People Reveal Their Irritating Experiences With A Roomie
28. I Discovered Our Friendship Wasn't Going To Last
“My current roommate, I’ll call her Sylvia, is the worst. We were coworkers and casual friends when I broke up with my significant other and needed to move. She found a two-bedroom, one bathroom for us. We each brought one cat. She took the larger room with the AC unit in it, I took the smaller room but got to use the storage closet. I had been living on my own for 10 years and she was coming from living with her parents, so I let her know up front that I had most of the furniture, dishes, bathroom set up we would need and was fully open to sharing, as long as she was cool with the place being mostly decorated with my stuff.
I quickly discovered our friendship was not going to last, as she had some jealousy issues, but that’s a story for another time. But for the first few months, I was thinking she was at least a good roommate. She wasn’t messy and she paid rent on time. That was all I really needed.
Well then her quirks started to come out. Sylvia never liked to be in silence so she always had the TV, or music, or one of her murder podcasts playing (and she wonders why she’s so paranoid) 24/7.
Even when she was asleep. It was never super loud, so I just let it go. Then she started saying things were coming up missing. But weird stuff like her make-up brush and her cat’s toys. Now I admit to her that I did go in her room sometimes to use her make-up mirror (which she had told me I could) and to vacuum, but that was it.
She continued to complain about stuff missing, so I bought her a camera and put it in the living room. Several months later, she continued to make passive-aggressive comments about me being in her room, or me having my significant other over and stuff coming up missing, so she bought another camera just for her room. I have always been the one to clean the house, so after that, I vacuumed everywhere but her room.
The only chores she does are the litter boxes, dishes, and trash. I don’t think she knows that the bathroom, counters, and floors have to be scrubbed and swept. But cleaning relaxes me, so usually once a week I do those things.
She also rarely sleeps in her room. She is always on the couch, with the TV going. My room was too small to have my TV in, so mine is in the living room along with my couch.
She is always sick too. Sleeping on the couch all day, germing it up. Even though she has a TV in her room. She said she lost her remote for 6 months so couldn’t watch it, then by the time she found it, she had burnt out the Fire Stick on my TV from leaving it on all the time. I thought then she would move back to her room, but instead, she just brought her fire stick out to my TV.
She gets mad when I turn the AC on in the living room (because my room doesn’t have one and it’s hot) because she can’t hear the TV and she doesn’t want us to have to pay for it. But then she will run it and leave the windows open. It’s also super awkward in the morning when I’m trying to be quiet in the kitchen while getting ready for work but she’s asleep 5ft away in the living room.
And when she has mental breakdowns and just sits there and cries.
She does NOT try to be quiet in the morning. I don’t think she even understands that there is a quiet way to close cupboards instead of just letting them slam shut. She always has her music/podcasts going and at least once a week she leaves her curling iron turned on when she leaves.
She is always talking to our cats about me. Like seriously, she has conversations with the cats where she makes passive-aggressive comments about me.
The worst is her passive-aggressive social media posts. She will post stories about all the ‘clutter’ in our bathroom (I put a shelf above that toilet that had lotions/cotton balls etc), how she can’t sleep because my significant other stayed the night (quietly in my room), how she has to take out the trash even though it’s my turn (we have no schedule for this, I just do it whenever it’s full) and how she has to give attention to my cat (I work full time and go to school full time, so I’m gone 12hrs a day).
Overall she’s just very emotionally troubled. I just bought a house this week, so wish me luck on telling her I’m moving out next month!!”
27. He's Too Lazy To Clean The Dogs' Cages
“I had a roommate in college named ‘Mick’. Mick seemed nice at first, I sat down and spoke with him and his friend at the same time before they moved in to discuss things.
We talked about how if any issues come up, we can just bring them up cordially and deal with them. Everything seemed fine. Mick and his friend moved in, and within about a week, things were not fine. Mick had two BEAUTIFUL dogs, one was actually a wolf hybrid, that he kept in cages downstairs at all times. They were in a room by themselves, not even in his room.
They would poop and pee in their cages and he didn’t clean it up. I actually never saw the dogs out of their cages the entire time we lived together. He also refused to take out the trash. He would simply tie up the trash bag and put it out on the back deck, and eventually, there were 6-7 full to the brim trash bags on the back deck, which began to stink up the back yard and our neighbor’s backyard.
One day while I was at work, I texted my roommate. I asked him if he could please clean up the dog cages because I’m having friends over tonight and it is smelly. He responded with paragraph after paragraph about how I’m a jerk and it’s not his problem and… mostly that I’m a jerk. I just responded by saying let’s talk about it when we’re all home.
That afternoon I get home, Mick is there, and his friend is there. I start by telling him the house smells bad and it is his responsibility to clean his dogs’ cages. And I also mentioned the trash. He started screaming at me, calling me a jerk once again, and just generally being ridiculous and off-topic. His friend was trying to calm him down and convince him that I wasn’t insulting him, I just wanted him to clean up after himself.
He continued to scream. I could see that I wasn’t getting through to him, so I just went to the kitchen and started making my dinner.
He followed me into the kitchen, CALLED HIS MOTHER, and started insulting me and calling me a witch to his mother.
I called the apartment complex and told them I felt unsafe and needed to move out immediately. I also told them about the dogs he was keeping and how he never lets them out of their cages or cleans up after them.
I was out within 2 days.
2 years later Mick’s friend messaged me and asked me how I got out. She said she finally realized how toxic he was (FINALLY?!) and needed to get out too.
The real victims here are those poor dogs.”
26. I Doubt He Can Join The National Guard
“After divorcing I decided to take on a roommate to help me rebuild my finances. I had a three-bedroom house. The mortgage payment was low because it was a messed-up house in the middle of an economically depressed town. I could afford it, but I wanted more breathing room.
Enter a guy we’ll call Chris.
Chris seemed fairly normal when we first met. He was a few years younger than me, I was in my mid-twenties at the time, but he was clean-cut and squared away. He was wearing a National Guard T-shirt, I asked him if he served, and mentioned that I was in the Navy and got out about two years prior.
Chris told me he wasn’t in the National Guard but was thinking of joining because he really wanted to be in the military. Cool.
The deal was $500, all-inclusive. He had a bedroom with a bathroom reserved for his exclusive use and a small balcony above a downstairs porch. Cable TV, internet, phone (remember landlines?), heat, AC, hot water all of it included. His $500 would cover my mortgage and taxes and insurance and leave me to only foot the bill for utilities, essentially leaving me with an extra $500 per month to chip away at the lawyer debt I put on my credit card.
Sweet.
Chris moves in and I notice the first few days he’s around the house a lot. So I ask him what his work schedule is like. He tells me that he is starting a new job next week so he’ll let me know. He gave me the first and last month so, cool.
Next week rolls around, I get a call on my work cell.
It’s Chris, he needs me to pick him up from McDonald’s in the middle of the day. Can’t do it, dude. I’m working. It sounds like an emergency so I call a buddy of mine to ferry him home. Chris started a job at a Mcdonald’s on the opposite end of town, passing three other McDonalds to get to it, and was quitting on his first day because it was too fast-paced for him.
I am immediately regretting my decision to rent to this guy.
Now solidly unemployed, Chris is spending cash from an unknown source on militaria. Every time I see him he has something else. By the end of the second week, he’s wearing a full-on military-ish uniform of his own design (camo fatigues with non-military pins all over it). He’s not quite at the stolen valor level but he’s definitely in a space where the untrained eye might think he was… something.
Around this time I tell Chris that he needs to make sure he pays the rent for the next month otherwise next month will be his last month. He agrees. A few days later he shows up and gives me $500 cash. OK, I’m skeptical but whatever.
I suggest to Chris that now might be a good time to try out that national guard thing. He’ll make some cash and, best of all, be out of the house for a while as he completes basic and AIT.
So I drive Chris to the recruiter’s office and he takes the bus home. About a week later, I’m woken up from a late sleep-in on my day off by someone pounding on the front door very angrily. It’s the NG recruiter looking for Chris, who is oddly absent from the house, saying that Chris has not shown up to three scheduled meetings with him to finalize his enlistment.
This is it. Chris either goes back to his office by end of the day or he’s done, no enlisting.
Chris shows up at the house that evening, I tell him what went down and he tells me that he essentially ghosted the recruiter because the recruiter wasn’t ‘being fair’ with his ‘offers’ to him. Chris wanted to be some sort of special forces whatever and they simply couldn’t offer him that.
