People Narrate Their Memorable Encounters With A Roomie
34. In The End, I Got A Cat
“So I had two hateful roommates back to back. We’ll call the first one Pablo. Both these situations took place in my first apartment after moving out of my parent’s house. Pablo lived in my city for over a year before moving in with me. We were friends before he moved here and he moved to work for his uncle, when I found out he did so, we started hanging out.
At first, he was a cool guy, introduced him to my friends, he got along fairly well with them, could be a bit of a jerk sometimes, but who can’t be?
After living here for about a year and working for his uncle, he got hit by a car, broke his arm, and ended up moving back home with his mom, 7 hours away. Might I add that about a week after he broke his arm, on a whim I drove him back home to see his mom on her birthday, paying out of pocket for gas and food.
He was a friend, and I will still do almost anything to help my friends, even after 2 awful roommates/friends. So Pablo lived with his mom for about 7 months, came back to visit a few times, hung out, we were fairly good friends at the time. As he was there longer and longer, he complained more and more about being there, missed his friends, mom driving him crazy, all that and he wanted to move back.
His Uncle wouldn’t hire him back, so he needed a job. About 2 months before he moved back he came to visit and spent a week handing out resumes so he would have a job when he moved back, or so I thought.
The lease for our apartment was in my name, he wasn’t in the city when I moved in. Two weeks later my dad and I drove his truck seven hours to get him and all his stuff.
He told me he had six interviews lined up for the week after he got back. I was working 50+ hours a week at the time, so I didn’t know what he was doing with his time. He told me that he was spending all his time looking for work (the six interviews led nowhere if they even existed), while he was unemployed his mom was paying his way, food, rent, bus passes, everything he needed. After 4 months of me working like crazy and him ‘looking for a job’ he had to go back home all of a sudden for a few days, found out later it was to help his mom move.
She had to move into an uglier part of town and a smaller place because she couldn’t afford both their rents. I worked shift work then, I would get home at 4 am and he would be awake playing Skyrim on my Xbox, get up in the morning at 5 on the other shift and he would be awake, playing Skyrim. He played non-stop for most of the time he lived with me, if he wasn’t, he was out ‘looking for a job’ with a guitar on his back wearing dirty clothes and for the most part looking almost homeless.
Not because he couldn’t afford clothes or laundry, he was just a lazy idiot. He spent lots of his mother’s cash on drinks, to the point he was regularly very late paying rent. Also ate my food all the time. Working as much as I was, and driving there and back, I had little time to do things like groceries, I would buy what I needed for the week, and then run out halfway through.
So far there hasn’t really been much aside from a lazy jerk. Well, I noticed he hadn’t played my Xbox for about a week, which was unusual for him. I went to play and sure enough, it died. When I confronted him about it, he got annoyed, and very defensive, saying he didn’t know, wasn’t the cause, not the least bit responsible when he had been playing it 8+ hours a day since he moved in.
I’m not a confrontational person, so I didn’t pursue it. He would routinely smoke in the apartment when I wasn’t home thinking I wouldn’t know, I did. All the furniture was mine and I was not ok with this. When he did smoke on the balcony he either threw them off or on the balcony itself. People littering at all annoys me. After weeks of asking him to use an ashtray, he cleaned off the balcony by sweeping then off the edge.
He never did dishes, which were all mine (other than his bed, laptop, guitar, and clothes he didn’t own anything), never cleaned despite anything but free time, denied any mess that was his, even if it was made when I was at work or asleep. Towards the end, he stopped bathing and all my furniture smelled like butts and smoke. Even after all his stunts, and this is only what I can remember at the moment, I didn’t want to kick him out.
It may not seem that bad compared to a lot of the other stories here, but when someone you consider a friend acts like this, it hurts more. In the end, when he just didn’t pay rent and started treating my friends like garbage, I convinced him to move back with his mom, I was still too much of a jerk to kick him out.
That didn’t happen with the next one.
Roommate number Two, we will call him Slick. Slick and I had been friends since 6th grade, so 8-9 years at this point, I figured it would be safer than Pablo. It wasn’t. He had two jobs and a significant other of four years when he moved in. Had a dog, a cat, and a snake when he moved in, I didn’t have any pets.
The cat wasn’t supposed to come with him. The first time I ever met the cat, it was terrified of everyone, still was up until he moved in. With the cat. No biggie, I dealt with it. Within two weeks of moving in, he dumped his significant other of four years via text message. The jerk thing to do, but not really my place to judge.
His dog was a pretty cool, well-behaved, smart, nice dog when he was around. When he wasn’t, it got into everything, chewed on everything, acted like a jerk. I came to realize when he lived there why his dog acted like that and his cat was terrified of people. He was an animal abusing idiot. I didn’t know because I never saw it before that, we never hung out at his old place, so when the dog was around it behaved perfectly.
After breaking up with the girl he tried to become an instant ladies man, it didn’t work too well (that’s not why I called him slick), but he bragged a lot. He ended up meeting this girl who had a partner at the time. She was a friend of a mutual friend’s significant other. She was a pretty messed up person, had everyone attempting to lie to her significant other about where she was and what she was doing and with who.
I didn’t know the guy, which was good for her because I wouldn’t have lied for her. She lived with this guy that worked two jobs to support her, and while he was at work, was sleeping with my roommate who also had lots of free time because he got fired from one of his jobs a month after moving in. He was fired for going 140 in a 100 zone in a company car, would have lost his license if he hadn’t cried to make the cop feel bad for him.
After he lost his job he started being late with bills, I was back at college so I didn’t have extra lying around to pay when he was late. That just added to the stress of it all. While they were fooling around she would bring her dog to the apartment, which at first I didn’t mind as long as it wasn’t going to happen a lot.
I was petless and his three were already too much, especially when he never cleaned up after them. I ended up saying no dog after it peed and pooped on the floor because they were both ignoring it. His dog would frequently be let out onto the balcony to go to the bathroom, something I had, at the time thought I ended as soon as I found out.
She ended up breaking up with the guy and started going out with Slick, something I tried to warn him about.
This happened shortly after Christmas. he was almost a month late with rent in January because he bought himself 2 more snakes for Christmas instead. Something I didn’t know about at the time and was super annoyed about when I found out a week later.
After they started going out it only got worse, he almost got fired from his other job, stopped cleaning up after himself or his pets. Would disappear for days at a time with the dog without saying anything, or making sure his cat had food and water. During this time the cat and I actually started to get along pretty well, he realized not all people are abusive, neglectful idiots.
When he returned the dog would eat 2 days worth of food in one sitting, presumably because it hadn’t eaten in two days. The rule for his significant other’s dog still stood, neither of them was happy about it. Things started going missing when she was around, movies, coins from my change jar, among other things. The bathroom would smell like smoke after she was there, even though he swore she didn’t smoke.
Once winter hit he started letting the dog use the balcony as a toilet again, something I didn’t know until the snow melted. Late February I got home late and we were greeted by her dog barking from his room, I told him it had to go. She left with the dog, came back 15 minutes later without it, at the time I thought she brought it to a friend of his that lived in the same building.
Turns out she locked it in his car for the last two hours she was there. In the middle of Canadian winter. It was -15°C or -4°F. It was a small dog, I’m surprised it didn’t die. When I found out I came close to snapping. The new rule, she was no longer welcome, between the dog getting locked in a car in the winter, and my things going missing I was done with her nonsense.
Not surprisingly, this didn’t bode well for what was left of our friendship. We didn’t talk much in the following weeks, he tried to argue against her being banned from the apartment, but I was unwilling to give in. It only got worse from there, all the things he was doing became more severe until I lost patience a week into April when he told me he wouldn’t be paying rent until the end of the month, car insurance was more important.
Between all of his stunts, stress from school, and the fact that I had all but lost what was once a good friend, I had a panic attack. The only one I’ve ever had. After talking things through with my dad, I mustered up the courage to confront him.
After he told me he would be paying a month late if at all, I informed him he had until 8 pm to have his things out (it was 8 am).
I had my brother come over to hang out for the day in case he tried to do anything. After being told he had to leave, he went back into his room until noon. I got a call from his furious mother, who after hearing what was really going on became considerably less mad. I helped him pack all his stuff from the common areas for a couple of reasons, one, I wanted him out sooner rather than later, and two, I didn’t trust he wouldn’t steal anything.
By 9 pm he was still moving stuff, I still don’t know what he spent all the time doing, half his packing was done by me, and most of his other belongings were snake tanks, a bed, and a dresser. Once 10 pm rolled around he was gone, with most of his things. He left a huge pile of garbage and what I assumed to be snake poo in the bedroom.
