Weekend Open Thread

Yesterday, I posted “15 Things To Ask Your Potential Roommate Before You Sign a Lease,” which got me thinking about what happens when you don’t ask these types of questions before you move in with someone. Then I thought that could make an interesting discussion this weekend. Specifically, I’m interested in hearing your roommate horror stories and dealbreakers or horror stories about when you moved in with a significant other (ooh, I bet some of those are good!). Come on, I know you’ve got ’em. So, spill it.

And, as an added discussion, what are all of you up to this Memorial Day weekend? I’m planting flowers on my terrace, eating hot dogs, and maybe watching a movie or two. Also, probably eating ice cream. I’ve been eating a lot of ice cream lately…

* If you’ve got a suggestion for a future open thread topic, email me at wendy@dearwendy.com.

113 Comments

  1. My last roommate and I never had any discussion before moving any. Specifically about how long we saw living together or how to separate the friendship from the rental agrement. In the end I wanted to move out early (we signed an 18 month lease) and 6 months in to it I decided i wanted to move. I offered to find another roommate she approved of or pay for us to both break the lease. Turns out she had decided I was the last roommate she was going to live with and after our lease was up was going to buy. She didn’t want another roommate and didn’t want to move early. So I payed rent for somewhere I didn’t live for a year. It was tense and horrible and our friendship ended simply because we couldn’t separate the business side of living together with the friendship.

    I moved in with my now husband after that (not the reason i moved) and I found it’s very different going from living with a guy to living with a girl. Toilet seat issues, pee stains, ball scratching, farting and burping the alphabet are all things I didn’t deal with when living with another girl. It took some time and me learning to not freak out if things weren’t perfectly clean (pee stains on the floor had to go though) and now we’re very happy. And he puts the lid down most of the time! I still find food wrappers hidden between the bed and the headboard at times though….

    And I”m moving to another state this weekend. I’m a little concerned about the heat and the traffic, I’ll be very happy when I’m in my new place putting up decorations in the air conditioning!

    1. sarolabelle says:

      decorations in the air conditioning? I’m in TX and we don’t do that. Some people did that in New Orleans when I lived there but really, there are so many AC vents in a house if all of them had streamers it wouldn’t look very good….

    2. sarolabelle says:

      sorry – I just reread what you wrote. I had just gotten up from a nap. Forget my last comment.

      1. I thought you were just making a joke 🙂 It did kind of read that way the first time I read it, but then I realized what she meant.

      2. haha yeah oops i’m going to blame the craziness of moving on my poor wording on that one! no decorations in the air conditioner just enjoying being inside with air conditioning while decorating! 🙂

      3. sarolabelle says:

        my first comment is actually kind of funny if you read it knowing I was half asleep! 🙂

    3. God I know! Men are so gross. My biggest conundrum after moving in with a man: WHY and HOW does he make the underside of the toilet seat so disgusting??? And why is he not embarassed???

  2. I have similar stories to those posted. I lived with a friend of mine for 3 months. She was moving out and I was taking over her lease. Now, I knew she was a slob, and she knew I was not, but it was “only for 3 months”.

    Yeah. You see where this is going…

    So, she had 4 cats and a dog in a one bedroom apt. One of the cats peed on my stuff when I first moved in (photos and some books). She was in the process of finding a new home for that cat, so I was like, look harder please! I bought a plastic mattress cover just in case.

    She had lived there for 3 years and NEVER cleaned the fridge…not even once. Only one burner of the stove worked and the oven was off by 100 degrees and she never mentioned it to the landlord. The carpet was gross (as you may have guessed).

    She was in the process of writing her dissertation, so I was ready to let things slide. But it was getting out of control, not cleaning ANYTHING up, filthy dishes, litter boxes in the bathroom (I requested they be moved, which they were). But the real beginning of the end was the day I came home from getting up early on a Saturday to the house FULL of black, acrid smoke. She was hysterically screaming and a hard plastic container was in flames on the stove. I found some baking soda and put the fire out as fast as I could while she stood there screaming.

    It was January and cold but I opened all the windows while she said she was complaining. I could barely breathe bc of the fumes and almost puked. So I was like, uh, I have to get out of here. I will be back in a little while. While I was out at the store, she called me and said she was going to the movies, and cleaned the best she could.

    Needless to say, I thought this was bullshit. I went home, and found smeared soot EVERYWHERE in the kitchen. My clothes were covered in soot, every single cobweb was sooty, and the whole place stunk. I called a friend who owned a house, and said homeowners ins usually required a fire dept call for any damages. I didn’t know if the landlord would call the homeowners and since my roomie hadn’t called him, I said eff it and called the fire dept. They came and noted the damage and told me the fumes were the biggest issue.