Plus, Chris didn’t exactly rock the ASVAB so his options were fairly limited. He felt that if he couldn’t get special forces the least they could do was make him an officer given that he was 21/22 and had no experience, skills, or other qualifications that would justify this, I’m not sure what he was thinking.
Shortly after this, Chris begins telling me that he’s seriously considering joining the French Foreign Legion.
I point out that he couldn’t manage to join the National Guard and I doubted he would pull it together to get to France and enlist in the FFL. Chris got mad and locked himself in his room through the end of the month, ignoring my pleas for rent for the third month. Three days in, I told him he had 24 hours to pay or I was starting the eviction process.
No response. I went down to the courthouse and got the forms and started the first step which was to serve him a notice that I was beginning the eviction process.
As I’m doing this, I decided to call the number he originally called me from. His former house number. It’s his parents’ place. I have a nice and civil discussion with his mom who is dismayed to hear that it isn’t working out.
She tells me that she was sending him cash while he ‘got on his feet.’ I tell her about the same day quitting at McDs and the failed National Guard thing etc. She begins telling me the myriad medical reasons why Chris is never going to serve in the military and that he knows this and has already been rejected by every recruiter of every branch.
Not the least of his problems being that he is an occasional bedwetter, apparently.
Three or four days later, a rented van pulls up with his mother following behind in her car. Mom and dad came to take Chris and his stuff home. I haven’t spoken to him since he talked to his mother. She hasn’t talked to him, either. He refuses to open his door.
He opens it when he hears his mother and he begins crying like a little kid about how he doesn’t want to go and it isn’t fair that he has to leave.
I’m dumbfounded by this whole thing.
Chris’s dad gives me $500 for my trouble, told me to keep the last month’s rent I had from Chris originally, and agreed to haul what turned out to be a rather urine-soaked twin-size mattress away with Chris’s stuff.
We shook hands, dad apologized to me on his son’s behalf and this little momma’s boy went off sobbing with his parents having failed at his first attempt at adulting.”
25. Psycho Roommate Didn't Have Any Friends
“My housemate and I replaced our first psycho housemate with another psycho housemate, who for the sake of this story I’ll call Mel. My other housemate, Emma, and I had placed an ad on a website specifically to find housemates, and Mel messaged that she was interested in the room.
Because she was interstate, the first time we interviewed was over Skype. We made it very clear after our experience with our old roommate and that while we wanted a happy home and didn’t mind sharing a meal sometimes, we lead busy lives and respect each other’s privacy.
Essentially, we didn’t want our new housemate to expect that we would spend every minute of every day together and be best friends.
She then visited the city we lived in a few weeks later, and we agreed to let her move into the room. Her dad was there helping her move in and would ask Emma and me very strange questions. We thought he was an overprotective dad and didn’t think much more of it.
Anyway, Mel was a bit clingy at first, but I thought once she’d started back at uni she’d be too busy and leave us alone.
I was wrong. I got really busy with full-time uni, my part-time job as well as trying to juggle stuff in my personal life. She didn’t have a life outside of uni. She didn’t have a job, no friends, no hobbies. She would wait till I came home from work at about 10 pm to have a chat, probably the only social interaction she had all day.
We felt kind of bad for her and made a bit more of an effort to socialize with her in the evenings we didn’t work. This was a mistake.
She became even more clingy and dependent and invited herself to come with me places. Didn’t matter if it was the gym, grocery shopping, etc. I found it very overwhelming and it got to the point where I found myself sneaking in and out of the house to avoid her.
She obviously went a bit stir crazy doing nothing all day and started to move things around the house to try and get our attention. At first, I didn’t think much of it, but then I realized what she was doing. Any attention was good attention for her. Instead of asking her to stop, I would just put my stuff back where it belonged.
After a few weeks, one day I came home from uni and she’d moved my clothes around which made me really uncomfortable. I was on the phone at the time and I said to the person on the other end of the phone very loudly that I would have to go because someone had made a mess of my clothes and that I was annoyed. I had hoped my psycho housemate would take a hint and leave my stuff alone, but she stormed upstairs and asked me what my problem was.
I said that I didn’t appreciate her going through my clothes and there was no reason for her to touch them. She started to get really aggressive and couldn’t be reasoned with, and by that point, I needed to catch a bus to uni for a lab. This angered her even more, and she said that she expected me to come straight home from uni so that we could have a talk.
I said I wouldn’t be dealing with this issue that night because I had a test the next morning. She stormed back downstairs and I quickly grabbed my things so I could leave. She was waiting for me at the end of the stairs and told me that she was coming to uni with me. I told her to leave me alone but she followed me all the way to the bus stop, yelling and threatening to hurt me if I didn’t stop moving MY things around the house, and she expected me to hang out and have dinner together every night.
When we got to the bus stop, she stormed off again. She’d made a bit of a scene and I was very shaken.
My significant other and I agreed that I couldn’t go home to someone like that and that I should stay at his house that night so I could just focus on studying for my test the next day. This all happened around the end of the lease, and I prayed that she didn’t want to renew it.
I hardly went home in the last month of the lease, only to collect clean clothes. She was an absolute psycho, so when she moved out I blocked her on social media so that she couldn’t harass me. Well, it turns out she thought that I owed her cash because she’d overpaid her bills when she’d actually underpaid me. And considering the other girl and I were hardly home the last couple of weeks, we could’ve asked her to pay more.
Anyway, I didn’t find out about this until my new housemate that replaced her started getting threatening messages from Mel saying I owed her $60+. Both the new housemate and I sent her copies of all the bills, proving she’d actually underpaid us. I hadn’t given it much thought and just paid her share because I didn’t want to contact her again.
After trying to reason with her, I suggested both of my new housemates should block her. My new housemate and I laugh about it now, but for a while, I was worried she’d come back and key our cars. She’s definitely not a very stable person and I hope she got the help she needed.
Luckily my current housemates are fine.”
24. She Fooled Me Twice
“I’ve had some terrible roommate experiences but the worst was probably this one girl who I’ll call Elba.
Her significant other had actually moved in and he sweet-talked her into our house by stating her mom kicked her out and that she had no place else to go. At first, everything was alright, and then as time went on she started getting an attitude about little things until it built up to us arguing all the time, claimed she was never able to afford food and always ate mine without asking, and on top of that, her and her significant other would get into loud, violent fights all hours of the night and break things in the house.
Then I came to find out she and her significant other were using illegal substances but when I confronted them they lied and said they were off of it and I stupidly believed them… that was until Elba almost died in the house due to a bacterial infection in her heart valve which was caused by substance use. She was in the hospital for around 3 months and her significant other told us he’d cover her rent for her but never did.
When she got out of the hospital she refused to get a job even though she knew she and her significant other were the reason we were all falling behind on rent, and refused to leave as well.
I even tried working with our landlord to get her out, which was admittedly a little underhanded, but she sweet-talked him into giving her more time yet she still made no effort to find work.
I tried everything to get her out and nothing worked until finally, we all ended up getting evicted from the house. And then I stupidly even tried living with her again.
A year or so after the whole ordeal she apologized and came crawling back begging to let her move into the new place I was at. I should have just said no but she claimed she got help and had a job working at a dog daycare.
But soon after letting her move in she was back with the same bad attitude and got fired from her job for stealing dog Xanax, got another job, lost it, and tried to blame another roommate and me saying we called her job and ratted her out for stealing from the last one (which neither of us actually did).
I ended up leaving that house and I guess she did not too long after and now apparently she has a baby with a guy she home-wrecked…
so Elba is now a parent, and I’m forever extremely cautious about who I live with or let in my house. ‘Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me’ as they say.”
23. I'm Unfortunate To Be Living With Idiots
“Pretty much all my roommates have been morons or jerks. My first one would constantly talk to himself and laugh to himself no matter if I was in the room or not, and I’m going, ‘Is this idiot serious?’ It drove me absolutely insane.
The next roommate had his significant other basically living there and you would just always hear them talking, sometimes screaming at each other. I hate when people have their chicks live in our apartment like they pay rent. Why do they always have to stay at our place? And they never left, they were there ALL THE TIME.
The next roommate did the same thing, on top of always stinking up the room with cheap ramen and popcorn and stuff like every day.