Ignored calls to come to clean it. While all this was going on the cat was locked in my room. When he was getting near the end the slimy girl asked me to get the cat, her sister was going to take it. She was just as nasty as her sister. Over the course of his living there, the cat and I became bros. No way my buddy was going with her, he didn’t even care.
I found out a few months later she was pregnant. Right after the baby was born he left her, because, shocker, she was lying to him. None of our mutual friends wanted anything to do with him after they saw all his stunts. In a way, I almost feel bad, until I remember how poorly he treated me and his pets.
This may not surprise anyone, but believe it or not, once the cat was taken care of and not abused, he stopped being scared of people.
He’s the friendliest cat I’ve ever met, and I’m definitely happy when Slick moved in he brought my kitty bro with him because it’s now over two years later, and he’s an awesome cat.”
33. His Trip Across America Became My Break
“Rented a house with a dude I didn’t really know all that well beforehand.
A friend of a friend. We were both musicians and wanted a house that we could use for recording/playing music. Awesome. I get to live in a house in the country for pretty cheap and get to do music stuff whenever I want.
This dude turned out to be an extreme narcissistic/borderline sociopath. He could do absolutely no wrong and anything bad happening in his life was, of course, not his fault but everyone else’s.
He would leave cabinets and drawers wide open in the kitchen and then get upset when I asked him to please close them when he was done taking stuff out of them. During the conversation, it was blatantly obvious that he was disinterested in anything you had to say. He also chose to sleep on the couch every single night even though he had his own bed in his own room, thus making what should have been a communal area not very communal. He claimed that he was a Christian but used his faith more as validation for the judgment of others than anything else.
Now granted I wasn’t the best roommate. I worked the third shift and wasn’t friendliest due to constant lack of sleep/exhaustion. I am also very nonconfrontational so instead of trying to talk things out with him, I chose to hide in my room. He would typically get home around 3 pm which was the middle of my night. So I would wake up and have to pee, look out the window and see his car and just decide to hold it.
If he was home on the weekends and I had nowhere to go I would just hide in my room. Only coming out for food or absolute bathroom emergencies. I was at one point considering peeing into bottles so I wouldn’t have to go out and be around him. I gave myself a UTI from just holding it all the time.
Things came to a boiling point when he left to bike across America.
He had been training for 4 or so months and finally left. He said he would be gone for about 3 months. We lived in Ohio so he had someone drive him out to Maryland to start. It was absolutely glorious. I realized what chaos I had been living in and just how complacent to the situation I was. I had friends over for campfires and movies which I never did when he was around.
I started writing music again and was even sleeping better.
It was short-lived though. One week into this glorious reprieve I was napping on the couch and heard keys in the door. His mom comes through the door saying that he will be here in about an hour. He decided it was going to be too hard and was coming home. Props to him though because he made it from Maryland all the way to Cincy before throwing in the towel.
I was immediately depressed and anxious at the thought of having to go back to living as I had been.
I sought out advice from my parents and friends that day as I tried to figure out what to do. I went home that night and told him either he moves out or I do. Things aren’t working for me and I need a change.
He agreed to move out and I gave him a month to find a new place. I offered to let him keep his name on the lease so he wouldn’t tank his credit and agreed to take over all payments. I woke up the next morning, went over to my parents to help my dad with some firewood, and when I came back that evening all his stuff was gone.
I don’t think I have ever felt as much unbridled joy as I did in that moment of walking through the door to all his stuff being moved out and knowing I wouldn’t have to put up with him anymore.
I haven’t heard from him since and still have a peacoat and a clothes iron he left behind. I really do hope that he’s doing well and has realized what an absolute pain he was and is working on becoming a better person.
I would also be curious to hear his side of this story. As I said I wasn’t perfect but maybe I could’ve made more of an effort to make things work.”
32. She Calls 911 Because We're Shouting At Each Other
“My Junior year, I moved out of the dorms into an apartment with a girl that I’d known since my Freshman year. She’d had the apartment to herself the previous year but could use the help with splitting the rent, and I think just missed having someone around all the time like you would at the dorms.
It started okay, but with a few tiny things here and there.
She never cleaned out her stuff that was now in my bedroom closet, but I didn’t own a whole lot of stuff, so it was more annoying than actually a problem. Over the first three months of living together we butted heads a few times, but nothing major. She did a great job keeping her stuff clean, we shared cooking responsibilities, she picked up after her cat.
I’d had worse roommates in the dorms, to be honest.
Around November, I start seeing a mutual friend of ours, and that appears to have been the tipping point. Suddenly she’s very angry with me, most of the time, and I tell her that maybe we just weren’t meant to be roommates. She starts looking for someone else to come in the next semester, I arrange things to move back into the dorms. She didn’t think I was trying hard enough to find a replacement roommate, which was fair, but I was also immature and didn’t really think it was my problem.
Around Thanksgiving, she’s got an applicant to sublet next semester in the living room. I came in, so she was with someone, dropped something off in my room, and left. I didn’t need to be around for her interviewing her next roommate. I come back a few hours later, and she’s got the radio on obnoxiously loud. I’m clambering underneath the sink for some pots and pans to make something to eat, and when I get up, she’s standing in the kitchen yelling at me about how if I’m just going to ignore her, I should leave right now.
Honestly, between the music and the pans, I never heard her. So now we’re shouting at each other (again, I was immature), which ratchets up to her calling 911.
The cop shows up, talks to us both separately, and then together. She says that with all of the yelling, she was afraid I was going to hit her. The cop asks if I did. Well, no. He tells me that if I’d so much as touched her, I would have gone to jail that night.
I thank him for letting me know that crimes have consequences, and if there are any other things I didn’t do that would have gotten me in trouble (again, immature). We work out that I’ll be gone in five days, to give me some time to find a place to crash, and she spends that night at a friend’s house.
The next four days are spent leaving increasingly hostile passive-aggressive notes to each other in the apartment, and finding out from a classmate (my roommate and I were both in the same minor program) that her story was that her roommate had grabbed her by the wrist and twisted it, so she’d been wearing a brace.
I then had to out myself as the roommate in question, and tell them the same story, which was that the police officer was clear that had I so much as brushed against her, it would have been an assault, and I would have been locked up, which didn’t happen.
I ended up spending the last three weeks of the year bouncing between a coworker’s house and a friend from high school’s dorm room floor, as student housing didn’t have a place to put me for that short of a time.
I saw the roommate in passing a few times but had actually finished with the minor program that semester, so that was more or less the end of it. And yeah, if she wrote about it, I’m sure I’d be the worst roommate experience.”
31. His Room Smells Like Salami
“We had a guy called Anatole (somewhat pertinent to the story). He wasn’t awful. Your typical hateful flatmate. Didn’t do anything all around the house and his room smelled, quite inexplicably, of salami.
It was a garbage/party flat anyway though, so no big deal.
He did set up his PC in the lounge one day, essentially taking over our social space without asking anyone. Then he’d Jabba the Hutt out for days on end playing some vampire RPG. That was pretty messed up. (The fact that he commandeered our lounge, not the gaming, we all loved games.)
Then he disappeared. We realized he’d done a runner and hadn’t paid his rent for a few weeks. So he owed us a couple of hundred or something like that.
The glorious thing was, he stupidly left his Warhammer figurine collection behind. And this was quite a collection. Hand-painted. Loads of them. A friend of ours who knew about Warhammer stuff said this collection was easily worth three or four times more than he owed us.
Sweet. So we start looking into selling it to cover rent and maybe fund a weekend of drinking and we move on with our lives.
Anyway. Anatole pops by one night about a week later and is all ‘hey guys what’s up? How ya been?’ He’s so blatantly looking behind couches and things trying to scope his collection but also trying to be super cool and pretend he doesn’t owe us anything.
We’re all sitting around playing cards and drinking and we all play it cool too. ‘Hey mate, how’re things? Where are you living at the moment? We have about three minutes of awkward small talk and then he asks if we’ve seen a large black chest around with a Warhammer logo on it.
My mate who was the guy who handled the bills says ‘Nah man sorry.
D**n. We’ve had a few pretty epic parties since you moved out. Hopefully, no one stole it or something. Oh and hey man some of your rent didn’t go through can we grab that off you when it’s convenient?’ (Fully giving this guy a chance to be cool and square things away with us.)
Anatole goes white as a sheet and says some story about paying us tomorrow blah blah excuse.
Then he left.
We sent him a text about an hour later that went something like this:
‘General Anatole.
Your army is in our clutches.
Honor your agreement and we will be lenient and grant their freedom.