    So FOUR hours go by, she comes home and I told her I had called the fire dept and said she needed to call the landlord. she totally flipped out, and screamed that she “was going to get into trouble” and WHY had I “told” on her? I stood silent and asked her if she was planning on finishing cleaning the house. She looked me in the eye and said, no, it’s good enough.

    I wanted to slap her at that point.

    So, the landlord never had the place cleaned professionally. He said it was her responsibility, which she decided she wanted no part of…oh it was such a wonderful time :/

    When she finally left, she tried to leave ALL of her cats with me, bc she didn’t want to pay a pet deposit at her new place 600 miles away. And she DID leave 70% of her crappy furniture, which I had to haul away myself.

    The next time I live with someone it will be with a husband. No more roommates!

    1. All of this happened in three months?! I’m surprised you made it that long. It’s hilarious that she thought you “told on her” when the place caught fire! Good move calling the fire department. Rules schmules, you were in danger with those fumes! Imagine if you hadn’t been able to put out the fire! Unbelievable.

      And how sad for her pets! I hope she took them. Or at least gave them to someone who wanted them 🙁

      1. Oh my…there is MUCH more, including major guy drama which is still somewhat continuing…

        As for the cats: One found a home right away. I still have one that was meek compared to her 2 original cats; she is a great pet and will be coming with me when I move soon. The last 2, which were both hers she adopted, ended up with a mutual friend who still has both of them. Another crazy thing: we had another friend who moved to Denmark for a postdoc and had to find homes for her 3 cats (which she did) and roomie was just so HORRIFIED by the whole thing. She ended up doing the SAME thing a year later, except she dumped the cats on our friend. And tried with me. I just had to draw the line with the cats. She never cleaned when she left, there was cat puke all over the baseboards and the carpet. The entire carpet had to be removed, actually. And she just bought a new puppy (but she claimed she couldn’t have any more animals!).

        She blamed her crazy shit on the stress of her new job and her dissertation defense. However, as you may have guessed, it wasn’t really about that. She has serious emotional problems, and I didn’t know the extent of them until I lived there. Since we both work in the same industry, I had to be careful about all this. But we are definitely not as good of friends. I have reduced communication a lot, and like I said, the bulk of it has to do with my current SO.

      2. Skyblossom says:

        While in grad school I lived in a house with five other women and one of them caused fires twice in one year. The first time I had just gone to bed when she knocked on my bedroom door and told me the dryer was one fire. I asked if she had turned flipped the circuit breaker. NO. Then I asked if she had unplugged the dry. NO. Then I asked if she had turned off the dryer. NO. I shouted at her to turn off the dryer then decided that I would at least put on my shoes before going to see what was happening because I didn’t want to be standing out on the sidewalk in the night with no shoes. When I went to the basement there was smoke in the hallway but no sign of fire. It turned out that she had filled the dryer with load after load of clothes so that the entire dryer was stuffed and the clothes couldn’t tumble. When the sheets on the outside edge got dry they finally became so hot they burst into flames and she had just let the dryer keep on running.

        The next time she put food on the stove to cook in the middle of the night and went back to bed and fell asleep. The food caught on fire and set off the smoke detectors.

        Who would think that someone could be that stupid and endanger the lives of five other people twice in one year.

      3. Careless AND stupid is one way to describe that…that’s really scary.

    2. After I graduated from college I lived with a friend for six months while I was waiting to start grad school. I’d known her for a few years but we weren’t very close. She was a vet tech and had adopted a very sick cat who threw up *every day*, often in my room (I learned to keep the door closed). Later she asked if she could bring another cat in, and I said no. Then one day I heard meowing in her room and found a cat in her closet–a three legged-cat she had rescued! Yeah, he got taken back to the shelter…

  3. Quakergirl says:

    I had a horrible roommate my junior year of college. I was supposed to live with a friend and another friend’s girlfriend who had just transferred to my university, but my friend ended up filling in as an RA as a favor to our house dean when someone bailed. So housing services assigned a random person to our dorm suite and it ended up being the girlfriend of Quakerboy’s nightmare freshman roommate.

    She was so, so spoiled and thus had no concept of responsibility. She would never clean a thing, ever. When we talked to her about cleaning up after herself she would use the same sponge to clean the bathroom and then clean the kitchen. EEEEW. She never washed her hands and would then touch everything in the kitchen. She left raw meat in unsealed containers in the fridge so that they dripped everywhere, including all over vegetables and into the Brita pitcher, even after we explained to her that this could kill all of us (we ultimately sanitized the Brita pitcher and put it in the fridge door cabinet, then started keeping our perishable, unsealed food at a friend’s place across the hall). She would take cookware and pots to events or friends places and never return them, and actually ruined several because she didn’t know how to cook very well. Once she attempted to boil water for pasta and didn’t know when it was hot enough so she just let it go until the bottom of the pot had a hole burnt through it, but then refused to replace the pot.