And sometimes you would hear him and his chick loudly hitting it off which I hated, again, like she paid rent. But this idiot would also take my food all the time and not even try to hide it. Like every time I’d have leftover pizza, I’d come back to find 2 or 3 pieces less than there should have been. When finally confronted, he basically used the excuse of, ‘I’m broke and don’t have cash for food,’ so I guess that means that any food that he wants is his at a moment’s notice.
Also, he would scream and curse all the time like a lunatic about God knows what, sometimes with his significant other, sometimes with his idiot friends who would randomly show up.
But my roommates now are just dumb. I’ve got one that used to smoke just about every single day and the whole place could smell it. So one of my other roommates called the cops on him as he threatened to before if he didn’t stop, but it ended up being a misdemeanor.
But after the guy initially threatened to call the cops, this idiot’s brilliant idea to cover up the smell was to burn fabulous liquid floor cleaner on the stove so the whole place just smelled like chemicals all the time. And this guy has been living here for 3 years and is about to graduate so he just acts like it’s really his place but out of the kindness of his heart, he lets us live here.
He just generally has a massive ego too, like he never does anything wrong, never takes any responsibility for anything, everyone else is such an inconvenience to him and he should just get to do whatever he wants all the time. College students are the worst people to live with.”
22. Disgusting Roommate Makes Our Place Look Like Garbage
“I lived with my best friend on and off for 3 years (I know).
I eventually lost my mind and bought my own place and vowed to never have another roommate for as long as I lived. Besides the usual – eating my food more times than I can count, leaving the place looking like a disgusting bomb site constantly (and disappearing for days at a time so he wouldn’t have to clean it up), ruining or breaking things, treating my belongings like his and having people round to smoke or party whenever he felt like it – there were a few golden moments that really just cemented this boy as a real icky, lazy, shameless, idiot.
His sleeping arrangements changed place to place; ultimately culminating in a urine-soaked mattress that sat on 2 wooden pallets. One time he didn’t wash his sheets for 9 months.
In our last apartment, he just stopped using sheets altogether. I used to have to routinely ask him to stop leaving the toilet caked in poop. I literally had to scrub a 24-year-old guy’s poop off of our shared toilet on more than one occasion.
One time he went to bed after smoking, left it lit, and it proceeded to melt completely and the kitchen counter caught fire. I was asleep in the next room. Fortunately, the house didn’t go up in flames – but instead of apologizing for endangering our lives, he blamed it on ghosts. We lived on a quaint residential street. We looked like garbage. His bedroom was so messy and foul that the smell used to seep out into the hallway, so when he was gone I would jam a towel under the door to stop the leaking odor of what I can only describe as 4-day old vomit compiled of only McDonald’s cheeseburgers and milk.
Don’t get me started on his car.
All of that stuff is bad enough, but my personal favorite story is about the time he decided he wanted a fish tank for his room. Within a week all the fish were dead. The water started to turn into a murky molding soup dotted with the lifeless, white-eyed bodies of all of his prized belly-up fish.
This thing didn’t have a lid on it, so the smell visually bubbled over the top and dispersed through his room like a dry ice-filled cauldron. It was grotesque. And it remained grotesque for a full 3 months until he decided to do something about it. The catch for me was that the only shower in that place was in the en suite bathroom, located in his bedroom.
The door was RIGHT next to the miniature river Styx for guppies. Every morning I had to hold my breath from his bedroom door to the bathroom door and throw open the window so I could take a shower. As you can imagine, it was a very stressful and infuriating period every time we were living together. It made me feel like I was being a jerk for being mad at him for making our living situation uncomfortable.
It pretty much crushed our friendship completely because I was so full of resentment over the fact that he clearly didn’t respect me or consider me in the slightest.
He either didn’t understand or just didn’t care. He’s gone on to be quite the social butterfly now and I hardly ever see or speak to him, but I do find it quite amusing that all of these new acquaintances of his think that he’s the coolest guy, but behind closed doors, he’s the kind of smelly little gross kid who doesn’t brush his teeth for days.
Now I respect myself more than to put up with someone else’s disgustingly low living standards and I could not be happier with my clean, nice smelling home where all my belongings remain undisturbed in my absence and I don’t come home to find out that someones drank all of my chocolate milk.”
21. It Took Him Decades Before Washing The Dishes
“Moved in with my best friend from high school less than a year after graduating from high school. The first few days were fine, we decided to split the cost of sodas and keep them stocked in the house. I don’t remember the exact span of days passing but I believe it was 3 or 4, I go to get a soda and they’re gone.
I ask the roommate if he moved them, he says we’re out. At this time I drank 2 of the 24 sodas, so next time we go to the grocery store I inform him that I’m not interested in splitting sodas anymore, he gets huffy, no big deal.
Fast forward a few days, the dishes are piled up and I washed them the previous time (no dishwasher).
He had lived in this apartment for a while so he had a ton of dishes, I owned 4 cups, 2 plates, 2 bowls, and a few utensils as I was broke and being my first time on my own. I let him know that it’s his turn to do these dishes and he comes back saying that since I didn’t want to split costs on sodas that he wasn’t interested in taking turns doing the dishes.
We agree to wash our own dishes, which ended up working much better for me since I had little to wash. We will come back to the dishes later.
So far these things aren’t too bad and I feel like I’m fairly easy-going so I brush this stuff off. Until it happened… well multiple its but you’ll see.
The first incident didn’t impact me as much but it was still a jerk move.
We had another best friend that was active military so he was on base but his significant other lived in the same town as us. The roommate would often talk about how if we would have parties that she would be mine and just a bunch of weird things. I would never do that to this friend and I brushed it off as being young and not knowing how to handle the situation.
One day the military guy’s partner and my roommate are texting me asking when I’ll be home from work and I start to get suspicious. I tell them the time I plan to be home but I ended up leaving earlier than expected. When I get home her car is in the parking lot and the door is locked. At this point, the door was never locked because he knew I had a hard time getting it open (it was an awful door/lock).
He eventually lets me in like 5 minutes later and she’s in his room brushing her hair, which I thought was weird. I ask him why he locked the door and why he’s acting so weird. She abruptly leaves and he comes into my room to talk. I see a text from her to the roommate that says ‘don’t tell him anything’. I get a call shortly after from my friend in the military and apparently, his significant other told him everything.
I still don’t think it’s everything but who cares anymore it was 10 years ago. I walk him through what happened when I got home and inform him of my suspicions. The roommate then has the guts to blame our military bud because ‘they hadn’t talked in a while and didn’t think they were even friends’. The roommate, military partner, and military bud end up all making up.
I would have been done with all of them but I left them to their business.
I want to say it was roughly a month after I moved in, he started going out with this girl with 2 kids, I believe she was 20 at the time and we were 19. She was nice enough but little did I know I would be seeing her more than I expected. He immediately moves this girl and her kids into our tiny apartment.
These kids were terrible, I believe they were between 1 and 3 at the time. Crying all night and day, trashed the apartment. Thankfully I worked and went to school so I spent a lot of my time away from the apartment but it never felt like mine. They complained when I had people over or made any noises. She never paid rent or utilities and didn’t work.
I don’t have anything against kids but I didn’t sign up to live with kids as a 19-year-old. I ended up paying more in utilities due to the 3 person increase, I was always polite but they were often standoffish towards me.
Moving forward to about mid-November. HE STILL HASN’T DONE THE DISHES! The initial dishes incident occurred in July. At this point, I had been washing my dishes as needed and keeping them separate from the sink of despair.
Imagine how bad your dishes smell if you slack a few days, now imagine how bad it is after a few months. There were roaches all over the house on top of that. I basically stayed in my room and never had roaches in there but the rest of the house was disgusting. The girl never bothered doing them either even though she was home basically every day, I’m sure he told her not to and expected me to wash the dishes because I didn’t want to split mountain dew but I was having none of that.
She eventually ended up throwing away most of those dishes because they were unsalvageable but this didn’t happen until shortly before I moved out.
This is getting really long so I’ll just list a few other things he did: guilt women into sleeping with him, sleeping with women and ghosting them (ones I know that really liked him), threatened to kill my family because I spent the day watching movies with the neighbors, claimed I was uptight because I didn’t view women like him and I ‘just needed to********,’ used his parents for cash even though he didn’t like them.
I moved out in December, thankfully the lease was only 6 months. I didn’t realize you could mess up so much in 6 months but he did it. Needless to say, we aren’t friends anymore. Not all the times were bad but most were.”