Should you choose not to pay the reparations owed to us, we will slaughter them to a man.
You have until nightfall, three days hence to meet our ultimatum.
For good or for ill.’
He paid the next day and we gave his things back.”
Another User Comments:
“My cousin pulled a similar thing with her sister (who is a complete jerk). We’ll call the jerk sister J. My cousin was away with their other sister at a big family event and they realized they couldn’t use some concert tickets they bought. So they asked J to return the tickets for them since she was at home, and said they’d pay her back for the Metro fare.
J said sure, she’d do it, and did so.
Except, when they returned from the family reunion, J gave them back less than a fourth of the moolah from the refunded tickets they had bought. They asked her where the rest of it was, and J said, ‘Well, I need to be fairly compensated for my time, so I took out enough to compensate myself for the several hours it took me to Metro in and out of the city to return the tickets.
You should be thankful, $10 an hour is CHEAP for someone of my education level.’
My cousin and her other sister were LIVID. They had asked their SISTER to do a FAVOR for them and even offered to pay the transportation, and she just kept most of the moolah as if she should have a wage?! She never asked them about any sort of payment in the first place, just said ‘Yeah, of course, I’ll do it for you!’
But then my cousin realized that, though J had moved almost all of her belongings into their parents’ place, she was spending most of her time at her partner’s. So my cousin selected a few of J’s expensive college textbooks and sold them for slightly more than what J owed them.
I’m not sure if it’s a victory or a loss that J never noticed the missing books, especially since J is very boastful about how good she is at keeping track of her own things and spending wisely.” Angeldown
30. She Doesn't Care About My Allergies
“I shared a 12×12 dorm room with her, for reference.
She would free bleed and leave trails of her period b***d from our room to the bathroom and not clean it up.
She would leave crusty underwear on the floor on my side of the room, next to my bed, while at the same time she insisted we divide the room with tape, and freaked out if anything of mine crossed that border for 2 seconds.
She was 18 and had a creepy older fiance that stayed over every weekend, and watched her sleep over Skype every weeknight, with me in view of the camera.
She smelled so bad that other students in our hall started making complaints about the stench coming from our room.
The first thing she said to me when I met her was, ‘I’m bi, but you need to know that I don’t find you attractive.’ As if I was going to be disappointed by that news.
She had a bunch of plants in the room that I was allergic to that were making me miserable, and she refused to get rid of them.
I also used to have a roommate who did illegal things in our underground room and stole a bunch of my funds, that was also pretty messed up.”
29. Two Weeks Later, The Bag Is Still There
“I discovered the crazy after the trash didn’t get picked up for three weeks…
The first week, I figured they just missed us. Week 2, our can is full, so we leave a bunch of bags next to it. They take the bags, don’t empty the can. Week three, I chase them down the street to see what is happening. The guy tells me they won’t empty the cans because they are full of two-liter bottles of urine, and they won’t take the risk of one breaking and squeezing on them (sic).
One of my roommates has been peeing in two-liter bottles because he was too lazy to walk to the bathroom, which was literally right next to his room. Shared a wall even. There were dozens of these bottles he had been filling and putting in the trash. I had to pull them all out to get the trash people to dump our can, put them all in some doubled-up contractor bags, and leave that thing in his room.
Two weeks later, the bag is still there.”
Another User Comments:
“In all fairness to the trash guys, that is classified as a biohazard I think. There are special protocols for disposing of such waste, and they usually involve a special waste management pickup and not your average garbage dudes.” Dagerbo0ze
Another User Comments:
“I know a guy who would do something similar. The bathroom was directly outside his bedroom but he preferred to keep the window next to his bed open and..aim.
They had to replace the drywall and some of the roof when he moved back to his mom’s place.
The weirdest part is he and his roommates are still friends.” lohype
28. He Wouldn't Have Changed If It Weren't For The Girl
“One of my roommates in College:
Insulted me daily, threw stuff at me from across the room, wrote mildly insulting music regarding me, and sang it poorly.
The worst however was borderline stalking behavior.
I went to the library, so did he. If I left for somewhere when he wasn’t in the room for whatever reason he would hunt me down, he was scary good at figuring out where I was going. I became better at hiding where I was going. I left town for a day in the middle of the week. From what I heard he spent hours going to all my usual spots.
The oddest behavior was when he made an account on an MMO I played just to follow me around and spam insults in chat. 4 accounts of his got banned before he gave up.
He eventually dropped a lot of the behavior when he somehow landed a girl. I was about a day away from going to the room advisory office and demanding one of us be moved to a different room or killing him and hiding the body.”
27. Old Roommate Acts Like My Mom
“Worst roommate ever was a 56-year-old lady who let me stay in a room for free. She’s somewhat of a family friend.
I (a 20-year-old female), keep things clean, never am too loud, try to be considerate, etc. This crazy woman tells me that my significant other at the time needs to leave before midnight. Disgruntled, I agreed and abide by the rule.
Next, she tells me I’m not allowed to keep my bedroom door closed anymore, for any reason. More disgruntled, I abide and try to hang out elsewhere.
I come back one night a week later and she’s placed all my stuff on the curb saying I’m acting inappropriately and irresponsibly. She then gave me a lecture about how my significant other was no good and was a stupid failure who will never amount to anything (my significant other sustained brain damage from a car accident).
Needless to say, I grabbed my things and we’ve never spoken again.
Not until she asked for custody of my siblings if my parents should die…”
26. She Locked Us Out Of The House
“I lived in a house with the girl who owned it, my partner and 6 months old, and another friend. The girl that owned it didn’t have a job and asked us all to move in to help pay bills so her parents (that bought her the house) wouldn’t get screwed on their loan.
We’d been there maybe a month. This chick never left her bedroom in the attic, except when she snuck down to eat my food. She never got a job, or contributed in any way, except to ask when we were paying her. Did I mention she owned like three cats? Three cats she couldn’t afford, might I add. I had to buy them food or they’d starve.
She also NEVER EVER cleaned the litter box. And she kept it downstairs with all of us. It reeked of ammonia, with poop piled so high it spewed out onto the floor.
I finally got sick of cleaning up her mess and told her that when I got back from work that litter box better be clean, I have a BABY living here and I don’t like her being out of our room because it smells.
I go to work. My significant other took our baby in the stroller (without a diaper bag, the idiot) to the store a block away. He didn’t take the keys to the house. And that crazy woman locked us out. She refused to let him in. The baby was screaming for a bottle so he broke a window to try to crawl in to get her formula, which she refused to give us.
He calls me at work, tells me what happened, and that the cops could only make her give us our baby things back. She swore we had NOTHING there and that we were trying to steal from her.
I seriously want to kill that jerk. I got some of my things back, after somehow getting legally screwed into paying her rent for all the time our stuff sat there while she was holding it hostage.
She kept all my cool stuff. And she kept these nick-nacks that were sentimental (my grandmother had painted chess pieces, and I got some after she passed). I’m still annoyed, and that was six years ago.”
25. Imaginary Intimacy, Dumb Dialogue, And Sprinting
“One of my friends had a housemate with a rather interesting routine… and he had (as far as I know) absolutely no idea that anyone else was aware of it.
His first step – at least from what I could hear – would be to close his door and address some imaginary woman who had apparently sneaked inside when he wasn’t looking.
‘Well, what are you doing here?’ he’d say, his voice audible through the wall. ‘Uh-huh. Oh, really? Well, I guess I’d better take my pants off, then.’
A few seconds would pass, after which he would speak again. ‘So, how about you take off your clothes, too? I’ll just lay here and wait for you to be ready. Oh, you’re ready now? Well, go ahead and climb on top of me, then.’
It would be several minutes before anything else would become audible… but then the next part of his routine would begin. Anyone within earshot would hear the guy’s bedroom door open and then slam, after which he’d sprint down the hallway to the bathroom and slam that door. He’d be in there for a few minutes, the toilet would flush, and then we’d all be treated to a second performance of him slamming the door, running down the hall, and locking himself in his bedroom.
So, in short order, his routine went like this:
Click
‘Oh, look, a sneaky woman!’
‘Now we’re both exposed!’
Silence…
SLAM
Rapid footsteps
SLAM
Silence…
Toilet flushing.
SLAM
More rapid footsteps
SLAM
From what I’ve heard, he’d do this every night. At one point, someone suggested that he might have been talking to a webcam model or something, so they ‘accidentally’ reset the router after hearing the guy’s door close… but he went right through the same routine, talking to someone who wasn’t there before beating a hasty retreat to the bathroom.”