    This incident was when we realized she had no concept of money because her family was crazy wealthy– as in she didn’t know how to drive because she had a personal driver type wealthy. The pot was a nice one (not fancy, but nice) that my mom had bought a while ago but didn’t need, and I really didn’t have the money to replace it (like I literally had $90 that I needed to get me through the last 2.5 months of school). She was just so insensitive about us having to replace things she ruined (food, cookware, a vacuum cleaner she broke after we forced her to make a joint cleaning schedule because she didn’t know how it worked), and never bought anything for the apartment (cleaning supplies, etc.). I explained to her once that it was really tough to replace food that got meat juice on it because the cheap grocery store was 25 blocks away, and she’s like “couldn’t you just take a cab? that’s only like 15 or 20 bucks.” Yeah, I go to the cheap grocery store 25 blocks away because I’m swimming in money to blow on cabs. NIGHTMARE. Although I will say my other roommate (the friend’s girlfriend) turned out to be a doll, and we’re still friends.

    The next year Quakerboy and I moved in together, so I didn’t end up living with either of them again (although I would have happily lived with my friend’s girlfriend had I not moved in with Quakerboy). The nightmare roommate wasn’t the impetus for the moving-in-together, it’s just we had already been together for 4 years and felt like we were in a good place to do it, had talked about all the right things, etc. There weren’t really any surprises (or, at least, bad surprises) when we moved in together. I already knew he was a little messy, but I hadn’t really noticed that he is also extremely handy and a very homey/nesty type person. So while he does leave socks everywhere, I will also sometimes come home to find him scrubbing the tub grout because it “needs a spruce” or reorganizing our entire DVD and book collection so that there’s less clutter. I like that he takes so much pride in our home. I have no regrets about living with him whatsoever, and I wouldn’t trade sharing a home with him for anything.

  4. DramaQueen224 says:

    Oh my goodness, in college I lived in an apartment with my best friend and another girl for 2 years. The other girl was horrendous, completely insane and unwilling/unable to have a normal conversation about problems. I have sooo many stories about how bad it was, I don’t even know where to begin.

    One time, after about a year and a half of living together, she sent me an email yelling at me for being in the bathroom for half an hour. Now, I’ve always taken long showers (not everyday, but a couple of times a week when I’m washing my hair and shaving etc). I know I take long showers and do so at night to avoid the morning rush. I also warned the roommate at the beginning of us living together that I take long showers. While I was in the shower, she was sitting on the couch in the living room- right outside the bathroom. So, I walked into the apartment sweaty and in work out gear, walked past her into my room, grabbed a towel, walked past her again with the towel into the bathroom, took a shower and walked past her again to get into my room. She then immediately sent me the email. Instead of knocking on the bathroom door, or talking to me the 3 times I walked past her in a 30 minute time frame, or talking to me at all, she sent an email. F-ing crazy.

    Needless to say, we basically went a long, long time without speaking to each other since the mutual hatred was pretty clear. That didn’t stop her, however, from being pissed as hell when I defriended her on Facebook after graduation/moving away and threatening to not let the summer sub-letters we had arranged for to move into the apartment as an “F*#@ you” to me.

    1. LolaBeans says:

      omg. this is my current situation. my roommate E-MAILS me when she is upset with me over the stupidest things.
      one time i got 3 e-mails in a 4 hour span.. that was interesting.
      she claims she is a clean freak but won’t do her dishes for a solid week. this past week, we started to get ants. and she’s claiming its from the kitchen window being open; nope. it was from a crack in the wall and they all bee lined to her dishes in the sink.
      she is driving me crazy. i live with 2 girls.. one is like my best friend, we get along great and the other is a nightmare. we are both moving out at the end of summer to get away from her specifically.
      oh, i bought cable for the apartment and said to her, well, you can pay for 1/3 the bill or just not watch it. she didnt want to pay.. but still watches it. drives me MENTAL!! lets just say i put a code on the tv so she can’t anymore.
      i can’t stand her. serious roommate nightmare going on over here.
      oh, one last story– last year when i moved in i put the hydro bill in my name and we all agreed to split it 3 ways. anyway, this same roommate went on vacation for a month and when she got back she refused to pay saying she wasn’t here. i was like.. what?! i dont care.. you still pay rent when youre away, still pay your phone bill. it was insanity and i think that was what really made me start to hate her.
      so i got a cat.. that she is allergic to.. just to drive her nuts 🙂

      1. That water bill part is hilarious…what planet is this girl from?

      2. SpaceySteph says:

        I don’t know, I can kind of understand if before she went on vacation she came to you and said “I’m going to be out of town for a month and not using water, so I would prefer if you and [other roommates] split it amongst yourselves since you’ll be here using water.” I think that’s a reasonable request, because if you go on vacation and live alone, nobody uses the water and your water bill would be really low that month.
        But I also think you have to make those arrangements in advance not start the fight when the bill comes. Also if you have a lawn or other common water usages, then I think its fair just to pay your part.