20. They Had Used Their Significant Others As Housemaids
“In my junior year of college, I moved in one semester with a guy I was acquainted with because I needed a place to live and his last roommate got deployed. He seemed chill, and I thought it would be fine.
The first issue came up when he would complain about me playing on his PS4 at ‘late hours’. That’s fine, I’ll get off, you’re letting me use it anyways. Later on in the year, he told me not to use it while he’s studying. There’s no reason he had to study in the room, but whatever, again it’s yours so I’m not gonna use it if you don’t want me to.
I go to the bathroom and come back 10 minutes later, and lo and behold, he’s watching basketball instead of studying. After that point, he told me I couldn’t use his PS4 anymore.
He also had a chronic habit of using MY things without asking or asking afterward. Once, he ate an entire big bag of my chips and THEN venmoed me a single dollar saying he ate my snacks.
He also made liberal use of my bottled water despite at that point not letting me use his things.
Oh, but it gets worse. After we moved out, he went on a tirade about how I had ‘no sense of personal hygiene and stank up the place’. I showered literally every day. He, on the other hand, left garbage ALL over his side of the room.
At peak, there was something like 3 empty bags of chips, 2 weeks-old Popeye’s garbage on the floor, and somehow a cup of molding tea. I didn’t even know tea COULD mold. And IT WAS HIS SECOND CUP HE MANAGED TO GET TO MOLD.
The dude’s significant other was studying abroad that semester, and since he and his roommate had used their significant others as personal housemaids, the state of the room was to be expected. Screw him tho.
Ironically, even after all this, I still hate his brother much more.”
19. We Teamed Up And Started A Resistance
“I lived for about 1y with a girl who was a total freak.
She wanted everything to be done her way, for example, I couldn’t rearrange the chairs in the kitchen, leave the sponge on the right of the sink instead of the left one, move a vase from the table to have more space to study, etc.
If I moved the magnets on the fridge, she would put them back in their original position. If I was studying on the sofa and needed a bathroom break, she would sneak out of her room to fix the cover on it before I came back. If I closed a door, she would open it. If I put my keys in ‘her’ spot, she would move them.
She always looked at me and the rest of the gang with disgust, turn her head away and just go past us.
The best part is that it was evident that she was annoyed about many things I and the rest of the housemates did but never said a word. She would talk trash about us to friends and coworkers and call us ‘dirty rats who live in the garbage’.
Bear in mind that the house was spotless all the time, we just didn’t respect her mental map of every single item in it. She also bullied one of my housemates, which annoyed me beyond imagination.
I teamed up with the rest of the housemates and formed ‘La Resistencia’ to see how far we could push her before she exploded. We arranged EVERYTHING in the house and watched her slowly losing her mind.
We bought a bunch of ridiculous items (we have a two-headed squeaky dinosaur toy that we absolutely adore) and placed them around, hanging posters on the doors, bought matching fluo glasses, and so on. She silently suffered for months.
Eventually, she moved out. She stole a bunch of stuff when leaving but nobody cared, we were free!!”
18. He Has Bad Luck With Roommates
“In college, I lived in a quad. A larger room with 4 people living in it instead of a smaller room with just 2 people. One of the other 3 guys had a significant other. She would come over at night and they would just hook up in his bed all night and they wouldn’t try to be quiet or anything. We could all hear it… all of it.
His bunkmate was in ROTC so he had to be up at like 4 am for ROTC stuff and he never got any decent sleep because of all the noise going on above him. This guy also stole a university cop’s jacket out of one of their cars and he would wear it around campus pretending to be campus police and would use it to hit on girls and stuff.
Eventually, we all ganged up on him, filed a litany of complaints, and got him kicked out of our room.
In my second year at college, I had a small room with me and 1 roommate. He pledged a fraternity and as such there was a constant stream of his fraternity brothers coming in and out of the room every day at all times of day and night.
His bros would come in and use the shower and whatnot. They’d bring their girls over. They’d do crazy hazing things in our room. One night, I had a tough day of classes, I also got into a huge fight with my mother and just needed to go back to my room and put on some music and chill out but nope… there were 25 of his frat bros in a pile trying to kidnap him and they were essentially tearing up the room in the process.
They were drinking and throwing things all over the place. They were all on my bed and everywhere and it was absolutely 1000% the opposite of what I needed that moment. I slept in the common room that night. That was a long year. I never got much sleep with him around. He partied so much I don’t know how he stayed in school. And I am no saint.
I would hang out with my friends and a different fraternity, but we were much more chill and relaxed.
I used to live with my best friend. Most of the time he was cool and we lived in harmony. But he would sneak into my room and drink my booze and would never replace it. One year for Christmas, my sister gifted me a nice bottle of booze…it was a special batch or something.
Anyways… I was saving it for a nice occasion and didn’t open it. Well… that special occasion finally arrived a few months later and I went to open it, it was empty. My roommate had been sneaking it bit by bit and drank the entire bottle.
I had another roommate when I lived in a house with 4 other people who was a total gym rat and all-around ‘do you even lift bro’ type of person.
I don’t really have anything against that kind of people, but that was literally all he ever talked about. No matter what you said to him, he was going to talk about the gym or GNC or supplements. He would then go around and critique what we were all eating for our meals. He also ate nothing but supplements and cans of tuna fish… which he would leave all over the house making the house smell like a rancid wharf at low tide.
He also had girls over all the time. I and the others didn’t mind this, but he would bring them over late at night and hang out with them in the communal areas and stay up late on weeknights blasting music. He would also go out on Friday and Saturday nights to clubs but beforehand… all his friends would come over to pre-game and he’d let them all use the shower to get ready to go out.
This meant that our water bill was very high because there would be 10-15 strangers all using the shower on Friday and Saturday evenings. He also fancied himself a guitar player, but he was awful. He’d spend hours sitting on the living room couch trying to play songs like ‘closing time’ on an acoustic guitar but he would fail and it would sound awful no matter how much time he’d spend doing this.
He would do this Sunday afternoon in front of our large tv and we’d be trying to watch football as a house and he’d say ‘No, I need to focus and relax, so go watch football somewhere else.’ We eventually got him kicked out.
This story involves the landlord of the previous story. He lived nearby and he and his brother would often bring over secret women that their wives did not know about.
They used this house as their secret dirty house. He also ran some kind of shady furniture business out of the garage and he’d randomly show up at the house on a weeknight around 11:30 pm with a truckload of furniture and 4 laborers to unload the furniture and stack it in the garage. This would last at least 4 hours while we were trying to sleep.
I used to live in a townhouse community and my roommate was also the landlord.
Each house got 1 parking space. If you had more than 1 car, the additional cars could park in the visitor spots which were scattered around the street. We had neighbors that would constantly park their cars in our spot and they would allow their friends to park in our spot. We had numerous talks with them, but they kept doing it. So we started having their cars towed. They would get so annoyed at us that they started threatening to vandalize our cars in retaliation when we would park in our spot.
They also had about 25 people living cramped in a tiny 2 bedroom townhouse so they had an entirely different situation going on and I used to feel bad for the 10 little kids that lived there.
Now, a good story to balance out all the negative stories… When I lived in the house with the guitar failing gym-bro, one of the other roommates used to be a cook for the navy and was from Saint Louis.
Every Sunday, he’d be up to cooking at dawn and he’d cook all day and we’d all help him and we’d all eat all Sunday on that food he cooked. He used to say we were all family and he did this without asking for a cent from us and was just the happiest guy in the world when he did this. He said it reminded him of back when he was in the navy cooking for hundreds of sailors on a carrier ship.
And d**n… he was a phenomenal cook. He’d make all kinds of soul food, fried chicken, shrimp scampy, Italian food, homestyle casseroles. In the fall he’d make chili and we’d all watch football and drink together as a house. Those were great times.”
17. They Accuse Me Of Showering Too Much
“I dropped out of the first college I went to. Was living with my brother and his family in our mutual apartment. Was babysitting more than I was studying, and electrical engineering, apart from not being my first choice, was also really hard. Even for students who actually had time, peace, and quiet to study.
2 years wasted and a 3rd one as well for being late to enroll in another college.
2018, I enrolled in another college, with the class of ’99 (I’m ’97, went with ’96 the first time). 2 guys, 1 brother, and 1 cousin of my high school friend. Double room apartment, me in 1 room, 2 of them in the other. First, they stop doing their part of the chores, like stop cleaning the bathroom, always leaving a mess in the kitchen after eating (literally never clean up the table in the dining part).
