hours passed, with me sitting on that bed, choking down the putrid fumes that had sullied our hall, with my friend seemingly overwhelmed at Joe and his inability to even take care of himself.
What happened next seemed to occur in slow motion.
My friend walked over to his bed, knelt, and dragged a clear storage box out from under it. I watched him, thinking surely he was just going to grab something, and prepare to head out of his room to a location with cleaner air. Instead, I saw the box had cleaning supplies. And my friend was holding the Febreeze.
He looked over at Joe. Joe didn’t blink.
He didn’t say a word. He just kept playing his game.
My friend walked around his bed, across the room to Joe, and stood directly next to him. He asked Joe, ‘are you going to get up and shower?’ Joe didn’t respond. I couldn’t move. My friend engulfed him in a cloud of floral-scented stink-killing mist.
It only made the scent worse. Febreeze, for all the success it has as a room freshening product, could not handle this task.
And I couldn’t stay in that room one second longer without bursting into laughter. So we both retreated.”
19. She Had "I Just Left My Parents" Syndrome
“I lived in a multicultural dorm for three years. Behind every door, in the corridor, there were two rooms, two people each, one bathroom and kitchen, kind of. We had many foreign students there because uni itself hosted ‘zero’ year classes for them in this dorm. I want to tell you a story about a girl, Star, in this course, who lived in the second room to mine (thank God for at least not sharing a room directly), in my second year there.
Star had ‘I just left my parents’ syndrome. Attending parties, trying to get as many friends as one can, and stuff. She didn’t care for others, was too busy socializing and being popular. Let’s start small.
- Food. I once came back to the room to not only see my ketchup bottle all dirty and quite emptier but also to see a bit of the very same ketchup on the wall in our kitchen not cleaned. I didn’t know back then that I have issues with sharing food, but it was the first moment.
- Her acquaintances. I once came back to her friend leaving our kitchen, mumbling ‘sorry’ on the way out, and her laughing and just saying ‘Hi’ and going back to her room. Huh? What was that sorry for? After some time I discovered that they broke the handle of my sandwich toaster they used that day, making it impossible to close and block it – luckily bread clips still do the trick.
- Gossip. Just before we gained our sanity back, we discovered that she had something nasty (and untrue) to say about us to others. My roomie Monica was easy, I was ugly, fat, and stupid in her opinion, and I’m not even sure what she said about her roomie Lisa, because Lisa was the one who told this to both of us.
- Dog. Star once brought the dog to her room.
I believe this was Thursday. We all were very surprised and confused, and Star told us about some guy, whose new girl has an allergy, and he asked her to take care of the dog for some time. We didn’t know him or the girl personally. Dog of course needed to be walked, but that was a problem Star would take care of right? It peed in the shared area TWICE.
Monica had the biggest balls of us all, so it was she who kept pushing Star to clean it the most. With much hesitation, Star gave in and cleaned. And then Friday came. We caught her with suitcases in the corridor and asked her – what about the dog? She told us all is cool and that her man is waiting for her in the car, so she will just take the suitcases now and come back for the dog.
She didn’t come back, and when we gathered again, Lisa told us Star updated her social media from the city her parents live in, so she actually lied back then. Monica had a passion for animals and felt very sorry for the dog, so she bought him some wet food, and took him for a walk the entire weekend. Guards kept bugging her, and she even got called by the head of the dorm, because you aren’t supposed to keep dogs in the room, right?
When Star got back on Sunday evening, we were very annoyed, and by Monday the dog disappeared.
- Eviction. Sometime later, a month or so, a security guard knocked on our door, assisted by the head of the dorm. They asked us if we know where Star is, checked both rooms for her, and told us that she will be removed from the dorm because she didn’t pay her rent for two months.
I and Monica didn’t know her location, so we assumed that she is hiding at some friend’s place. When the guard and dorm manager left, Star got out of her room. Lisa later told us she hid behind the curtain, and they didn’t notice her.
- Lisa’s intervention. Somehow Lisa got in possession of Star’s parents’ phone number. She tried to be friendly to all of us at the start of the year, but at this time Star stepped on her nerves way too much.