      3. SpaceySteph says:

        Hmm I’m gauging from the thumbs down that this is not a reasonable request? I’d love someone to explain that to me.

        When I lived with 2 other roommates, if a person had guests for a large chunk of the month (both other girls had boyfriends who stayed with us for weeks at a time periodically and I had a friend crash with me for a few weeks one summer) then we would split the water so the ones who had guests paid more of it. Electric too. It just seems like if something changes rate based on usage, then the ones responsible for the increased usage foot the higher bill.

      4. I didn’t thumbs you down, and what you say makes sense certainly. But charges (such as water) fluctuate a lot with who uses what that it would seem kinda silly to me to be so stringent on paying based off of each person’s usage, and it is probably hard to come up with good numbers for that. Also, as someone who strongly dislikes talking about money with others, I am the type of person who likes to split things evenly anyways.

      5. SpaceySteph says:

        It wasn’t easy. We devised it as a way to save some arguments after my one girls boyfriend stayed with us a whole month and the other girl, who could barely afford rent as it was, was fighting with her about cost of water and electric for the extra person. To smooth things over, I did some math based on the number of days each person lived in the apartment to come up with shares. Engineers will turn anything into a math problem. Anyways, I thought it was silly but I could afford the extra $15 or whatever in order to keep the peace, not everyone is so lucky.

      6. LolaBeans says:

        it doesnt matter about the money, it’s the principle. when i go away for xmas for 2 weeks i dont say ‘well im not paying any hydro for that duration because i wasn’t here’ thats petty. you live here, you pay equal share of the rent/bills. and that’s the only fair way to do it. otherwise it would get ridiculous. and we’d all start being like ‘well i was out monday, thursday and sunday of this week’.

        doesnt make sense. and there would be costs whether she lived alone or not. you are still billed for usage of electricity, water etc. even if you don’t use it. there is a base fee.

      7. SpaceySteph says:

        The flat rate on my electric bill is $9.33. I would happily pay my third of that. But of a $125 electric bill when I was out of the country for the entire time covered by the bill. No thank you.

    2. DramaQueen224 says:

      These stories are hilarious, and as much as I love a good bitch sesh, I feel bad putting out so much negativity without any positivity so here’s a more happy tale:

      Two years ago I found a roommate on Craigslist. She ended up being one of the happiest, kindest and most optimistic people I know. She was an awesome roommate and is still a great friend. My sanity is super grateful for her. The end 🙂

      If anyone else has some roomie love, I’d love to hear it too!

  5. My roommate in college had dirty laundry everywhere. And I mean everywhere. You couldn’t see the floor because of all her dirty laundry. Our room smelled so bad I had to keep the window open even though we were in the middle of winter.

    There was Chinese in our fridge…for months. It made the fridge smell sooo bad, but at least because of all the rotten food, the roaches (and other horrible insects) had a nice place to live!

    She thought it was cute to have her boyfriend call her at 6 in the morning. This was okay for her since she could sleep in, but it was absolutely horrible for me.

  6. Oh boy, do I have an interesting story. Last year was my freshman year in college. The particular freshman dorm I chose to live in was for 3 people (major recipe for disaster), whereas the not so nice ones were just 2 people. I thought I had it all figured out. My best friend for the 7 years before college was going to the same college as me (really far away from home) and we were planning on being roommates together. With the great tools of Facebook, I found a group for my college of incoming freshmen looking for roommates. After talking to several other girls, I found one girl I really clicked with (online at least) and I thought my best friend would get along with her as well. So we move into the dorm seeing with all of us seeing each other as great friends. My best friend and the new girl actually get along better at first, but it doesn’t phase me. However, soon the new girl and I become practically best friends and my old best friend doesn’t want to admit her jealousy.

    The year becomes difficult and I found it hard to remain mature in this situation and sometimes my other roommate and I would act childish because it was hard to escape the horrible living situation it had become. My old best friend decides to start venting on a blog that I knew about previously, and well, one of her posts included a death threat against me and the other roommate. We never took the threat seriously, but it was our ticket to get her kicked out of our dorm room for the sake of all of us. The dean finally obliged to kicking her out of the room after months of trying to get her to leave.

    Unfortunately, my old best friend and I are not friends at all anymore and we never talk, but within the past year have been able to be cordial with each other. The good news is that my other roommate and I decided to room together again this year, and we’re still best friends after 2 years of living together.

    1. Hmm I’m not even sure why people are thumbing me down.

      1. Two Straws Please says:

        Why the thumbs down? At least by the way you’re describing it, (and i really really really hope there is more to this story) you come off as someone who just dumped your best friend of 7 years.

        And things happen. People get to college and they change. There’s nothing wrong with that.