The dishes keep piling up every time it’s one of their turns, days, sometimes a week or more. Never doing laundry or vacuuming the apartment. I’m not a passive person, so I was actively telling them to do their part around the apartment, as I cannot keep eating in my room or having to do the dishes every time I need to eat. We agree to split our chores when it comes to dishes and stuff under the counter, like coffee, some food, and whatnot.
My side, always clean, my plates and everything, always clean. Their side still piling up, they start taking my things and not washing them. I literally didn’t have a fork to eat with, almost always had to dig through their pile of dirty dishes to find my god d**n fork, wash it, to be able to eat. I brought up some expensive coffee I got (coffee lover and addict here).
They use all of it up when their friends are over, literally making it with hot water from the bathroom. Feels like throwing it away. They insist they’ll buy me another pack, but nope, keep bringing $1 coffees home… Never see my coffee again, literally haven’t had 10 cups of it, from a huge pack.
Some of their friends keep coming, like 3 times a day, hanging around the apartment for the whole day, being loud.
It gets worse as they keep coming later and staying up until 3-4 AM, being loud, even when I had exams the following day at like, 8:30… Their friends feel way too much at home and start taking stuff from the fridge, start using my dishes as well, which my roommates don’t wash, again… I’m starting to lose my mind and openly am aggressive with them, but it doesn’t seem to work.
Their friends start coming over at 9-10 PM, having LAN parties, of like 3v3 up to 5v5, almost every day. They split, in their room and the kitchen. Can’t use the kitchen when they’re there. (the only time the table is clean is when there are supposed to be laptops on it for the LAN party).
Then, one of them starts accusing me of showering too much (once a day), because our electricity bill was high, completely forgetting his buddy’s gaming and 10 computers being on every other day.
I snap and I start being a jerk right back at them. I start setting up the router to reset at random times, specifically when they’re having LAN parties. It’s ironic because both roommates and all their LAN buddies are studying IT. The first year, sure, but still too dumb to find out what’s going on. I enjoy myself. Feels a bit better.
Eventually, fought with one of them.
He came at me, when 2 of his buddies were there, thinking I’d keep quiet and be scared. He got me good, sure, when he sucker-punched me a few times fast. When I eventually got to him, started pounding his head with my right while pulling him with my left, he turned his head and got him in the side and the back. Only then, did his friends decide to intervene and pull us apart?
More like, pull me off of him, while he was screaming how he was going to kill me.
I went through all this because I couldn’t move out, having paid for a year in advance. Left at the end of the school year, with 2 months of the paid apartment down the drain (was supposed to stay the summer and work). They stayed, but they got kicked out because the downstairs neighbors were complaining too much.
I was so happy. The neighbors called our landlord at least 10 times, always the dude that slept in a room below theirs and only once, his sister, who slept in the room below mine. Because my phone fell out of my bed at 6 am and woke her up.”
16. Unfortunate To Live With 3 Hateful Roommates
“Roommate 1 would sleep in real late, skip a bunch of classes, then stay up until well after midnight.
I had early classes, worked a part-time job, and got maybe five hours of sleep usually. One time he was just waking up when I got home.
He had no computer (this was the early 2000s, not uncommon), so he used mine. I was okay with it but put in a keylogger because he kept talking about getting into illegal dealing and I didn’t want that thing traced to me.
At the end of the first semester, he had flunked every class, mostly due to excessive absences. He used my computer to write a letter to the president, talking about how he’s the son of immigrants, came up from nothing, and deserves another chance, and also to have his tuition paid for. I rolled my eyes and laughed reading what he had typed out, but then I realized this was not to the president of the university… he wrote the letter to President George W Bush.
Evidently, it did not work, and he had to move out. I was overjoyed, but he left tons of trash, dirty laundry, old food, his scale that he bought to weigh out illegal substances (which he never got into selling because he just used them all himself), and empty bottles of booze.
Roommate 2 was a junkie art student who didn’t do anything. The day before he had a final project due in some sculpture class, he raided my closet and took all of my wire hangers, leaving all my clothes in a heap at the bottom of the closet, and made some kind of wire person monstrosity.
The dude never apologized, offered to replace the hangers, nothing.
Roommate 3 was a party animal, he actually built a mini bar in his tiny room. I didn’t see him much, and I didn’t have too many problems with him with one exception. One night, he had a bunch of people over. They drank and blasted music until 3 or 4 in the morning on like a Tuesday (I had to be up at 5).
At one point, they all got in line and practiced some kind of ‘stepping’ routine, shaking the whole foundation (it was a very shoddy dorm building initially intended to be temporary until a better one could be built, but that never happened and it became permanent). A little while later, when they were finally calming down and wrapping things up, I finally fell asleep. I woke up in a start because some girl, wasted, came into my room and sat down on me in my bed, hard, and puked a metric ton of stinky, booze-filled vomit into my shoes.
I moved out a week later.”
15. He Started Acting Strange
“I shall call him A for anonymity’s sake. Everything started fine, being a buddy from college, and we got along great for a while. Then he started getting weird. Booze bottles started turning up in his room, and some of mine vanished including an unopened bottle given to me by my parents.
He then discovered the wonders of the internet and began hitting up girl after girl on apps. He would let them come over, play around with them, then leave them there the next day when he went to work, leaving my significant other (who is living with me at the time) alone with this unknown stranger while both he and myself are working.
He worked with the Water Department with the city, and when repairing a wastewater line, he got some splashed in his mouth which caused an infection.
This put him out of work for WEEKS while they gave him a combination of painkillers and antibiotics for the infection, but he wouldn’t take them at proper intervals. He popped these pills like candy and washed them down with booze, meaning he got crazy messed up by all of it. He started trying to snoop through my stuff while I was gone and pestered my significant other about my personal life.
He never bought any furniture outside of a table to put his monitor on, for the computer he built with the cash he got from selling his mobile home, so all he had was a futon mattress on the floor. His floor became littered with fast food bags and trash because he never took any of it out.
Our neighborhood wasn’t the best and had a lot of troubled people living in the complex.
One day a big fight broke out in the parking lot, and I actually had to hold him back from shooting at them with an airsoft gun knowing that if he did we would probably have our door kicked in and be beat to death. I was so glad when we finally moved out of there.”
14. The Carpets Turned Gray
“I moved in with two people September last year, we had a 6-month agreement- I lasted 2 weeks. My friends lived on the other side of the country but they were coming down soon to live here. So I went to all the house viewings alone, chose a flat, alone, paid the deposit, alone, paid the insurance, alone.
Once we moved in, I was so happy. But that only lasted a few days, they would argue every single day, lock themselves in a room, run away, literally would pretend to go to the bathroom and then climb out the bathroom window, wouldn’t wash, the house turned into absolute chaos. None of them would wash up, shower, or tidy up. The house smelled real bad, it was dirty and ridden with fleas as they wouldn’t pay for flea treatment because they were scared it wasn’t safe for the cat.
And also they were too mentally unwell to go outside. If that’s how unwell you are you should be in a mental health facility. Getting the help you need.
Okay, so you’re going to literally let the Cat die a painful death because of your own selfishness. For the two weeks that I lived there, we would smoke every day all day, for two weeks straight.
I had never smoked or been interested in it before then. The arguing, running away carried on. Until I snapped, I got blackout wasted, to the point where they said they couldn’t even see me in me anymore. My eyes were glossed over, I wasn’t there. I was in the hospital for hours that night. I became depressed and I lost my job because of the days I missed. I struggled to get out of bed. So I moved out.
As soon as I got home to my mum’s house that night, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. But I didn’t want them to hate me so I kept in contact with them, I used to visit them all the time, each time I went over the house was even worse. You could smell it from the hallway entering the building of all the other apartments.
There were MAGGOTS on the bin, fleas everywhere. The carpet was gray, where it had once been tan, with at least 6 trash bags lying around because they were too lazy to go to the bin outside. 0 plates, cups, and cutlery clean, I spent hours of my own time cleaning for them, just for them to turn it back to a garbage dump the next day.
I never got that cash back. (2/3rds of the insurance, 2/3rds of the £720 deposit, the cat? Mine too. But I couldn’t have it at home as I have a dog). So now I’m without hundreds of pounds (£). My mental health has never been the same. I don’t talk to them anymore and I never want to.