So she ratted her out and told us about it. Parents got very annoyed, and they arrived to take Star home. It was a huge relief, but if you reached this point, you can imagine.”
18. I Gag Every Time I Remember Him
“I rented a room on the 2nd floor of a house that he rented from someone else. The guy rented out the two bedrooms on the top floor to help pay his rent so he could sit on his butt and smoke all day because he was too lazy to work.
When I went to look at the place it didn’t seem bad. Little did I know that the person who was renting out both upstairs rooms and was leaving when I moved in was the one who was cleaning the place. Things went downhill fast…
In general, he was a jerk. This guy would blast horrible rock music, to the point that the house would shake.
Somehow I’d sometimes be able to hear him sing, completely off-tune of course. His favorite time to do this would be Sunday mornings. Of course, I was hungover.
He left piles of dirty dishes all over the kitchen and the living room, which he pretty much lived in. The fridge and freezer were full of stuff that was sticky and leaky and expired and smelly.
When I got a mini-fridge for my own room he got really snarky about it. I pretty much only ate takeout, frozen food that I could just put on tin foil and shove in the oven, or boxed/bagged stuff that didn’t require cooking.
He had his own washroom on the main floor by his bedroom but he’d come upstairs every morning at 6 AM to shower and leave his hairs in the bathroom right next to my room.
I’d clean the floor, sink, toilet, and tub every night before I showered because the thought of sharing a bathroom with that man repulsed me. I left everything in my room, including hand soap and toilet paper, in the hopes he would not use that bathroom. He just put his own stuff in there, including half a dozen towels.
He realized I wasn’t going to clean up after him, so he paid his ex-wife to come in and clean.
It was a rare day when I was at home during mid-day since I tried to keep busy out and away from that house as much as possible. When she came upstairs to the bathroom, she popped her head into my room to ask about the towels. I told her the towels weren’t mine, she realized whose they were, and we exchanged a look that is hard to put into words.
There’s more, but I’m going to stop here… I kinda forgot about that guy until now, and the memories came flooding back. I can even smell (gag) the place and feel the crunch of the living room carpet under my boots.”
17. Awkward Kid Has Disgusting Habits
“This guy, we’ll call him Will, was in my class in high school. He was a bigger kid – played trombone, was awkward, etc – and I was always defending him to other people.
I thought everyone was just being really mean to him because he was awkward, and that wasn’t nice. I wanted to be a positive influence in his life.
A couple of years after high school, we still talked on a semi-regular basis. My significant other (now husband) and I lived in a 3-bedroom apartment and our other roommate decided to leave about 8 months into the 12-month lease.
We had another roommate lined up to move in for the next year, but we needed that rent fund for four months, so Will suggested he move in for a couple of months to help us out. ‘Great!’ I thought.
Right, when he moved in, we noticed that he had a mattress and box spring, but no bed frame or sheets. We thought it was weird, but whatever, it’s not our room, and he’s kind of doing us a favor.
It was approaching summer, though, and our apartment had a wall unit air conditioner that didn’t reach the bedrooms, so it was getting considerably hotter. Will was a 6’4″, probably 280-lb guy who, it turned out, didn’t shower very often and slept without clothes, so that mattress was pretty disgusting.
Will also had an ugly significant other who I was really nice to when I first met her.
However, when I started noticing that Will’s room was getting increasingly more disgusting and asked him to please try to keep it clean, she began passive-aggressively complaining about me on her MySpace (yes, lame) like I was crazy for not wanting him to leave food in our dishes all over his floor in 90-degree weather or just generally not trash the room he was staying in for four months.
He would do weird things like hide our living room pillows in his room and pretend like he didn’t know where they went. He bought a bunch of Spam and would make it pretty exclusively, which smelled like garbage. It turned out that I really didn’t know him that well in high school when I was sticking up for him because he was actually a pathological liar about the dumbest things and had developed a substance problem that he then tried (and failed) to hide from us.