        BUT……but but but but but. You story isn’t about a horrible roommate. From what you’ve said, your “best friend” didn’t do anything awful, you just dumped her and “acted childish” with your “NEW BFF!!!!” and then were surprised that your best friend of 7 years was pissed……

      2. I agree. Except for the death threat part…THAT’s a bit scary.

      3. well she said they had already tried to get the old BFF kicked out of their room multiple times before that. so it seems like the two of them were being really cruel to her. she probably just said something like, “I could kill them” out of frustration. i feel so bad for her, the poster and her “new BFF” seem like the ultimate mean girls.

        you know, groups of 3 friends can be really close right? You don’t have to bond by excluding someone else.

      4. Okay, it’s true I didn’t really explain WHAT she did that was horrible. She never paid for things (toilet paper, paper towels, soap, cleaning supplies, etc) we needed and always seemed to disappear when we needed to go to the store. All of the bigger purchases like a mini-fridge, vacuum, etc were paid for by me and the new roommate, and my old friend never contributed one bit. We were required to sign a roommate agreement, stating when lights should be turned off, what music level is comfortable in the room, etc, and she broke most of those rules. Sometimes she would go to bed before 2 am (which is what we ALL agreed on as lights out), which is fine. I would go to bed sometimes before 2 am, but whenever she would, she would complain profusely and shut the lights off in frustration. And it’s not like there was a party or anything going on in the room. We were all up late working on homework. She started spreading rumors about me and the new friend to our other friends (we started out with the same group of friends), and I’m certainly not one to start any drama. I’m not a mean girl at all. But I do completely admit that when things got out of hand, I resorted to some immaturity. But I never spread anything bad about her or got down to her level. I became frustrated with the RA’s and the RD’s lack of ability to do anything, until she came up with a death threat. I could go on and on about what she did, but there’s no point. And while I wasn’t particularly threatened by her death threat, she is very passive aggressive and depressed, and I thought she could easily harm herself or someone else.

      5. Passive aggressive and depressed so you team up and kick her out. Nice.

      6. As I explained that’s really not what happened. Having a roommate who will leave dirty dishes/food out for days in a dorm room with no kitchen anyways is really gross. Plus we had cockroaches anyways near the AC, since it was always leaking on the floor near my bed. She was overall really messy and inconsiderate, even when we tried to reason with her. The school eventually put her in a dorm room by herself after a psychological evaluation–this situation was pretty serious for all 3 of us.

  7. ROOMMATES! I’ve had some great roommates. A 6-week summer college program in high school introduced me to one of my dearest friends. My freshman year next-door neighbor became my roommate for the rest of my time at that school. I love them both dearly, and while they live pretty far away, we make sure to keep in touch.

    And then there’s … ROOMMATES. In college, my roommate & I decided to rent a house with another one of our friends. When my roommate moved out, I found out that she had been the buffer between me and our third friend (who I’ll call Gertrude).

    You see, Gertrude was reckless. She was a sloppy drunk, and possibly an alcoholic (the amount she drank was directly proportional to how bad her mood was). I had to hold her hair/change her clothes/help her use the bathroom/clean up her vomit/wipe her tears/recount her blackouts on a regular basis. She would alternately confess her love for us, and insult us. She badmouthed my then-boyfriend to my face, while she regularly brought home a different guy every week (and then cried on my shoulder when they didn’t call her back).

    She was messy. She had the room upstairs from the kitchen, and she would regularly eat her dinner in her room. Every two weeks or so, we would have to raid her room for the dirty moldy dishes she stashed under her bed so we could have something to eat on. She introduced mice into our house. She never washed dishes, & thought that putting pans with food bits in the sink was the same as washing them.

    Gertrude was also careless with money. We were all working at our university over the summer, but she couldn’t make rent on more than one occasion. I had to cover her security deposit (which I lost when she threw a party with some of her friends, & one of them fell through a wall). I covered her rent on no less than three occasions. By the time we were moving out, she owed me nearly $1000.

    She refused to pay.

    I wrote email after email. I called her. I wrote a letter. I wrote HER PARENTS a letter. All asking for her to pay me back, or at least acknowledge the debt so we could work something out. Nothing. Not even from her parents, which possibly shed some light on her avoidance tactics.

    To this day, she still owes me that money.

    So when I think about bad roommates, I always think of Gertrude. I can’t imagine I would ever have a roommate worse than she. Gertrude is married now, to the brother of the guy my beloved roommate married – and she has admitted that having Gertrude as a sister-in-law is trying at times. I couldn’t imagine. I’m just glad that Gertrude will likely never be in my life again. Because if she ever does show up, she had better have a check for me.