On the bright side: I now have my own wonderful clean, tidy and beautiful flat, I live with my brother.
I have a job, and I’m so happy. It’s never too late to turn your life around.”
13. Ghostbusters Theme Song Ruined My Morning
“I had a roommate my first semester in college in a super ugly dorm built in the ’50s. Rooms were like 10′ x 12′ and one bed was elevated. I knew this and wanted to get there first to pick the bottom bed. I arrived about a week before classes started (about 2 days after dorms opened) and was shocked to find my roommate already there, we had the same idea I guess.
Let’s just say this dude needed the bottom bunk more than me, he was about 300 pounds and there is no way he could have made it into the top bed. Being heavy isn’t a bad thing in and of itself but it got worse much worse…
This dude is super nerdy and a total weeb, he was obsessed with anime and 80’s movies, back to the future, ghostbusters, etc. I am pretty nerdy myself but this dude was on another level.
Here is how an average morning went…
GHOSTBUSTERS do doo do doo do!!!! He woke up to the ghostbusters theme blasting from his alarm clock, (back in the day cell phones weren’t huge yet, god I’m old) and he would snooze it like 5 times before finally waking up, super rude to me. Keep in mind our beds are like 5 feet from each other, mine is just elevated. He wouldn’t even get out of bed and he would make his ‘breakfast’ by heating ramen noodles in a microwave next to his bed. Gross
He had many other bad habits, cleanliness, body odor. Thank god it was only one semester.”
12. Full Blast Motorcycle Gang Drama
“Sophomore year of college I had a room where its just one big common area with a couple of beds you could turn into bunks if you wanted to (I never did want to since they were extremely heavy and we were forced to put them back at the end of the semester).
I had 8 am classes and had just started working for the school’s AV dept so I wouldn’t get home on weekdays till around 9 pm. And then on weekends, I would hang out in the computer labs all day playing ffxiv and LoL with some friends, so I never saw him or my room much.
What made him the worst was that he would full blast Sons of Anarchy on Netflix before he went to bed, EVERY NIGHT.
I would be laying there around 3 am listening to bikers fighting while he is fast asleep. HOW DO YOU SLEEP LISTENING TO THAT! I asked him to turn it down cause I have 8 am classes and he barely did, it was just as loud still. I’m still surprised I made it to class as much as I did.
One day I get back to my room and he stops me in the doorway going off on how my clothes stink and the room is a mess.
I look behind him to see my side has like 2 shirts on the ground and I keep my dirty clothes in my closet which is near the door the farthest possible from this dude’s area he would hang out in.
I had enough so I brought up that if he turned down his garbage show and I could get some sleep, maybe I would have enough energy to actually clean when I got back to the room.
That night was the first and last quiet night I had with that roommate. I even cleaned up the room and did laundry when I got home that night. even if it was only half a load of laundry that was actually dirty. That night it was back to FULL BLAST MOTORCYCLE GANG DRAMA.
I complained to the RA and got a solo room on the third floor for the last quarter of that semester.
and it was the best d**n 2 weeks of silence I had.
Also, in freshman year we had to triple up in a room made for 2 people and I once walked in on one roommate hooking up with someone but they didn’t notice me so I walked out and waited in the lobby. Down the hall. 10 min later my other roommate walks into the dorms and I was too timid to yell out to wait.
So I ended up watching that roommate start screaming ‘OH YEAH GET IT!’ as he gets kicked out and ends up leaving the dorm for a while. Later I saw that he posted on the dorm’s social media page with a picture he took of them. It was quickly taken down and I got to move to a solo room that nobody claimed by the end of that week.’
11. Bills Don't Affect Him
“Always left dishes in the sink. Never cleaned up. I have photos of the sink he left after a party he threw, left in the sink for 3 days while we complained every day, and then he had the audacity to point out that I left a plate in the sink too… yes… under the giant pile you left that I haven’t been able to get to for 3 days.
He never paid bills on time. Internet is due in a week? Let me pester you to send me $10 for the 3 days till it is due. I threatened to shut the internet off every month.
Would have people over, loud and drinking till early hours of the morning. All rooms are centered in the living room. Which affected me because I work mornings and nights.
Didn’t affect him because he didn’t have a job. He was on food stamps and never looked for actual work.
Manipulated a few women. Saw a few of them become dependent on him. I saw so many women come in and out I never learned their names. I answered the door to one and they said ‘Hi’ and tried to walk into my house. Me not recognizing them stopped them and said ‘um… who are you?’ When she explained she was my roommate’s partner I said: ‘sorry he has so many women over I never recognize you’ (hungover and annoyed sorry).
I was informed she thought they were exclusive and started crying.
I truly believe he was and is a sociopath.
I had to fight him almost every day about basic around-the-house stuff. The other 2 roommates clearly were not ok with a lot of the stuff he wanted to do but didn’t want to cause an issue. I kept the concept of ‘give him an inch he’ll take a mile.’
Had to deal with his substance use and explain how I very clearly am not ok with this where I live.”
10. She Insisted I Leave The Door Unlocked
“Sara got mad at me in early February (after having lived with me beginning in September) for something completely out of my control – I don’t recall at this point, and I don’t care to – and ignored me.
Which wasn’t annoying, it was just weird. I would walk in the room, and whether she was studying, reading, surfing the web, etc., she would face the wall as soon as I came in. Like, literally turn her body so she was facing the wall, and not me. At the end of February, we made up, and then somehow, a week later, Sara was back to ignoring me and picked up the turning to the wall stunt and cold shoulder.
For my 21st birthday, I had invited Sara and a few other people to go into the city for a few drinks (definitely nothing crazy, I’m not into the partying scene), and then come home. It was a Saturday night, and no one had any commitments, so it would’ve been perfect. We were all planning to go, and about 45 minutes before we were planning to go, she realizes she doesn’t have an ID on her (she was 21, but never got a license)… so she needed to have our mutual friend drive her about 30 minutes north (and back) to get her passport at her mom’s house.
Okay, fine. We can wait. The pair return over an hour later, no passport in hand. The friend who drove her said they pulled up to the house, Sara went inside to get the passport but ended up playing with her cat for 15 minutes, got in the car, and said she decided she didn’t want to go with us into the city anymore… why would you not have called us or texted us before or even on the way there to tell us???
We could have gotten a head start without her. (My 21st sucked for other reasons, but that was the icing on the cake).
To top off her very strange behavior, she had somehow misplaced her key the first week of school (don’t ask me how), so Sara INSISTED I leave the door unlocked so she a) wouldn’t have to wait for me to let her back in, and b) wouldn’t get charged the $50 or so fee to replace the key.
This also meant that we would sleep nightly with the door unlocked, so it was nightmare fuel for me, imagining a guy busting into my unlocked room… I kept all my stuff in a trunk with a padlock, but this school didn’t have the best reputation, so I would always take my expensive stuff with me. In hindsight, that should have been the red flag about how weird she was, but it just never occurred to me.”
9. We Were Forced To Lock Our Cats In
“My wife and I rent the master bedroom of my godfather’s house. He is a very religious and charitable man (most can be zealots, but not him). He let some old friends and their families move into the new construction underground that he built for over USD 20,000. He’s such a generous man, he let us pay dirt-cheap rent while we stayed in college: $400. The family of FIVE moved in in the middle of the night at 11 pm.
They spent 3 hours moving all their stuff and filling up his garage, leaving their moving truck’s headlights on; not only bothering me who needs to wake up at 6 am, but also the neighbors. Older couple in their 50s, their 70yo senile mother, and their 32yo daughter and her 30yo significant other.
The one problem with my godfather is, he is so charitable he lets people walk over him A LOT.
These people would steal from us, but it would be so small and petty it wouldn’t matter until it added up. They would steal pop tarts, bread, milk, snack bars (always the last one with the empty box left on the shelf!!!!) And more. The 32yo daughter would sometimes bring her 5yo daughter for summers because she is divorced and wants to spend time with her.
The 5yo is deathly allergic to cats. Godfather has 1 and we have 2. We were forced to lock our cats in a tiny, hot bedroom all summer long so they wouldn’t shed around her. Her 32yo mom is so bad the 5yo would constantly pet Godfather’s cat, as he was not told to be locked up. She would have to keep taking her daughter to the hospital and the one time she saw my cat she cursed me out and blamed me for her terrible parenting skills.