Eventually, after three months of more lies and disgusting habits building up, it came July, and about time for him to move out. We left for a weekend and left him a letter (we weren’t talking by this point) telling him to make sure he had his stuff out by the end of the weekend. When we got back, he had left us his disgusting mattresses and a ton of trash/illegal paraphernalia to clean up, plus we had to clean the carpet and walls because he had managed to get food and who-knows-what-else stains all over.
We had to lug that disgusting piece of work down three flights of stairs to throw it out, too. What a jerk.
Whenever I have seen him out and about since then, he’s made eye contact with me briefly but then avoided me like crazy because he knows we never had any closure about his garbage stint as our roommate.
There was some other stuff that happened (he huffed the canned air I had but tried to tell me he wasn’t; he never did laundry in the 4 months he was there but once ‘needed some dryer sheets’ and took all of them for illegal purposes; he claimed, in the time he lived there, that he was Buddhist…
then Jewish… then Wiccan… etc…) but it’s been a few years and I think I blocked a lot of it out.”
16. He Didn't Get The Hints
“I lived with 2 other guys. I would clean up after myself and wash my pans/pots after using them, keeping a little collateral mess. one roommate was fine, the other would use every pot/pan/dish/cup and then announce that it was our turn to do the dishes. We explained many times that we cleaned up after ourselves and he needed to do the same.
He never got the hint, even after showing him that I had used one pan/plate for my meals and he had dirtied the entire kitchen.
This went on for several months until he said he was tired of being the only one doing the dishes and that we needed to help out. We reiterated that it was only him dirtying the kitchen. He went on strike saying he wouldn’t do the dishes.
We caved and did them. Then he did this again and I told him I was done cleaning up after him. He stated he wouldn’t clean the kitchen as it was now our turn. I told him he had a week to clean up or I was throwing out all the dishes/pots/cups etc. He ignored this and I threw them all out except my one pan/plate.
He freaked out saying why would I do this and just seemed to have no memory of our many conversations. He soon moved out and I and the other roommate lived together for several years without any problems.”
15. She's A Binge Drinker And Animal Abuser
“Okay, so I moved out when I was 19 with a good friend and her significant other. Well, she had to leave at the end of the summer and her significant other was staying in the second bedroom.
We needed a third roommate because if not it’d be too expensive. One of our coworkers had just been left by her fiancé so of course, I thought it’d be an easy fix for all parties. I had never been so wrong. Not only did she move in at 3-4 am, but her fiancé had also thrown all her stuff out of their house. She had SO many things and we didn’t have a bedroom for her so she just took the living room.
On top of that, she had two pets. I don’t really like animals let alone cats and she had a cat and a bunny.
So she was like a binge drinker, a substance user, and an animal abuser. After about three weeks she went missing, claiming she was at a significant other’s house (she had men over at all hours and even brought home a call girl).
Mind you I was a 19-year-old college student who liked to smoke so I was really into having my own safe place. And my other roommate was really chill. This girl, though. She’d leave and never feed her d**n animals. One day my significant other found her bunny dead. Straight up rigor mortis had set in because he was shoved in a dirty cage under all these clothes.
I called her to let her know and she was so sure it had been alive that morning. How would she know if she wasn’t there?! Well then her cat would never eat unless I or my other roommate fed it, but it wasn’t my d**n cat so I was reluctant to keep a closer eye on it. His litter box reeked and if my roommate hadn’t cleaned it, it’d probably never be clean.
ON TOP OF THAT she said she shouldn’t have to pay rent because it was basically just a place to keep her things and she was never there.
For like the four or five months she was there we were late or incomplete on rent every time. Once I finally called her out on her stunt she went off on me saying I had never been there for her and she was going through a hard time and she always went over ‘as soon as I left’ and fed her cat and did what she needed to do.
Very soon after that, my roommate and I ended up kicking her out and God knows where she is now.”
14. I've Seen The Same Things In My Family
“When I was a sophomore in college I was placed with a guy who I already knew who had a reputation on my previous dorm floor as being really crazy.
He’d have outbursts that involved breaking the common furniture and other disruptions. He was well known for being very intelligent but a seriously strange guy.