24. His Female Friends Are Not Just His Friends
“The Idiot was completely our mistake – we found him on craigslist to fill a room. He moves in and just seems a little weird for the first couple of days as he’s getting settled. Then he decides that, since we’ve been so nice, he’s going to make us dinner.
Dinner, it turns out, was spaghetti with a slightly heated jar of Ragu (the brand) on it. Okay, fine – he can’t cook. Whatever. Only… he seems to only eat noodles. And not with pasta sauce, either, but with like a fist-sized hunk of not-butter (vegetable oil spread) melted into it. Also, there’s a smell developing, and we’re realizing slowly it’s him. He was on a bunch of medications, so that might’ve played a role in the smell, but there was also the fact that we never once saw him go to a laundromat.
Occasionally, though, he’d camp out in the bathroom for over an hour, and we’d hear these wet slapping sounds from inside. We figure he’s probably washing his clothes in the bathtub. Okay, so… he’s weird… But we’re laid back. We can make it work. Then it gets worse… First, he tries his hand at dinner again. ‘Hey, guys! I got a great deal on chicken!
I’m going to cook dinner again!’ ‘What… kind of a deal, Idiot?’ ’10 pounds for $3.50!’ Not per pound. Just $3.50. That’s $0.35 per pound chicken… which he proceeded to place on a cookie sheet, still frozen, into the oven to bake. At this point, we just feel sad for the guy, but we still disappeared before the meat was ‘cooked’. When we got back, he’d eaten ALL of it.
The bones were in the trash, red like cherries because he’d basically eaten it all raw. Sad… and disgusting.
Next, Monday rolls around and he tells us that each Monday he MUST watch RAW wrestling. In turn, each of us (who dislike wrestling intensely) goes and tries to figure out what he gets out of it. Being sarcastic jerks, each of us can’t help but make our own snide comments… to which he EXPLODES, screaming in rage, and demands that we take back anything we said that related to pro wrestling being scripted. He absolutely, 100% believed pro wrestling was candid and real. So… so sad.
But we lost pity quickly thereafter. Soon enough, he’s keeping my ex up at night chatting until sunrise online. We ask him to stop, he doesn’t. Turns out, he’s voice chatting with girls back in NJ where he’s from. And soon enough… he starts getting packages from these girls. Bragging about the packages. Which are full of food and cash, because these girls are his partners.
We are now repulsed – but wait! He drops on one of us one day, ‘Oh, yeah – by the way, my girl is going to move into my room..’ No. No, she is not, Idiot. He bit his lip when we put our foot down, but that was it for us. Since he was STILL voice chatting all night, we started to remove the splitter that allowed him to have an internet connection in his room whenever we went to sleep.
Two nights was all it took – as I’m getting ready for work one morning I hear him just SCREAMING at one of our female roommates. This dude was over 6 feet, the roomie he’s yelling at was 5 foot nothing. Inappropriate to the extreme. Then I hear my significant other stomp into the room and get into the mix. He screams at her, calls her nasty names, and I intervene.
No-fuss, no discussion, nothing – I remind him he’s subletting, he has no rights, he signed a document we gave him saying he has no right to notice – ‘get out’. Called him a cab and told him to get all his stuff back into the one bag he originally brought it in. He was gone within the hour. He finally got a job after that – since he didn’t have one the two months this all unfolded over – and we’d see him now and then working at the convenience store down the street we frequented. He never spoke to us, but we were friends with the rest of the staff.
They were amazed we put up with him as long as we had.
Last we heard of him, one day his boss told him he’d cleaned something improperly. He evidently looked off into space for something like a solid minute, said nothing, and just literally ran out the building, across the parking lot, across the street, and across the empty lot beyond, out of sight.
Never, ever find someone to room with you off craigslist without meeting them first. God, we were stupid… but not as stupid as that guy. (Oh, he was also probably AWOL from the Navy – nearly forgot that part… what a s*****k).”
23. She Loves Zero Sugar Soda
“I was looking for a roommate when I was starting graduate school. I’m a guy, but I enjoy living in a clean apartment. I’m not a neat freak or anything, but I like things to be presentable. Most of my college guy friends were pretty gross, so I thought, ‘Girls are clean! I’ll live with one of my female friends!’ One of my friends, we’ll call her Jane, that I knew through a mutual volunteer group was also looking for a place.
She said she WAS a neat freak and LOVED cleaning! I thought, ‘Great! This will work out well.’
Jane was the most disgusting human being I have ever encountered in my life, and also a pathological liar. When she ate a banana, she would peel the banana and just drop the peel on the floor. When Jane used eggs to cook, she would put the broken covering of eggs back in the fridge.
‘Hey Jane, can you do your dishes?’ I would say every day. ‘They just need to soak for a bit!’ She would answer. Fast forward to four days later and the same dishes are in the sink building up a nice layer of mold. The worst part? WE HAD A DISHWASHER! She didn’t even have to DO anything! Just put them in the dishwasher!
She also took two to three hour-long showers every day (water was included in our rent, so why not, right?), and would run through half a roll of toilet paper every day. Doing what? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.
Jane would fill up our trash can with the thirty cans of zero sugar soda she drank every day, then make me take out the trash.
‘I’m too weak to take out the trash, my epilepsy is acting up!’ Do you know what’s causing your ‘epilepsy’? DRINKING THIRTY CANS OF DIET SODA AND ZERO SUGAR SODA EVERY DAY, YOU IDIOT! EVER HEARD OF ASPARTAME POISONING??? Ugh! She also refused to drink water because she ‘didn’t like the taste.’ Those ‘migraines’ you get? Yeah, it’s probably dehydration!
Every day when she got home from classes, she would take an hour-long shower, put on a bathrobe, sit on the floor, and eat junk food in front of the TV.
Pretty sure she never washed that bathrobe once; The bottom half of it got all grimy, and the spot where she sat on the floor got grimy too. There was a massive, circular stain of Jane’s corruption on our carpet.”
22. There Were Coins Everywhere
“Not permanent roommates, but when I was in high school, I was on the wrestling team. Every year, regardless of whether or not someone from our team made it or if our team made it, we go as a team to the state tournament. To watch and whatnot. We would stay in a hotel for a few nights since it was a weekend event. Our rooms/roommates were assigned by the coaches and we were not supposed to switch rooms.
I was a freshman at the time, and I got stuck with these two kids, Triston and Jon, who are really weird, and these two other guys who were okay.
Anyway, one time we went to watch the tournament matches for the day, and when we got back, my roommate Triston was just sitting at the desk in the room, cutting up springs and putting the pieces together to make chain mail.
Was there doing that all day apparently.
However, it gets MUCH weirder.
On the last night we were in the hotel, we basically decided as a team that we were all going to go to the hotel pool. I and my roommates were getting into our trunks and whatnot to go down, and right before we leave, Jon says he needs to do something first. Okay whatever, we just go down without him.
Eventually, he gets down there and we all have a good time in the pool.
After we’re all done, we go back to the room to get ready for lights out. We walk in the door and I go towards the bathroom to change out of my wet suit.
I open the door and there are just coins all over the floor and sink. Pennies, dimes, quarters.
Like 150 coins spread out haphazardly on the floor. Then I noticed weird red stains on the seat and the bowl of the toilet. I thought it was maybe b***d, but it looked too brightly colored and it looked flakey-dry. I called in my roommates and asked who this was from. Everyone denied it. We asked Jon if it was him since he stayed behind, and since it was not like that before we went to the pool.
He claimed it wasn’t, but agreed to clean it up anyway.
We never figured out what happened and that kid Jon never said if he did it. He was not on the team the next year.”
21. He Called His Family To Say Goodbye
“I had a dormmate who would watch naughty videos just 5 feet away from me while I was playing video games. This is the same guy who told my friend that ‘if he stopped watching naughty videos, he’d have a girl by the end of the week.’
Well, we got tired of this and my other friend and I decided to teach him a lesson. My first friend and I were watching South Park in our dorm one day while the dude (M from now on) was goofing on his PC. All of a sudden, he turns off his PC via the power button and starts watching with us.
A few minutes later, he asks me, ‘Hey man, can you be tracked over Kazaa?
Like the stuff you download?’ I answer with a vague ‘maybe, but I doubt it.’ He goes back to goofing off and I get an IM from my other friend.
‘I just IMd M and told him I was with the FBI and that we had been monitoring his downloads of illegal music and videos. I used an account called ‘the_pandanator’.’ (As an aside, this friend didn’t care for grammar or punctuation, so I can only imagine what that IM conversation looked like.)