    1. Effing – A. $1000. Gertrude had some balls!

      1. Actually, on more than one drunken occasion, I had to remind her to put on undergarments, and sometimes help her put them on. So, unfortunately, I can confirm that she did not have any. LOL. 🙁

  8. I’ve been lucky, my past roommates have always been pretty good. They tended to be a little weird (that’s what happens when you move in with foreigners you’ve never met), but generally clean and quiet. Although one did keep any leftover cooked food in the cupboard. She said placing it in the fridge would dry it out – although I’m pretty sure leaving food uncovered in the cupboard isn’t going to keep it fresh and moist. If it hadn’t been winter and a 3rd floor apartment, I would have worried about ants. And interestingly, I’ve never had a roommate who actually had a bed. They slept on mattress pads on the floor – not even an actual mattress or a futon mattress, just a mattress pad. One said she was only staying for 4 months, so there was no sense moving her bed from her old apartment (across town), and another said the bag it came in said “mattress” on it, therefore it must be a mattress and she wouldn’t need anything else.

  9. honeybeenicki says:

    I have learned that I don’t deal well with roommates. My first year at college was the only year I stayed in the dorm. I went through 4 roommates that year, including one who dropped out after a huge argument we had (she would eat all of my food and then she would tell me I needed to go grocery shopping). The first and last roommates were awesome and I wish I hadn’t switched the first time.

    But, my real roommate horror story was this year. With my husband gone, I can use all the financial help I can get, so when my dad’s girlfriend’s daughter was moving to my city I thought it was a great way to get a little extra cash each month. That was a BAD idea. The night they moved her in, Dad kept asking if I was sure and as they were leaving he gave me a hug and offered me his condolenses. Now, its hard to describe this girl. She’s obnoxious. She’s loud, messy, and irresponsible. She would do her laundry and then leave the basket in the living room but get pissed when the dogs would knock it over. She complained that the dogs would sit across the room and look at her while she was eating (that’s their begging…. they know not to get too close). I get up for work very early (4:45am every day) and work long days, but she would make all kinds of noise all night. She would beg me to take her somewhere at 9pm on a weeknight and then tell me I should just call in to work the next day. She chewed loudly (*SMACK SMACK SMACK*) and made HUGE messes in the kitchen that we had to fight with her to clean up.

    But, the best story I have from this whole thing came in the winter. I live in WI and we get a lot of snow. At the beginning of January I broke and dislocated my ankle, so I had one of those pretty boots for quite some time. About a week after it happened, we got about 18 inches of snow. She refused to get up and help shovel and eventually so that my mom (the only roommate I can get along with – she lives in the upstairs portion of my house) didn’t have to do it all, I wrapped my boot up in plastic and went outside to help shovel. When the roommate finally got her lazy ass out of bed around 1pm (she didn’t even work for a damn living! Her brother paid her rent), we had to basically push her outside to help shovel. Mind you, it was in her lease that she had to help shovel. After 15 minutes… FIFTEEN MINUTES… she came inside where I was since my mom had banned me from helping after about an hour and a half. She started to take off her coat and boots and I asked why she was doing that and here’s what she told me…
    (wait for it)
    She said “I started sweating. And if you sweat outside in the cold you can get hypothermia and DIE.”
    I didn’t know if I should laugh or scream. Do you know how many dead people there would be in WI and other northern states if you could get hypothermia and die after 15 minutes of shoveling??? We would be wiped out!

      1. honeybeenicki says:

        Didn’t have to. Apparently she decided to leave on her own after about 2 1/2 months. Didn’t like being treated like a child. The way I figure it, if you don’t act like a child then you won’t be treated like one. If you make a mess cooking (I’ve never seen someone make such a huge mess making mac and cheese!), then clean it up and don’t wait for other people to have to get on you about it.

      2. “The way I figure it, if you don’t act like a child then you won’t be treated like one.”
        AMEN!

  10. My worst experience with a roommate happened after I moved in with my partner. We shared a condo with another couple. The girl wasn’t even on the lease and for a while wasn’t contributing to the bills, even though she was there constantly. Finally we demanded that she help. First complaint: they smoked week, a lot of weed. And they tried to cover it up with even more nauseating incense. Second, they always had some sort of party going once Friday came, regardless of our schedules. Third, they never cleaned. After I moved in, I scrubbed the entire place, except their room, down, organized the cupboards and fridge, created a system for the recycling, etc. They never lifted a hand to help. One night they came home drunk from the bar, had wild monkey sex on our bathroom vanity (leaving handprints all over the mirror) before throwing up all over the bathroom floor and toilet and in the tub. The didn’t clean it up until the next afternoon. Third, they would have random people sleep on the couch and we’d go down the next morning only to be freaked out by some guy. Worst experience was when we found a naked, completely naked, guy sleeping on our living room floor. Fourth, they had no understanding of boundaries. We came home one night to find them having sex on the couch. I had to put a sheet down everytime I wanted to sit. Even when they had sex in their room they were so freaking loud our neighbors knew what they were doing. They monopolized the TV, broke the DVD player, ruined my good (and expensive) baking sheets and didn’t replace them, ate our food while leaving their leftovers to rot, broke the rice cooker. She was the clumsiest person in the world. Before they finally moved out she had broken an entire set of glasses, several plates and bowls (all of which we bought) and smashed 2 mixers, just the glass container. When they moved out they stole half our silverware, including a very expensive knife that could pretty much cut anything, pots and pans that we had bought, all the cleaning supplies that I had bought (ironic considering that they never cleaned!) and all the umbrellas. Living in Portland that’s a big effin’ deal!