He had a beard and he’d sit at his desk (mind you, we had no privacy) and eat with his hands. The food would get stuck in his beard and the mess on his hands would go there, too.
He had some obvious issues with illegal substances and drinking. He’d be wasted and would dance in the room while wearing sunglasses and a bandana. His substance dependence seemed to exacerbate his Tourette’s.
He didn’t have the famous cursing variety, but he always seemed to be muttering and ticking, making bizarre noises most of the time.
He was so wasted one day that in the middle of the night he vomited all over the floor, which is pretty standard stuff. The real issue here is that he left for the day and did nothing to clean it up.
When he came back and I mentioned it to him as something that might be worth taking care of, he called the front desk and a cleaning lady came up to clean his vomit while he watched.
He also pooped his bed more than once, which was really great. The whole thing was just great. Really a great living situation for me in a college dorm.
This might not really sound that bad but try and imagine living in a room where you sit and sleep five feet away from someone who makes noises, mutters, drinks constantly, gets tuna and sauces stuck in his beard, vomits on the floor, and soils himself. Much of my life before this had basically been the story of me living with severe substance dependents and addicts in my family, so it was not great for me to go to college and end up in that situation again.
I eventually went to the housing director and told her that she had to move me and when I explained why I was told that I could be held liable, under the school’s policies, for his consumption of booze in our shared dorm. I managed to talk my way out of that situation and got myself moved to a better space before things went too much further south.”
13. There Are Flakes Of Skin Everywhere
“She had a strange skin condition which caused her to rapidly exfoliate skin EVERYWHERE. And we aren’t just talking a little sprinkling here and there like she had a bad dandruff problem, these were clearly visible flakes of skin and were so abundant that I needed to vacuum every floor in the house every 2 days or otherwise it looked like a snowstorm had blown through.
It was on the stairs, on the hardwood floor, in the bathroom, under the mats, everywhere. I couldn’t walk in the house without getting my feet covered.
I didn’t know her before I moved in, and the landlord made sure there was no evidence of her condition when I viewed the place. She seemed rather nice, but she didn’t fully appreciate how uncomfortable I felt and didn’t want to take much responsibility for it.
I did manage to pluck up the courage to confront her about it a few times. She was very apologetic, and a bit embarrassed too, but after she had given the place a quick sweep, she seemed to think the problem was done and dusted. Two days later… back at square one. To make matters worse she wasn’t even around most of the time that I was home, so it was just me against the music.
I would have moved out there and then but I really had no other place to go, and I was already about 2 weeks into my semester at university. Thankfully she moved out 2 months later.”
12. So Many Names, So Many Encounters
“Steve smoked in the house after I explicitly told him not to.
We partied, but there were rules. Start drama, bye-bye. Mess something up, you buy a new one. Perfect on rent, and paid half the cable.
Azure hooks up with her partner very loudly with her window open. I got looks driving out of my culdesac. She smoked in the room, too, ruining my dresser with the ashes. Struggled to pay rent.
Amanda and Jamie were great.
Spanky was a jerk, slept on the couch every night even with a perfectly good bed in the room. Rarely paid rent, dipped with no notice after 5 weeks of no cash.
Jody used a new towel every day and didn’t wash them till SHE did her laundry. I have a lot of towels so they were community towels. She also started going out with a clinically legit schizophrenic.
They broke up once and he broke into my house and tore her room apart. Rarely cleaned her dishes, despite cooking in them several times. She bought loads of produce and let it spoil in the fridge. Good on rent, though.
Lindsay was the cleaner. She cleaned her room, and the roommate bathroom weekly. No one else really bothered. Struggled on rent, but I broke her collarbone one night so I gave her a month free for medical stuff.
Never paid them.
Nate left tooth flossers all over the house. Got wasted once and puked on MY couch, then went on a tirade about how privileged and self-righteous I was. Sucked on rent. 100 here, 50 there… Hoarded glasses and dishes in his room, my pet peeve. Smoked entirely too much. Then said he couldn’t pay me rent.
Heather cooked a lot and was good at it.