We leave M behind to go get dinner together, and I come back an hour later to him standing facing the inside of his closet (it wasn’t walk-in), with his shoulders bouncing in tears. He wails at me, ‘My life is overrrrr!’ in his nasal voice. He recounts in tears about how he got contacted by the Feds while I keep my best poker face.
He then proceeds to call his family, grandparents, aunts, etc. I overheard one conversation: ‘Well, Grandma, I probably won’t be seeing you for a while… no, I can’t talk about it right now…’
As he goes through his contacts, he becomes more and more pitiful. At this point, I’m thinking he might do something rash, so I start freaking out. I eventually convince my friend to call him and say it was all a joke.
After hearing it was a joke, M simply says tepidly, ‘heh, y’all got me good.’ That was the last time we heard of it. And the last time he judged my friend’s personal habits.”
20. Hands Down The Worst Roommates Ever
“I had just broken up with someone and needed a new place to live. A friend of mine from college was tired of living in Missouri and she and her significant other (who I had never met) wanted to come out to live in Seattle.
The three of us decided to share an apartment.
Because I already lived in the area I found a great apartment in a city south of Seattle and paid the deposit with the (written) agreement that they would pay me back 2/3rds of the deposit and we would split utilities three ways.
So we get the apartment and I move in a week before they do, as they were driving from Missouri.
Along the way, they inform me they are bringing cats. This was not in the arrangement but I roll with it and tell them they have to pay the pet rent and pet deposit on their own.
They move in and both have jobs. Come first months rent they only pay half of what they should. They smoke constantly and leave pizza boxes on the floor (in summer) leading to an ant infestation.
They never do dishes.
Four months go by without them paying a single thing toward rent or utilities. Eventually, one quits or loses her job and the other got cut way back on hours to the point of almost unemployment but wouldn’t look for more work.
When I would remind them that rent or utilities were due (always in writing) they would respond that I needed to stop pressuring them because it was affecting their mental health.
Around this time my grandfather died and left me $5k. They reasoned that I could afford to support them. In actuality, I could not. That was supposed to be for a surgery I needed and insurance did not cover it at the time. All of that was spent to keep it all from being homeless including feeding them because I’m a sucker apparently.
It eventually got so bad that I told them they had 10 days to pay up or get out.
They responded that if I wanted the moolah I should sue them. I had absolutely everything in writing as to what they agreed to, all the missed payments for rent and utilities, etc. So I did. I filed a case in small claims court and had them served.
A couple of days later they moved out (without paying) and left most of their stuff there.
The court date came and they no-showed. I had a stack of written correspondence almost two inches thick that I presented to the judge and after he read through it he was quite angry on my behalf. The judge ruled in my favor that they owed everything they agreed to pay and never did, plus 12% compounding interest until it was paid off. This was back in November 2014 and to this day neither has a paid a dime.
Pretty soon here I’m just going to sell the debt to a debt collector to at least recover some of that and the debt collector can try to get it from them.
Oh yeah, and sixty days after they abandoned the lease on our apartment the complex manager came to certify their abandonment (the day they left I closed their bedroom door and didn’t go in until she came back to certify the abandonment) and she was like ‘um… do you know why there is poop in the closet?”
19. Lazy Woman Doesn't Have A Place In Our House
“I took on a ‘friend’ since we worked at the same place. Charged real cheap for a master bed and all utilities.
Mostly keeps to himself. Bit messy and doesn’t do dishes often enough. Meh, was whatever.
Then tells me one night, ‘Hey, could I maybe move in my -significant other- for a while. She’s in a rough spot and it’s for a few months.”
Kay cool, easy peasy. Pays 100$ more a month… thought it was that easy. She moves in with a dog and a few items. Again, cool.
Within a week everything goes downhill. She was a very disgusting thing. Brought roaches, bed bugs, fleas. The dog was a meanie to my rescue husky and sweet blue heeler.
She constantly went on and on about these things she was.
A war vet, detective, c*****l, etc you name it. Really… crazy. She had no job similar to my significant other.. so I straight up said after a month of no effort:
‘You gotta clean up after you and your man or find work now and split responsibility. No lazy butts in this house.’
She yelled at my significant other at the time, ‘Dishes are done and foods cooking right?!’ Audible yes, etc. (I was the breadwinner and we’re a gay couple.)
Of course, nothing comes of it, and I bring down the hammer when I throw 40 plastic plates at both of them and require them done in 1 hour or eviction in 2 weeks. Things got better… she’s still being crazy. She starts buying illegal substances from neighbors… she gets a job 2 days a week at taco bell. Cries cause she’s picked on and ultimately fired because of refusal to show up.
Says they make fun of her. She eventually tries to come at me and my significant other at separate times. I smack her with eviction. Just her. And she’s gone in 3 weeks. Friend follows a month after, he was dumped by her after her eviction.
It was the weirdest situation and frustrating. That was 3 years ago.
12 years ago I had a roommate who dealt illegal substances and swore he was in a gang.
Decided he couldn’t afford to live with us anymore, and just… left. We knew he had a cat, but didn’t know if he locked it in the room. After 3 days of not showing up, we unhinged the door and… the filth… maggots in the carpet, carpet burns.
The cat… was okay no worries. We just kept him around for a bit. After a month, we hocked a bunch of his electronics he abandoned at our place till we got the 500$ in rent.
Gave the cat a loving home. Boy was he annoyed when he showed up 45 days later. What were we to do? He wouldn’t answer, friends/family wouldn’t. He tried to bring some muscle but…
He was undocumented in the apt so we just said we’d call the cops. He had no actual documentation he paid rent or lived there. He gathered his stuff and we cleaned up.
There was one more about 7 years ago. He was an in-between. We actually had him as a roommate twice. Once for a year and then again for 6 months. I overcharged the life outta him because he was a handful and always messing things up.
I’m kinda laying this lightly as reliving those years… boils my b***d.”
18. Please Don't Do It On The Couch
“My friend was having a difficult time getting along with her own roommates so, naturally, I invited her to stay over at my place thinking it wasn’t going to be too long until she found a different place for herself.
She had a somewhat of a long-distance partner who lived 3 hours away, who decided to stay for a weekend without my permission.
One day out of the weekend I left my apartment for less than 10 min to go across the street to the dollar store to grab some candy for a movie night with my significant other. Later that night, came back to a completely awful smell only to find out they were in the middle of hooking up… on my couch!!
I was so full of anger I left immediately as I saw them.
Another story is I’m currently living in a dorm that has a shared common area, shared bathroom, but individual rooms. Upon moving in late August, I had no idea who my roommate would be for the school year. On move-in day both of our family’s were there to help us move in, including her dog.
Now I’ve had dogs all my life growing up so I’m not allergic to them or afraid but when I move into my dorm I did not expect to be living with one or taking responsibility for one. Turns out this dog is her emotional support animal and will be staying with us. Like I said, I had no problem with it until the dog had become an absolute nuisance.
She goes to parties nearly every other night and leaves the dog to dig in the trash or be locked in the dorm all day. I can’t ever leave my door to my room open or it’ll chew one of my things (as it has already chewed one of my items) or beg for food, and I always have a difficult time vacuuming or blow drying my hair because it barks and tries to climb me like a tree.
I’m not a very confrontational person so I’ve been having a difficult time figuring out how to weigh this situation, especially because I find it to be controversial that it is her ’emotional support’ animal. All I know is that when I signed a contract for my dorm I did not sign up for a life with an animal that I did not want.”
17. Ex Roommate Killed My Brother's Cat
“Several years ago I moved to Vegas with my then-roommate and good friend. We had our share of ups and downs trying to get our footing in the brand new big city life but overall had many great times and I thought we were all doing alright.
My brother soon followed after we moved to Vegas and began living with us. We seemed to be a nice albeit slightly dysfunctional family. Fast forward to when my roommate got a partner and moved him in. This caused a slight rift because his significant other was ‘allergic’ to cats and wanted us to get rid of our two cats. This was obviously off the table.
This was our house and we weren’t getting rid of our pets so that his significant other could move in and I also had my doubts he was even allergic. Before moving in he spent loads of time at our place and would barely even so much as sniffle.
Anyway, shortly after he moved in we ended up moving into a new place together. Not even two whole days into the new place, my brother’s cat went missing.
With how weird my roommate and his significant other had been acting my mind went immediately to them. I called my roommate and questioned him, he adamantly denied doing anything to the cat, and honestly, that was the first red flag. When my brother had called me and asked had I seen the cat, I replied calmly, ‘No, I haven’t. Why? Is she missing? When’s the last time you saw her?