The man broke into my room once to steal expensive oil after he asked for some and I said no. None of them worked except for 50yo husband, 2 30yo spent months finding dead-end jobs They were loud, annoying and one time, when my wife was still my significant other, we were loud going at it, they found out, and later told my godfather and said if that’s how I act I should be kicked out.
TO TOP ALL OF THIS OFF: All 5 of them paid a total of USD 500 for rent every month. So my wife and I, who work full-time jobs and part-time college paid $400. So 5 people, 3 of which are working after the first 6 months, between ages 30-72 (remember grandmother), pay just $100 more than hardworking 20-year-olds.”
8. The Worst Part Was His Towel
“My roommate for my first year in university was your stereotypical horrible roommate. He checked all the boxes. I’ve compiled a list of all the things he did. I lived off-campus, about 15 mins away. To preface, this guy was pretty big. Not tall, but just a bit on the heavy side. He was very hairy as well. Let’s start.
He showered once a week. Once a week on Saturday.
Brushed his teeth on occasion. Often I would hear his alarm, he would go straight from his room to outside.
Whenever he’d wake up, he would do this thing known as ‘hucking a loogie’. Do you know when people try to get that thing at the back of their throat? That gross ‘back of throat sound’?
He did that anywhere from 3-10 times at 7 am, waking me up every. single. day. His throat-clearing sound became my alarm. The worst part is my classes didn’t start until 11:30 am, so I’d get woken up at 7 am when I didn’t even need to get up.
When he cleared his throat, he’d spit whatever was in his mouth into the sink, then not wash it down.
When I would get up to brush my teeth, I’d see what was in his mouth the night prior, and I’d have to rinse it away.
He had a fork in the bathroom. I don’t know why he had a fork in the bathroom.
He was hairy, so there was always hair on the bathroom counter. The hair would get onto the fork.
There were poop stains on his towel.
He brought friends over at late hours of the night (1 am-4 am) to play Fortnite. One night, he hit a trickshot (or something of the like) and screamed at the top of his lungs. At 2 am on a weekday
He once set the fire alarm off because he was trying to boil water and woke me up at 2 am on a Tuesday.
As you can imagine, he smelled horrible.
In fact, one day, he had been in, playing Fortnite all day. He had been sitting in the same spot from the time I left for school to the time I came back (7 hours or so). He had the windows closed, and the room was so humid, his pungent smell had congregated to every corner of the room. I rushed to my room and closed the door before the smell got in.
When I heard he had left, I ran to the window and opened it to air the place out. The next morning, and I kid you not, hundreds of flies had gotten up to the window and were swarming around our window trying to get in. If it were not for the mesh, our room would have been infested with tiny bugs (that I assume gathered to get into our room, that was humid and smelled of sweaty teenage gamer).
We lived in a semi-high rise apartment, we were on the 10+th floor. How bugs got up 70ft in the air is beyond me.
Yes, I did talk to him about these things, but he wouldn’t do anything. I started telling him when I was going to bed, and not to make too much noise, but to no avail. He’d still act as an absolute idiot.
I moved out a month before school ended because I couldn’t take it anymore.”
7. He Stuck Me With All The Bills
“This ‘friend’ of mine claimed in Michigan that one of his previous roommates had a significant other who was apparently some sort of higher-ranking gang member.
Fast forward a couple of days, he asks me to move up there so that we can find a place so he can move out and he would be away from all that.
Me being the nice person I am, since I was already planning on moving north where it’s colder went up there about a month later.
We found this place and he had sent me pictures prior, mind you, I didn’t fly up there I drove, along with all of my things. Also note that I have a 2003 honda civic hybrid so no, it’s not meant to be driving 1000+ miles in one sitting.
So I get there and see the guy ‘Blake’ flag me down and we pull over, my mom had come with me because she was helping bring some of my stuff. My first impression is that this guy had lied to me (before all of this we were friends on a couple of online games and he lied about everything as I will soon explain.)
The first thing that caught my eye was the nappy-headed lazily dressed 6`10 dude that wasn’t wearing any shoes. I thought to myself well. There’s one lie ‘he had told me that he went to the gym daily and was pretty physically fit.’ But no, he was fat.
After that, the house looked nothing like the pictures he sent, and I was promised that I could pick whatever room I want.
I couldn’t, and I now have the smallest room in the house. So second lie. I’ve been here since around march, and 2 roommates have moved out since then because of him. Soon to be a third.
Recently his brother has moved in, and thankfully he is responsible. We plan on moving if he doesn’t change the way he acts in the house because we are both tired of the lies.
Oh right, the worse experience part. I moved across the country to live here with a moron that never cleans the house, does nothing but sit and play video games all day, lies to your face 24/7. claims he makes a lot and doesn’t want/need to get a job because he trades. (His monthly income is 1400$) He helps pay none of the bills except for rent and that’s only sometimes.
There are so many other things I could tell you but I have work soon. This ignorant piece of work has stressed me out for months on end. Also, my power may go out in a few days, simply because he hasn’t helped me pay it since I put it under my name a couple of months ago. Hello, $530 electric bill.”
6. He Borrowed My Bicycle And Crashed It
“My husband and I rented a room to a guy we met through posters we’d put out looking for a roommate.
We didn’t really have the options to vet him much, but he was the only applicant and he was employed and seemed quiet, so we rented to him. (We had just moved out for the first time, I know how stupid this was in retrospect.)
For the first few months, he was quiet and hardly ever in the common spaces. Then, he suddenly stopped paying rent.
We left him notes about the rent and texted him to no avail. Then one day, while I was away with friends, my husband came home to him rummaging through our room looking for cash or jewelry he could sell. He had also kicked our cat and chased the other one into hiding. We filed a police report and a restraining order and changed the locks.
He proceeded to get his significant other to lie about the incident in court, and then the cops made us allow him back in until we could evict him properly.
What followed was a really awful month. He ‘borrowed’ my bicycle and crashed it, and then hid it. He stole my husband’s bike altogether. He smoked all over the house and left the butts everywhere.
He screamed at us and laughed as we locked ourselves and our cats into our bedroom for safety. He also stole every electronic he could get his hands on and broke anything valuable he didn’t want. We couldn’t do anything until the month was up and we could change the locks and force him to leave. The cops had to escort him to get his things because he was so confident that we wouldn’t have the guts to get rid of him that he left everything on the last day.
He left us a huge mess to clean up, including a hole in the wall of his room. He also left us financially screwed from the repair and replacement costs, and we were forced to move soon after.”
5. I'll Break It So You Can't Have It
“So my friend’s parents were moving to another city and she needed to move out and find a place. So she asks around at work and a bunch of them get together to be roommates.
They find a small house to share with four bedrooms amongst the 5 of them (my friend, two single coworkers, and two coworkers who were a couple). The couple was an absolute nightmare. They would leave food everywhere, never do any chores, and leave their stuff in all the common areas after being repeatedly told to keep stuff in their room.
They also kept odd hours and would be loud until the early hours of the morning then get annoyed at my friend and other nice roommates when they were doing things during normal day hours cause the couple was trying to sleep.
On top of these hours, this couple would hook up pretty loudly. And because of their hours, this would happen during the very early morning when the other roommates were trying to sleep.
The male half of the couple was also incredibly aggressive and when my friend tried to confront them, he threatened to beat her up and screamed in her face. My friend was scared to be in her own house.
Finally when the lease came up the couple was told to leave and they had to be out by a specific date as they had someone new coming in to rent the room. Of course, the couple waited until the last minute to do anything and caused a lot of fuss. After they left my friend found some of the belongings she had been missing in their trash bin.
Opening up the other trash bags that were laying around my friend and the other roommates found cutlery, bags, a vase, a fan, and so much other stuff that had disappeared from around the house. The couple had been determined to go out with a scene and had adopted the mentality of, ‘even though I don’t need this, I’m going to break it just so you can’t have it.’
They all still work at the same place which makes things kinda awkward but after some passive-aggressive stunts the couple pulled, their boss basically called them on their ploys and said if they saw any drama being brought to the workplace everyone would be fired.
They had a big party once that couple left.”
4. Air Force Roommate Snitches Me To The Officers
“So when I was in tech school in the Air Force I had this dude who was trying to be a yellow rope (for those who don’t know, it’s like a student that gets like 1% authority and leads classes around and kind of helps instructors).