She was my significant other at the time, so we feasted a lot. I’d grill, she’d do the other stuff.”
11. She Should Have Known How To Park Correctly
“The first day she moved in she left the apartment with her bedroom door locked… inside her room was her stereo blasting the Lip Gloss song by Lil Mama on repeat for about 2 straight days till we finally got a screwdriver and broke in her room… we scratched the CD and put doorknob back on like nothing happened. Almost daily we would come back from class and find our clothes looking rather stretched and misplaced. She was obviously wearing our clothes… we both wore small… she was at least a large.
She would have her cousin come over and they always ate all of our food… of course when we were not home. She stockpiled garbage in her room for weeks so it smelled awful. She took the other roommate’s car out for a joyride with her friends. .How did we know? The car was parked one spot over, radio volume was way up, crumbs all over the seat, and the most tell-tale sign was there was cocoa butter on the steering wheel and driver window.
The girl was all about that d**n cocoa butter. Worst of all, she ratted me out every d**n time for missing curfew which ended up making me have to do community service.”
10. Awful Roommate Doesn't Empty Lint Trap
“He poops on the toilet seat and would never clean it up. When I’d had too much one day I told him he needed to clean it, like an adult, he threw a fit and tried deflecting everything back on me.
Like I wasn’t even asking him to do anything else I just want you to clean your own poop, please…
He showered maybe once a month. Now sometimes I’m so exhausted from work and other stresses that I’ll go a while without taking a full bath, but this dude would just come home and fester in his room most of the time, doing lord knows what on his computer.
He wouldn’t even wash his hands after he went to the bathroom. He smelled so bad that the security deposit went towards getting the carpet removed and whatever else to get the smell out.
It didn’t help that he seemed to have no idea why you need to empty your lint trap. He’d put clothes through the dryer multiple times wondering why it wasn’t getting dry.
Then he’d resign and let his clothes fester and mildew in the laundry basket because of course he doesn’t fold his laundry and put it away.
The dude had an awful sore loser attitude. He played a very popular game and was OK at it, but he played with people who were generally better than him, and when he’d lose he would throw massive fits.
So then instead of trying to help him get better the other players would hate playing with him or purposely beat him badly because he’s insanely disrespectful.
Oh, side note he is the reason why one of our local game stores has ‘no shirt, no shoes, no soap, no service’ on its front door.”
9. It Was Fun At First
“Freshman year in college, random roommate pairing. His name was Brandon and he was a rich kid with lots of older fraternity friends from his hometown.
We got along okay even though we were different. He liked to party, I liked to party and that was fun at first. Then we made new friends that were from different, non-compatible groups. I was partying less while he was going full force. One night I was in bed reading Catcher in the Rye again for my English class. Funny enough, I was reading the part where Holden fights his roommate when Brandon comes in just wasted out of his mind.
I think his older frat buddies like to mess with him because he starts talking to me, but calling me the name of one of his buddies. He just starts talking all this stuff that makes no sense and then gets a butterfly knife that he hid behind his grateful dead plush bear and climbs up to my bed and starts motioning like he’s going to stab me.
I get as far away from him as I can in my loft and somehow talk him out of stabbing me. I leave the dorm and sleep in a friend’s room. He moved out a few days later.”
8. I Got Arrested Because Of His Own Mess
“This roommate, we’ll call him Gimli, and I were friends in high school; we met freshman year and hung out until senior year then never talked after graduation.
Four years after high school, my buddy said he started a new job, Gimli works there as well. Gimli was also in the market for a new living situation. I met up with Gimli a few times to talk about moving in, he was just as funny and kind as I remembered. He moves in.
A few months later I was working at a pizzeria when I got a call from a county detective.
I was told to go directly to the police station after work. There I found out Gimli had been selling illegal substances out of my house very late at night, which gave the police motive to obtain a search warrant. The police searched my house while I was at work and not only did they find Gimli’s illegal substance, they found my stash, about 1.5oz. Gimli threw me under the bus, I was arrested for possession.
While waiting to leave while in the station, right in front of me, Gimli was cooperating with the officers by setting up a sting. I wanted no part in it, this was my first experience with an illegal substance in my life, I had no idea Gimli was into it, he got me arrested, that piece of work.”