Did you check such n such?’ But when I called my roommate directly after it was, ‘NO! I didn’t do anything!! Don’t question me!’ I knew he had something to do with it but figured he purposely left the door open for her to get out, nothing too sinister. WRONG.
For days and days, my brother searched the area, calling her name, shaking around a food dish, knocking on doors, etc. We never found the cat.
I think it’s important to include the fact that my brother was suffering from depression and had ALWAYS wanted a cat of his own. One day when he was particularly down, I surprised him by taking him to pick out his very own cat. He was OVERJOYED and the two had been inseparable ever since. The cat would come to him when he called and would always sleep literally on top of him.
So this was very much an emotional support cat that he had for about a year before this incident. And my roommate knew how much this cat meant to my brother (who is super unproblematic and was always super nice and friendly to my roommate).
Anyways, fast forward some weeks, and my brother, my roommate, and I are all sitting on the couches watching TV when my roommate decides to go hang out in his room.
After he walks out my brother looks down and sees a phone on the couch and asks if it’s mine. I tell him no. We both look at each other for a moment and he immediately jumps up and snatches the phone. He pulls up the messages between our roommate and his significant other and what do we discover? My roommate and his significant other going back and forth talking about how they’re going to put his cat in one of the moving boxes, seal it and throw it in the dumpster and that’s exactly what they did.
We proceeded to read texts that showed them laughing at my brother for crying about the cat and looking for the cat. They also talked about how I accused them of doing something and how ‘I’ll never find out if they just keep their story straight.’ We heard my roommate’s door open, my brother locked the phone and dropped it on the couch where it was left. My roommate had no idea that we’d seen any of the texts.
A few short weeks later I found a job in another state and moved my brother and me out of there before my roommate and his significant other got home from work. Anyone willing to kill a helpless animal who was dearly loved and their very own roommate’s animal at that – can not be trusted. So we dipped… and I haven’t spoken to him since.
He has reached out to my brother and said he ‘misses us’ and I noticed he unblocked me from social media (why he blocked ME I’ll never know) but I have no interest in being his friend or talking to him ever again. On top of that, I got a $1000 light bill that was charged off in my name because I forgot to change it out of my name before I moved. So they just let it go to collections and I ended up having to pay for it to get it off of my credit even though I wasn’t even living there at the time it was being billed. Definitely one of the worst roommate experiences ever.”
16. He Treated His Partner Like Garbage
“The first house I lived in during college was a trip. Got it after a buddy’s manager moved out. Five bedrooms, three baths, generous kitchen, living room, and back patio. Only $1000 a month.
The first curiosity was the decided disposal of some of the possessions abandoned by the previous tenant. Among them was a large stuffed unicorn, about as large as a large dog. I went out to the back deck one day for a smoke when I see a roommate had strung it up under the awning.
And there it hung, for the better part of a year. Every once in a while we’d burn it or stick smoke butts in it. Somehow one of the eyes got cut off, and someone took the horn and stapled it to an old pair of white tights we found. Eventually, it was just too disgusting to look at, so we gave it a dignified retirement on a pyre.
The next was our glass pit. By the largest room’s back door there was a gutter which quite a lot of rain fell about twelve feet into the dirt. It washed out quite a large hole. Well, I come back from class one day and go out back for a smoke when I see a few broken bottles in the pit. And slowly thereon the pit fills with shattered bottles.
It was a blue/brown/green mess of jagged glass shards. By the time we went to clean it out, it had about 3/4ths of a 50-gallon trash can full of glass.
Next, we had our quirky yet dumb roommate who always loved projects. We would talk at length about his wonderful inventions where I would suggest a simple item that already accomplishes his breakout genius plans.
One day he described to me an iPad for two hours before I broke it to him. Well, he got a job driving a truck for some warehouse, and had access to a bit of scrap from work. We got a few large cable spool tables, a large unused batting cage net, and some pallet racks. One of the pallet racks got set up out by our deck (which stood about 5 feet off the ground toward the back of the house) where he stretched the net over it to make a large hammock.
And wouldn’t you know wasted people love hammocks? The next pallet rack got set up in the smallest bedroom, where they threw two ‘repurposed’ dorm couches on top of it and a bed beneath. Add in some suspended sheets and you have a pretty neat pillow fort going on.
Oh yeah, and he also met the love of his life on a week-long cruise and moved down to Puerto Rico to be with her.
They got a place above a bar he worked at when, over the course of a month, they found out that they hated each other’s guts. She moved home and he stayed until he had enough saved for a plane ride home. We don’t bring that one up too often.
We had another roommate who was in between jobs often and mostly supported by his significant other of six years.
But that didn’t stop him from sleeping with everyone. He was raised by a mega-narcissist so he already had some issues. He treated his significant other like garbage, so when it finally came out that he slept with another roommate’s girl, the truth finally sank in and they split up. He moved back home with his parents and came over one night to slash a bunch of tires.
Fortunately, we caught him leaving and got a restraining order. Then a few months later he came back to his ex’s place and slashed their back porch screens up and tried to break in.”
15. Ex's Roommate Was A Liar
“My ex’s roommate was a terror. Visited once and her side of the room looked like a bomb hit it while my significant other’s side was clearly divisible by this line of cleanliness beginning halfway between their beds.
We were trying to get some alone time and she decides to watch a movie with four of her friends on her bed, two of whom are proudly emitting the most noxious farts, volume on her bass-heavy speakers so loud a neighbor came round to complain. This was just the beginning.
She drank constantly, my significant other would wake up to see her going at it with her partner in the bed opposite.
She took a lot of substances and let my significant other find her then just starts laughing when they finally get all the way to the hospital and admits she only took half of what she said she did, didn’t even need her stomach pumped.
She then – and I do not use this term lightly – said that a guy they were friends with abused her, put the house through police interviews and police officers in my ex’s bedroom collecting evidence, only to then break down and admit that it definitely didn’t happen – thanks for making it harder for real victims to be taken seriously, girl.
Threw a full bottle of booze at my ex’s head, thankfully missed, vanished for four days, then moved out without a word.”
14. We Know Exactly Where He Is
“I’ve had some bad roommates. I think the worst was not entirely his fault. This kid was bipolar. On three different occasions, this guy came home in the middle of a manic episode.
Lucky me. Of the two others who lived there, I was the only one who ever had to deal with him when he was like that.
He would absolutely just freak out, yell at everything and everyone, including himself. He would pace the apartment at frantic speeds breathing super hard until I could finally get him some water and have him sit down long enough to breathe.
Then… one day he just disappeared. Now for the first 3 or 4 days, the other two roommates and I did not do anything about it. This guy would disappear for days at a time. We had no idea what his schedule was like. At the time he was a sophomore in college and none of us knew what his class schedule was or if he even had a significant other… or friends for that matter.
He was in a fraternity, and I was friends with one of his fraternity brothers. After I had told my roommates about the manic episodes they had me call his brother and it turned out that no one in the fraternity had seen or heard from him.
After some discussion, we filed a missing person’s report. He had been missing for about 5 or 6 days at that point.
The police show up and we go through the normal motions. About 3 hours later one of the officers came back and said, ‘we can’t tell you where he is, but we can say he is okay.’ All three of us looked at each other and at the same time said ‘psych ward.’ The officer couldn’t stop laughing and left.”
13. She Has No Respect For The Deceased
“My significant other and I had shared an apartment with this girl.
My significant other died suddenly from a tragic accident about 4 months into our lease, and the roommate decided to sue our landlords and threatened to mentally hurt my significant other’s family through hate letters and the like, for letting my significant other (now deceased) out of our lease (and not letting her out of said lease)… yeah… complete jerk. After they denied her out of the lease, she decided to make my life a living nightmare in hopes of getting kicked out of the apartment (stealing me and my deceased significant other’s things, eating my food, breaking me and my deceased significant other’s belongings, etc.) Made grieving for my significant other a whole lot worse.
The other roommate is tricky, only because I found out he was the worst roommate AFTER he had already moved out… A couple of weeks after he moved out, a friend of mine alerted me to an online blog my (now ex) roommate had. In this blog, he had logged every activity of mine (going to the bathroom, sleeping, watching a movie, leaving the apartment, etc.) and also explained in detail different ways he would murder my cat if given the opportunity.
He also lied about certain activities I was doing (saying I was sleeping with someone when I wasn’t, smoking when I wasn’t, etc.) and blasted me from here to China with horrible names, and how he wanted to hurt me physically. Good times.”
12. He Doesn't Take Responsibility For His Friends
“He would throw parties without telling any of us. Literally, the first indication that we would be having a party in our dorm would be the party. The people who would come wouldn’t even be college students.