So we’re in the room one night and I’m doing homework cause the holiday season was coming and our instructor said we could do homework from the next 2 blocks but we would still have to go over it in class. Naturally, we chose to do it now so we didn’t have to stress about it when it came time for us to get to go home for Christmas/New Year.
So it’s like 9 pm and I’m slaving away and this idiot is SCREAMING marching commands like we’re outside in formation. I look at him and tell him to be quiet cause I got a lot of homework and I need to focus. He quiets down for like an hour, then he sees me get up and starts going at it again. I jump in the shower before bed and I still hear it and I’m annoyed but I thought he would stop when I go to sleep right?
Wrong. (Through tech school I wore earbuds to bed cause I like noise when I fall asleep, and didn’t wanna leave a tv on and bug other people.)
So I guess he assumed I couldn’t hear anything and right at that moment I was about to drift off he starts up again really loud. I told him ‘shut up or you are never getting that rope’ and he looked so angry and he didn’t do it in the room ever again.
Fast forward a few weeks, he gets his yellow rope and he lets all that illusionary power go to his head and the idiot tells the instructors I have booze in the room (I was underage at the time) and they flip my whole room while I’m in class. Obviously, they don’t find anything because I’m not stupid but now I gotta clean my whole room up, and it’s just annoying.
Then the next week he tells them I’m smoking in the room (admittedly I was but it’s still a messed up thing to do) and they came, confiscated my stuff, and wrote me a LOC for it (again for those who don’t know, a LOC is basically a piece of paper that the Air Force uses to tell you that you got in trouble for something minor but still in trouble).
I fought it and somehow I got it overturned so it never hit my records but I was angry.”
3. I'm Convinced That She's From The Underworld
“I have reason to believe that my ex-roommate was the spawn of satan.
I had a roommate who would leave chicken in places throughout the kitchen to cook later; however, she’d forget about it so it would rot and the apartment would stink. My other roommate on the other side was allergic to a lot of things but the crazy roommate didn’t care and so she would leave the food the girl was allergic to out. She had terrible allergic reactions.
I tried to get my hall director to remove her but she refused.
I really like having a clean bathroom and would clean it once a week. Then when she moved in, she started leaving her period b***d all over the toilet seat and floor and wouldn’t clean it unless I asked her to. It looked like a freakin crime scene. It was so disrespectful.
Whenever she’d use the bathroom in general, the seat would be stained brown and there’d be foam in the toilet. I don’t know where from. It was awful. I started to pee standing up or would have to disinfect my toilet before each use. She also never showered and smelled so I had to buy two glade plugins in one room just to hide the smell so I could breathe.
Every day I would call my mom to tell her about this psycho. This is important because I rarely ever call my mom. That’s how bad it was.
I truly thought the worst thing was that she liked to reenact voodoo practices. She’d speak in tongues and would blow powder into the air. But then she started to sneak multiple men over into our room at night at the same time (we shared a room since we lived in a dorm).
Whether she slept with them, I don’t know. I woke up and found one standing over me watching me sleep. At that point, I couldn’t stay in the room anymore. I also worked night shifts so I had to be up at 4 am some days to work. I told her the days I needed to sleep but she’d bring these strange men and I’d wake up in fear.
I started to develop exploding headache syndrome. I ended up sleeping at my best friend’s townhouse because it was that bad. The craziest thing about it was that she was only in the dorm 4 days out of the week. But those days were absolute nightmares. Worst second semester of my life.”
2. They Were Lazy, Messy And Thieves
“My second roommate at my first college apartment, after my best friend had to move out for financial reasons, was literally the worst. He constantly had his cadre of friends over, who were all really loud, made a mess of the place, and were obnoxiously weeby (no offense to weebs, I’m one too, but they were THAT kind of weeb), and would never take out the trash or do the dishes, or mop.
He eventually got his significant other basically living rent-free in his room (which he rarely let anyone else into), and she only ever did it half-willingly. I would leave on a Saturday morning to go see my parents over the weekend, and would come back to trash literally stacked Tetris style overflowing from the garbage can, and would often have to use bleach to clean the tile of the garbage juice stains.
However, his true jerkiness had yet to be fully revealed. In my senior year, I had a mental breakdown from the stress of school, and from a very demanding amount of phone calls from my father about making sure I’m passing with a 3.0 GPA. I had to break the lease early and thus told him a month or so ahead of time to let him know he’d have to find a new roommate.
He didn’t find one, so we both had to move out.
He and his significant other barely packed anything or cleaned up, but they made sure they took the stuff that I said that they could have since I didn’t want to move it back home. When I came in the next day they were already gone leaving behind a mess. However, aside from not packing or cleaning, his room was DISGUSTING!
It was literally really nasty, moldy, and had jolly ranchers and gum perfused to the floor tile which I and my mother had to spend all day cleaning. This, however, was still not his biggest crime.
That idiot stole my Warhammer 40K miniatures and vehicles, and probably my X-Wing tabletop game backpack with all the supplies and ships. All of which I painted, built, or refinished myself.
That was around 350 dollars of stuff and irreplaceable sentimental value. While I didn’t get him red-handed, there were precious few other suspects, and he also played 40K.”
1. He Lied About Paying The Bills
“I knew Roommate beforehand and we had recently started working at the same job (I got him the job).
Roommate basically told me that he can’t still live with his parents when he’s 30, and he was 29 and said I was the only person he knew who was looking for a place (I wasn’t, was staying with my parents as well but didn’t really mind). Basically got pressured into moving in with him.
So first it’s worth mentioning that Roommate was the biggest bum in the world; he’d come unannounced into my room just about every day and talk at me, even when it’s clear I don’t want to talk to him.
When we moved in, I made it clear that I didn’t trust him – he was notorious for being late on bills or otherwise out of cash – and that we’d put only his name on the lease, so if something happened and he didn’t pay his bills, it was on him and not me. He was kinda upset about this but eventually, he agreed and we got things going
A few times he had issues paying bills, and let me know, but it wasn’t really my problem so I let him handle it. Once he realized I wouldn’t help, he started making sure the Internet was the last thing he paid; if he couldn’t afford internet, I had to pitch in and pay the remainder because I wasn’t going without, so I ended up paying a good bit into that.
We got some new kittens after a few months, to help keep my cat company; I only wanted one, but he showed up one day with two and one was his. They had issues with litter box training, and roommate would get very angry at them and literally throw them into the bathroom, turn off the lights, and shut the door for hours. When I noticed this happening I made sure to let them out, but he threatened to move out if I stopped him.
After a while, he started claiming he could tell which cat was guilty, and it was always my kitten and not his. I made it clear that cats don’t learn from punishment and this is just animal abuse, but he didn’t seem to care. Eventually, he started ‘punishing’ my big cat as well, so I confronted him and let him know that if he touches my pets again I would leave immediately.
So that mostly put a stop to it, but the kittens are still to this day super skittish and afraid of hands
The roommate was also weirdly paranoid about most things. I had a shotgun in my room, which basically as soon as he found out about it, any time he heard a noise around the house or someone was at the door, he’d burst into my room and grab my shotgun.
He would constantly talk about how if someone tried to rob us he couldn’t wait to blow them away, a bit of a psycho and it made me really nervous to have him touch my gun. Eventually, I hid the shotgun, which was good because we did have a guy show up at our door once pointing a pistol – luckily roommate was out front with him, so I got the shotgun and waved it around until the guy ran off; roommate was upset that I didn’t shoot him.
So fast forward past a few years of lots of other minor problems caused by living with a bum; one day we get a knock on the door and I notice it’s police officers out there. Roommate is already talking to them so I just go hang out back in my room; he comes back in shortly and tells me we’re being evicted. I’m shocked; I’ve been paying rent regularly and had my bank set up to autopay into my roommate’s account so he could pay the landlord my half of rent.
Well, as I’m sure you can all guess, he wasn’t paying the landlord. He would directly take my cash and buy things with it. Luckily, as mentioned, I made sure something like this wouldn’t be my problem when all this started. So I just moved back to my parents’ place, no problems, and let him keep the kittens that he had ruined psychologically.
Around the same time, I was trying to get rid of my old car, and my Roommate found a friend of his that wanted to buy it.
It was a salvage title in pretty bad condition, so $500 and that was it, I gave him the key for a test drive. When it came time to move out, I never heard from them again; at the end of the day, it seemed like a really good investment – $500 to make sure that guy never contacts me again, because he knows if he calls me, I’m going to ask about the cash.”