7. He Got Slapped With Harassment Charges
“I had my dorm to myself for half of the fall quarter. Then over winter break, I was assigned a new guy with who I had a couple of mutual internet friends, so naturally, I asked around and they all told me he was an ‘okay’ guy, nothing stood out.
Classes started on Tuesday and since I was already moved in I decided to not come back to campus until Monday. When I got there I found an empty bottle of booze on my side of the room, multiple empty/half-eaten pudding cups strewn about the room (on my desk, spilled in the recycling bin, on the floor, etc.). The fridge was full of booze and Mountain Dew.
However, my new roommate was nowhere to be found. About five hours later he came in with a police escort to get all his stuff out of the room. Apparently, he had gotten blacked out wasted, pulled his pants down, and gone all around my stack looking for a good time. He ended up getting slapped with harassment charges and I haven’t seen or heard from/of him since I briefly met him when he moved out.”
6. They Threatened To Sue Me
“Roomed with two other women, one moved out because she wanted to live rent-free with her sister, so I had to fill her part of the lease with someone I had been friends with for about two years. Turns out my ‘friend’ was an addict (unbeknownst to me), and never had anything to pay her share of the rent… which was not even $350, much less pay her share of the utilities.
During this time the other girl we lived with was a revolving door of friends with benefits, a slobbering heavy drinker, and also obsessed with this abusive guy that would come over every night so they could scream and hit each other in their wasted stupor.
When the bills got racked up to exponential amounts, they stopped speaking to me (all the bills were in my name) and made me feel like a stranger in my own house.
The climax of the whole chaotic storm happened when one night, the addict was smoking illegally in the room right next to mine, with her 17-year-old son, by the way. She had the thermostat at 85 degrees, my fiance and I couldn’t sleep because we were sweating our butts off, and every time we went to shut off the heater, she would come out of her room and turn it back on.
After my fiance politely asked her to leave it off because we were uncomfortable, she, shivering, dressed in sweatpants, a heavy hoodie, and a scarf (in 85+ degrees), started screaming at him not to ‘tell her what to do in her own god d****d house.’ After this blow-up, my fiance told her ‘fine’ and yanked the thermostat off the wall, and brought it into our bedroom.
She promptly starts beating down on the door until the latch breaks and proceeds to scream at both of us. Telling us how this is ‘her house, and we’re out of control.’ I push her out and block the door, her still shrieking at the top of her lungs, and telling her teenage son to assist her.
The next day, my fiance and I move out and stay at a hotel to escape the insanity.
We return after the weekend to pack our things and move out. Neither of the other girls was at home so we had a little peace… until the addict called me, screaming that we were playing our music too loud, and her son (who was not welcome in the house anyway, due to a previous incident) couldn’t sleep. Then she goes into detail about how she’s leaving work right now to come back and beat me up, which wasn’t a concern to me because her car was broken down an hour away.
After we were all packed up and on the road, I receive a plethora of texts from her, and the other morally bankrupt roommate claiming they were going to sue me for leaving, and I better ‘lawyer up’ because they’re coming for me. I don’t know what attorney would have worked for free, but they seemed convinced. Since then, I’ve only heard from one of them in a feeble attempt to ruin my relationship with my best friend, but no b**********g or suing occurred. But, I did learn a valuable lesson: don’t have roommates… oh and illegal substances are bad for you.”
5. No More Illegal Things In The House
“He had people over every single night. They were loud and obnoxious and would get even more so the more inebriated they became. My mornings were spent cleaning up half-empty cans and bottles of cheap booze from the coffee table and mopping up the sticky remnants of spilled drinks on the floor.
Whenever I brought it up to him he acted as though he was the only person who paid rent and that he was entitled to have friends over. He couldn’t hold down a job and sold illegal substances to pay the bills. However, he was the worst dealer ever as he was always breaking the number one rule of illegal dealing.
He also managed to annoy a rather crazy dealer who threatened to shoot up the house and kill my foster puppy.