I remember one time I saw a woman who looked like she was 35 and had a baby with her… at a party. These weren’t low-key parties either. Music blaring until 5-7 am (usually on a weekday too), people going at it on our couch in front of everyone, and the place would be trashed when we got up. Our jerk roommate even had the guts to refuse to clean up, telling us it wasn’t his fault, it was his ‘friends’ and why should he have to clean up their mess?
The best time though was when he broke up with his significant other with who he often would hook up loudly, usually in the shower. His significant other has apparently had a penchant for drama and spent the entire night crying and screaming outside this guy’s door in our dorm room. When we got up the next morning he was still sobbing and muttering incoherently.
However, we were more distracted by all the b***d on our walls. You see, during the night our roommate apparently slammed the door on his ex’s hand, and his ex then went around our dorm smearing his b***d all over everything.”
11. He Thought The Sun Gave Birth To The Planets
“My last roommate was the grossest human being known to man. If his significant other wasn’t expected over for a few days, he just…
wouldn’t shower or brush his teeth. He’d keep bags of trash in his room filled with rotten food for weeks. He’d pee all over the toilet seat, and poop all over the back of it. He’d leave his skiddy underwear on the floor, and his fat significant other would leave her crusty panties everywhere. The scariest thing? He works with food. The idea of that guy touching something I could consume is just disgusting.
Oh, and he thought the sun ‘gave birth’ to the other planets, and that’s why our planets form a line. As in, a diagram in a children’s book with no acknowledgment to orbits. I wish I could make this thing up. He told me this while blasting Skrillex of all things.
He lost his job not even two weeks into moving in. He caught up after a few months of me having to act like his mom and hound him for cash, but getting any was like pulling teeth.
His real mom even came to visit unannounced once and ended up replanting my garden at 8 am without asking. The lease is in my name, where he rented a room from me. He ended up moving out without paying rent or bills. Had to hunt him down and harass him for months. Found him at work wiping raw meat on his apron and preparing a customer’s salad without washing his hands.
I ended up kicking him out and having someone else move in. My house has never smelled better.”
10. He Set My Stuff On Fire
“Lived with a guy (childhood friend) for about six months. He suddenly tells me in the middle of the night after I get off work that he has had a religious epiphany. He was going to Yugoslavia to see the Virgin Mary (it was still a country, before the civil war).
He said he’d be gone for about a week.
The next morning, he’s gone but all his stuff is still in the house. He left an envelope with a gold and ivory rosary and 150 bucks for rent and utilities. Two days later, a dude from Ecuador is on the porch. This guy, Byron, barely speaks English. After about an hour it all falls into place.
My roommate went to Međugorje Yugoslavia, has joined a religious order or something, and was now sub-letting his room to this kid.
Now Byron was alright, at first. Slowly but surely, culture shock set in, and becomes wigged out over my lifestyle. (I was a cook with a small substance problem).
I come home one night after about three weeks and Byron had set all my stuff on fire.”
Another User Comments:
“Like the apt was on fire? He had piled everything in the living room and was dancing around the flames? Or taken everything outside and burned it? What happened afterward?” DancinFoo
Reply:
“Took my clothes, books, stereo equipment, records, piled them up in the backyard. Poured paint thinner and gasoline, torched them.
Because of my habit, I didn’t want to talk to the police.
Jammed what little I had into my car and left.
My original roommate reappeared about six months later. He became some sort of Catholic mystic. He said maybe he should have ‘foreseen’ that Byron and I probably wouldn’t have gotten along.” looki_chuck
9. I Felt Bad About His Abandoned Cat
“The coup de grace was when he moved out and left his cat. It was this black and grey fat cat named Jordy.
I’ll never forget the first time I met Jordy. She was sitting on the stairs and I leaned out to pet her and she clawed me with her paw. Not the best first impression. This never changed. Now in all fairness to Jordy, I used to get wasted and swing her by the arms and sing songs to her.
So anyways, the roommate finally moves out.
I wake up in the morning and who do I see meowing at me for food? That cat Jordy. Of course, he was long gone and never came back to get her. And of course, I started to feel bad for her. Come to find out she had a hateful life with the previous owner. I took care of her for a few years. She never warmed up to me but she’d come into the bathroom and I’d turn the faucet on so she could drink out of the sink, lapping the water up with her paw.
I kept this cat for four years and then finally gave her to my wife’s mom when we got stationed overseas. She’s happy now. Jordy is like Highlander in that there can only be one person she loves. And she loves my wife’s mom. I still kind of dislike the cat to this day, but I’m happy she has a good loving home.
I ran into the old roommate a few years ago at a wedding and he’d totally forgot about the cat.
And that’s why he’s the worst roommate.”
8. Turns Out He Doesn't Go To Interviews
“My roommate came to live with me after living with a mutual friend of ours and her family for a while. He did a lot of weird things but the weirdest was when he would call her (the mutual friend) and tell her he had a job interview the next day conveniently timed about half an hour after her work shift began.
He would put on his one nice shirt, she would pick him up, and he would drop her off at work and ‘drive to the interview’ which we later discovered meant going back to her house, where no one was home, letting himself in with her set of keys, and eating as much of their food and drinking as much of their booze as he could before picking her up at the end of the day.
The entire time he maintained that he had a publishing deal on a vampire novel he’d written and was expecting the check ‘any day now.'”
7. Stop Telling Me To "Chill Out"
“I had a suitemate (I was in one of those dorms where two rooms were connected by a bathroom) who used to constantly come in and take my stuff. As in, I had a TV and he didn’t and when he wanted to watch TV he would take my TV over to his side without saying anything so I would regularly come home to find my TV gone and I would have to go over to his side to take it back.
He would also sometimes take my Xbox as well and delete my Halo save when I was well into level 8. He also did that thing where when he wanted to play a game he would take whatever game was in the system out and put it in the case of the game he wanted to play because he was too lazy to grab the original case so none of my games were ever in the right cases.
And then there was the time that I came home from work to find him and another guy getting wasted on my bed. And whenever I got angry at any of this stuff he would pull the ‘chill out bro’ routine and start telling me that I was the one who was acting unreasonably. My roommate would always back him up too, telling me that I was too attached to my possessions and needed to let go.
They also used to tell me I was wasting my life because I wouldn’t smoke. Neither one of them made it past their first year of college because they spent all their time smoking, surfing, and playing my videogames and never went to class or studied or turned in assignments.”
6. He Attacked Cops
“Freshman year in college I shared an apartment with 3 other guys. We were all great friends first semester but over winter break, the guy I share a hall with changed. He smoked 4-5 times a day (in our shared bathroom) which made our apartment reek.
We warned him plenty of times that he either needed to smoke in his own room or go outside but he refused to listen. After months of warnings, we finally called the cops on him, which was a risky move considering he knew where we kept all of our drinking and illegal practices.
Unfortunately, he smoked all his stuff before the cops showed up so he was not arrested and he only got a warning.
The school provided new locks for all our doors because we thought he would try to retaliate against us, specifically me. Anyways I go to get my new key and in the process of doing so, unbeknownst to me he was going through all my drawers and cleaning out my room. When I returned I called our RMs and they called the police. At the time I had been on antibiotics and he had taken the bottle, so when I told the cops he had taken medicine.
So they arrived wanting to get into his room and save him. Little did they know that the idiot was on substances and had been lying in ambush waiting for them to enter his room. Three total cops responded to the situation and given his previous encounter with police they were also the largest the force had.
Upon entering the room they noticed something was off because all the lights were turned off and my roommate was nowhere to be found.
However, when one of the cops approached the bed my roommate burst from under the covers and attacked the cop with a paperweight dropping the cop. He then was able to get to the second cop and beat him to the ground as well. The third cop attempted to tase my roommate but he missed and hit the second cop. My roommate then attempted to remove the gun from the cop’s holster but luckily was hit by a now reloaded taser from the third cop.
My roommate spent the night in jail but was released on bond the next day. At this point, he had been expelled from school and any interaction with myself or our roommates was prohibited as well as trespassing on school property. Well, he made threats against our lives and successfully reentered our room within 5 hours of getting released from prison. Cops show up to our room, guns drawn and subdue him and take him to jail for a second night.
At this point, I thought he couldn’t possibly get out on bond again but he did. And once again tried to re-enter our building. This same process went for three days until the police were able to process a restraining order for us. On his final attempt to enter the building he was able to escape before police arrived. Our building was locked down, and there was a 24-hour manhunt before he was found breaking into another dorm to steal stuff for illegal substances.