    I plan on sleeping and relaxing this weekend. After buying a duvet cover for out new blanket, which is going to be on heck of an ordeal with this girl.

  11. amandalee says:

    Oh god, how much time do you have? I had so many bad roommate situations, I always surprise myself when I decide to move in with someone new.

    College freshmen year roommates- I had two in a very, very small dorm room. The first one, we’ll call her Stacey- slept with over 20 guys our first semester (I only know because she kept count on the wall under her calendar in lipstick). Which would have been fine except she would do it while I was studying on my room about 4 feet from her bed. I came home from a weekend at home to find her and her boyfriend of the week having sex in my bed. They didn’t even stop in action, just kept going. She later explained they didn’t have a condom and didn’t want to make a mess in her bed since they were sleeping in it that night. How thoughtful of her to share that. Oh yeah, and the other roommate snorted pain pills and coke off my dresser and left some evidence behind when my parents came to pick me up for Thanksgiving break. That was a fun drive home.

    Junior year of college, different school. Any surprise why I transferred from the first? lol I lived with my best friend and two random girls who seemed nice at first. One turned out to be a neurotic anorexic who would go on and on about she would love to borrow my clothes but they were WAY TOO BIG on her (I was a size 2 at the time). She would also only eat serving sizes of every food, so our refrigerator would be full of like containers of three pieces of broccoli, two pieces of cheese and so on. Even though she barely ate, she loved to eat peanut butter of all things and would devour a whole jar in a few days if I went somewhere. So, I just started putting it in my fridge in my room. She then bitched me out the next day for making it so inconvenient for her by making her walk in my room and look throw all my stuff for her to locate the peanut butter I came home once after class one day to find her in just her underwear having an emo photoshoot on the couch with techno music playing in the background. And she slept with a sword her ex bought every night.

    And these are the worst offenders that I can remember off the top of my head. SO HAPPY I now live with my fiance.

    1. amandalee says:

      holy auto-correct errors in my post. lol I hate that function on my phone.

    2. Britannia says:

      I would have literally thrown her disgusting ass out of my bed and then filed for a roommate change! That’s one of the nastiest, most inconsiderate things i’ve ever heard of someone doing, and being so unabashed!

      1. amandalee says:

        Yeah, she was pretty disgusting. She wasn’t even embarrassed over it, just very matter of fact. I tried to get a room change but we were overfilled and they weren’t allowing it. She thankfully dropped out the spring semester.

  12. Britannia says:

    I don’t really feel like telling my horror stories as I’ve been doing that a lot lately! But as for your question about what I’m doing this weekend…

    Friday will be a leisurely day — yoga, walking the dog, cleaning the house, writing.
    On Saturday, I’m going to have my grandparents over for BBQ at my house with freshly caught ocean bass and mahi mahi, and they’ll meet my new puppy for the first time.
    On Sunday, I’m having the usual Sunday breakfast with my grandparents and then heading over to my girlfriend’s house, where we’re going to dress up like wealthy women from the 50’s, drink sidecars, and watch cheesy Marilyn Monroe films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry A Millionaire. Then, we’ll make dinner together, sit in her hot tub, and gossip.

  13. AnitaBath says:

    I could write a 300 page novel on my horrible roommate, but I’ll just stick to a few of the highlights. I’ll preface by saying that my roommate was a girl from a very wealthy family from New York, who seemed pretty down to earth and not spoiled at all. I came to find out there was more than one kind of “spoiled.” I don’t think she ever had to clean anything before in her entire life.

    – She’d leave her dishes in the sink for weeks. I’d keep asking her to do them, and then she’d load them HORRIBLY in the middle of the dishwasher and be offended when I asked if she wanted me to show her how to load it.

    – She’d leave raw chicken pieces in the sink under her pile of dishes, so it took FOREVER to figure out what smelled like it was dying in the apartment.

    – I once spent five hours and $75 making a ton of Christmas cookies. I left for a day or two and came back, and she ate ALL of them. She laughed when confronted.

    – Even though her family was LOADED, she’d steal tiny things of mine. She’d use my perfume, my dryer sheets, my tampons, and my clothes, even when she had her own of everything.