I wish I could say that my significant other and I kicked him out, but he’s like a brother to us. Instead, we rented his room to a more financially stable friend and the former roommate is now currently residing on the couch. He’s no longer allowed to have people over and we are no longer allowing illegal substances in the house.”
4. I Wonder How She Gets Out Of The Psych Ward
“She used to call me at 3 am to accuse me of random things I didn’t do. When she was living with me, she thought the neighbors were working with her father and the FBI or CIA to keep tabs on her. She told me that her father abused her when she was a child and that there’s a video of it online.
I’m pretty sure that she told mutual friends that I harassed her. She stole my truck and debit card for about 6 hours one time, thankfully she only bought $20 worth of stuff.
She thought that her kid’s father had three kids with other women, one of which was the father’s best friend’s wife, and she thought the wife was my significant other at the time because they had the same first name.
She’s really good at lying and has anyone that will still talk to her convinced that I abused her and leached off of her for over a year when I was the only one in the house with a job and was paying for everything. She kept getting out of the psych ward in a day or so because she’s so good at lying.
By the way, this is my sister I’m talking about.
We share both parents.
Last I heard she was shacked up with a dealer, and known home invader in a literal shack, just getting doing substances and messing around.”
3. Irresponsible Cop Got Kicked Out
“A young, suspended, police officer was living in my place. Possibly the most irresponsible and careless human, I’ve no clue how he had become a cop. Whilst on suspension (for what I’m told was not the second time), and on the night of the Vancouver Olympic riot in 2010, decided to have a raging party in my downtown condo while I was at work.
Unable to get home before midnight due to riot police blocking roads, transit shutdown in areas, etc… I finally make it home to find my landlord out front of my building, sweeping garbage and broken glass, some of which was thrown from my unit’s balcony, she says. And that my roommate and friends had been yelling at people in the streets below, inviting them up to the party.
As I finally get upstairs, there are bottles everywhere, spilled liquids, smoke, pizza boxes, garbage, clothes, dishes, and not he nor his posse. They decided to head out and be a part of the destruction still going on in parts of the city.
You’d think a cop would take pride to protect his city and be responsible enough to help and save rather than be utterly careless.
Disgusting. He was kicked out shortly after.”
2. Coffee Mug Lasts For Three Days
“My worst roommate ever was also my first. We were placed together in Uni in the dorm rooms where you’re really never more than 10 feet apart unless you stand over by the door. Pretty tiny rooms. One of the big problems was that he was extremely messy.
I’m no saint of sanitation myself, but he would leave clothes all over the floor, half-eaten food lying about, didn’t clean out the coffee pot so we got a nice few days of mold inhalation because he never opened the d**n window. Let’s not forget making coffee, taking a sip of it, and then leaving the cup there for the next 3 days. I woke up to find underwear draped off of my computer screen multiple times, and when he showered he never used shampoo because the natural oils allowed him to style his hair better.
Couple all of this together with the fact that he brought a huge speaker up with him and would blast his rap and songs like ‘Cocoa Butter Kisses’ night and day. Then even after he moved out I found moldy chowder left in the mini-fridge.”
1. He's Proud That He's A Natural-Born Thief
“I am actually willing to go homeless right now, which is what I am going to do because this jerk is so bad.
He has been stealing our stuff. Everyone knows not to leave stuff out because he will swipe it. He takes everyone’s food without asking, when he DOES ask for a drink he will literally drink half of it. I went to work and put my clothes in the washer and had intentions to put them in the dryer when I came home. I come home and this idiot took them out of the washer and threw them on the ground so he could use them.
When I finally confronted him about it, he called me a stupid dumdum, a trashy idiot, etc. Like, I even asked nicely. He told me how I am a liar and our friends will never believe me when I tell them. They were talking to me about it literally a few hours ago. And he hates me for something that happened in the ninth grade.
He is the most inconsiderate used-up jerk I have ever met in my life. He is so deluded and every time I look at his fat red-haired face it makes me wish that his mom’s attempt at abortion worked. He also brags about how he is a kleptomaniac and a natural-born thief.”