Throughout that day my roommates and I were in protective custody because we found out he was gang-affiliated and had access to firearms.
Anyways he was arrested and committed to a psych ward for schizophrenia and hallucinations. All said in done he had a rap sheet of 3 assaults of the first degree on an officer, 7 counts of trespassing, petty larceny, larceny, and breaking. He accomplished all this in like 5 days.
An investigator also said that he had admitted to stealing our Xbox’s and ps4s for illegal substances earlier in the year when our apartment got broken into. Turned out he faked the robbery to steal our stuff. So yeah that is my messed up roommate.”
5. Gullible Roommate Thinks He Has Cancer
“So, I’ve been living with this guy a couple of months now and we’re pretty tight. Sometimes, he gets really deep and has odd thoughts that he blurts out.
He is basically r/intrusivethoughts spewing nonsense.
One of these outbursts happened a week ago. He says, ‘We put food in our mouths. And eventually, it comes out of our butts. Don’t you think we should inhale throughout mouths–‘ ‘We do.’ ‘–and exhale through our butts?’
Oh my god, he’s having a moment, I think. I say, ‘We do. They’re called farts. They are actually our body exhaling.’
‘But then why do we still use our mouths to exhale, too?’
I feel like I’ve been busted but quickly recover. ‘Well, sometimes food goes out your mouth as well as in. If you exhale through your mouth, it means you’re sick.’
He stares at me for a minute. ‘D**n, I think I have cancer. I can see you’re breathing but your mouth doesn’t open.'”
4. The Suitcase Is Still Covered In Vomit
“My freshman college roommate. On this Tuesday night during finals period, she had one of her high school friends visiting.
They went out drinking on this Tuesday night and came back at 2 am or so. We had just been trying out this new bunk bed idea, and I was on the top bunk, so she stumbles into her bottom bunk, tosses around a little, and I thought she was asleep. Nope. I hear her get out of bed and assume she’s going to the bathroom to puke or something.
Instead, I see her stumble over to my closet and sit down inside like it was in slow motion. As I realized what was happening and tried to jump down from my bed, she begins to projectile vomit. All. Over. Everything. My suitcase, my shoes, all my clothes. Bright pink projectile vomit. Then, she promptly goes back to her bed, passes out, and ignores me the rest of the night, even with her visiting friend trying to get her to take care of herself.
Anyway, I was seething mad (she had also not been the best roommate up to this point), so I got the RAs so that I could handle it reasonably. It’s probably also worth noting that the RAs at my school don’t discipline us for drinking, so this wasn’t getting her in trouble in any way. I took all the quarters she had for laundry and started to do my laundry at 3 am.
By the time I finish, it’s around 5, so I go to bed and wake up 2 hours later to go to my 8:30 class. I get back after my 2 classes at 11:00, promptly go back to sleep, and leave a note telling her not to wake me up under any circumstances, and that we’re going to have to have a real talk about this situation later.
Around 1, she wakes me up and starts apologizing.
First, I told her that I wanted to go back to sleep, but she insisted on apologizing then. So I said, ‘if you want to apologize, then clean out my suitcase because it is covered in your vomit’. She damp-sponged it once and said she was done. It still had puke in all the crevices and stuff, so I told her to actually clean it because I don’t want her puke on my suitcase, to which she replied ‘ugh I made one mistake, stop punishing me for it’.
So I suggested she buy me another suitcase if she didn’t want to clean this one, and she refused to do either of these actions (this girl’s also Silicon Valley rich, so this would not be out of her means at all). On top of everything, she said that I had no right to take her laundry quarters without asking the night before.
Anyway, in 2 weeks we had all our roommate switch forms filled out.
We still don’t talk, and that suitcase sits, puke stain and all, in my closet.”
3. I Got Dragged Into Their Parking Lot Mess
“My roommate was every bit of 300lbs. He and his friend went out one night for some drinks. Later that night around 3:30 am his friend is hitting my window saying he needs my help. I get dressed and go outside to find my roommate passed out in the apartment parking lot and his friend kicking the life out of him, screaming at him to get up.
He was covered in vomit and was crying. I calm his friend down and tell him kicking him won’t make him get up. By this time all the neighbors are all awake and annoyed now. We decide to drag him into the house. The trip was bad for him. We had to drag him through the asphalt, then onto the concrete sidewalk, and then through the dirt to get him to where my apartment was.
My grip kept slipping because of the vomit, and his pants came down, it was so gross. We finally get him to the door and pulled him over the metal weatherstrip which I imagine felt great. By this time I’m exhausted so I leave his butt in the living room and take a breather. THE IDIOT THEN GETS UP AND WALKS TO THE BATHROOM! I was really annoyed!”
2. He Pooped Himself In Our Kitchen
“The house I’m living in atm, there’s this guy who does substances all the time.
One night he took something he described as a ‘yellow pill’, he didn’t even know what it was. I returned on a Saturday night having been away to find the kitchen floor covered in glass, poop, and toilet paper.
This guy had pooped himself in our kitchen and smashed a load of glass into it.
He’d then lazily tried cleaning it with loo roll, which he then left on the floor and in the kitchen bin.
Then he didn’t clean it up until like 2 pm the next day so none of us could get into the kitchen to cook or even get food out of the fridge.
Since then he’s also managed to somehow forget about a tap long enough to flood the entire kitchen and leave the water running for enough time for it to make a pool in the corridor outside and completely soak the carpet in another housemate’s room.
The guy whose room it was had locked it and he was away for 5 days afterward so the room stank like swampy butts.”
Another User Comments:
“I’m a little furious with you for not cleaning up the water. I don’t care whose room it was or who spilled the water, water does as much damage as fire and now the padding under the carpet is probably a dangerous mass of mold.
If the door was locked, you find someone with a key or you take the knob off. Also, the housemate who occupied the room probably had his stuff soaked because you took a ‘not my problem’ approach to some pretty serious potential damage.” ParadiseSold
Reply:
“I wasn’t in when the water was everywhere, I came back from holiday to find all of my pans in the kitchen full of water and a bunch of wet towels everywhere.
For context, the flood happened on Friday night and I didn’t get back until Monday.” Trebor417
1. She Thought I Wouldn't Rebut
“The first day I moved into the room, she said if we sleep with the fan turned on she’ll be sick. I negotiated so to the point the fan is at the lowest speed (I have my desk fan but it’s too noisy so she agreed to have the ceiling fan at the lowest speed). Really I live in a tropical country, 95-ish F is quite normal for a night.
And if you feel cold, maybe it’s time to use a blanket and not sleep only in your underwear.
She ate a cup of ramen without cooking it. We’re talking about cup ramen, with a styrofoam cup, and some tiny packets of dried ingredients and seasoning. She opened the cup like when you try to peel an apple skin, and ate the ramen raw. I don’t think she knows how to eat it normally with water and all.
I don’t know if she knows water, she drank those powdered ginseng drinks without water, 5 packs a day.
We have a bathroom, shared with one of the rooms next door. It’s sort of a connecting door. She occupied the bathroom for a good whole hour, made me and our neighbor unable to bathe before class. She also cut her hair in the bathroom sink in THE ROOM, without even bothering to sweep it.
Oh did I mention the space below her bed has a good garbage heap? She would also eat a coconut, half of a watermelon, and leave the garbage in a small plastic bag on her side, without throwing it away for a week (or more).
She’d skype with her family/significant other/whatever almost every night, and when I wanted to skype with my family, she’d say I’m being too loud.
When I use my computer, she’d say my keyboard/typing sound was too noisy. When I try to study at my side of the room and she went to sleep, she said the desk lamp was too bright she can’t sleep. Okay, okay.
About at the end of the year (when we’re supposed to move out from the room, that’s the rule). She got sick, she was sick and angry.
She once locked me outside the room just when I went out to throw my garbage away. It was nighttime, I knocked on the door, hard. I’m not the loudest person but I may be the most stubborn one. I may not be the most patient, but I know how to annoy someone with my patience. She yelled at me, blamed me for making her sick, so she couldn’t do her yoga.
I kept my cool and said ‘oh yeah? How did I make you get sick?’ She went silent. She said I’m the worst roommate she ever had, I replied ‘you too.’ She said she will move out of the room ASAP, I said, ‘thank goodness.’
We never really talk with each other save for that. I talked with my neighbor more. Of course, we talked about my roommate.
How she clogged the sink on my side with some coverings of eggs and the toilet too! They’re unusable around the end of the year. They allowed me to use the sink but not my roommate. They’re also very annoyed at how she never, ever, cleans the bathroom/sink/etc although we have the schedule.”
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