    – She’d steal my groceries too, so I started hiding my things under a huge ham in the vegetable drawer (she was Jewish).

    – She refused to buy anything when it was her turn. When it was her turn to buy toilet paper, she’d go without it for days (I had a hidden roll I wasn’t going to tell her about). I once left for a few days, and when I came back we were out and she had just been using paper towels. She couldn’t figure out why the toilet (the only one in the apartment) was clogged. I told her to fix it. She tried plunging for about three seconds, gave up, and then went and started drinking in the living room with a friend. I told her she needed to wait to start drinking until she fixed the toilet, and she got all pissed because how was she supposed to know you’re not supposed to flush paper towels?

    – When I’d tell her to bring home a few gallons of water to replace the ones of mine she kept drinking, she came back from the store empty handed. When I asked her why she didn’t get any, she said they didn’t have any. I asked her if they were out, and she said, “No, but I didn’t see any by the milk or anything.”

    – She clogged the toilet at least once a week and then disappeared. Guess who always had to unclog it?

    – When I confronted her about how she never cleaned anything or took out the trash and how she always disappeared and was unreachable when I told her days and days in advance that I was having company and could she please throw away her trash and pick up a few things, she told me she didn’t see a problem with anything and that she “doesn’t do vacuuming.”

    – When I ran into her a month after we moved out, she implied that my younger sister was a whore.

    I could go on and on and on and on, but I need to stop there. My biggest problem was that she didn’t see a problem with ANY of this, and always acted like I was being an unreasonable bitch.

    1. AnitaBath says:

      Oh, and I forgot the best part. When I talked to her about cleaning and reminded her that she hadn’t vacuumed or mopped once the entire year, she said, “Well I don’t drop things on the floor, so I don’t really see why I have to vacuum or dust.”

      Really? You don’t have SKIN CELLS!?

      Ironically, when I had to cut the gobs of hair off the rollers in the vacuum, it was all hers…

      1. TrixyMinx says:

        I had a friend who’s roommate would do the exact same thing with dishes. He got so mad at the sink alway being full that he gathered it all up and dumped it on his roommates bed.

      2. Oh god, there have been so many times I’ve been tempted to do that.

      3. Quakergirl says:

        Your roommate sounds like my junior year roommate’s doppelganger, even down to the toilet paper/paper towels and clogging the toilet situation. My sincere sympathies.

    2. AnitaBath says:

      Oh, and she would also leave half-filled bottles of beer everywhere, never put away my DVDs and video games after using my Xbox to watch her DVDs, and when she spilled beer all over my controller and I told her the keys were sticking she told me to just press the buttons a lot and that would fix it.

      Did anyone ever get revenge on their roommate? The dish thing wouldn’t have worked because they were all mine and she would have just left them on the floor (we shared a 1 bedroom). When she was stealing some expensive perfume of mine, it was clear perfume in a clear bottle (I actually didn’t even like the stuff anymore and was super sensitive to the smell, and probably would’ve just given it to her if she asked) and I was going to pour it out and replace it with vinegar and not tell her, but I couldn’t get the cap off 🙁

      1. McLaughlane says:

        I wish you had, she deserved it!

  14. caitie_didn't says:

    Oh man. My worst roommate of all time winner goes to my first-year university roommate. We had been very close friends in high school and she practically BEGGED me to room with her. I was hesitant, because I already knew she was a little neurotic but eventually agreed. At first it was great. We were getting along well, everything was fine- I was doing really well in school, making tonnes of new friends and generally kicking ass. Towards the end of December, beginning of January though, things started to disintegrate. I don’t know if she was jealous of me, or just decided she didn’t like me, but she took absolutely every opportunity that she could to put me down, especially if there were other people around. She became a master at backhanded compliments (my favourite was: “but I bet when you finally get a boyfriend your relationship will be amazing!”), and she manipulated situations so that she was always, always the center of attention (including faking asthma attacks so people would have to rush to her aid). It all came to a head when she started telling me how much a mutual male friend liked me and how he was planning to ask me out. He didn’t, and he wasn’t- they started dating about three weeks after that. When I confronted her, in tears, she blamed it on me. Apparently it was all my fault and I brought this upon myself because I was a bad roommate who left stuff on top of the mini fridge and didn’t make my bed every morning. At the time, I’d never been in a relationship and was *very* insecure about my lack of romantic success, so she basically picked the very thing that would make me feel the worst and used it to torture me. She also spread a rumor that I was lesbian around the dorm, all because I went to the gay pride parade (actually I go every year, it’s a kickass time!) and that apparently didn’t sit well with her, being insanely judgmentally catholic and all.

    Oh, and one time I came into the room and found her CUTTING HER TOENAILS ON THE CARPET. She also claimed to have hit me once when I was sleeping because she was “mad” at me….I don’t believe it, because I’m a light sleeper.

    So, we’re not friends anymore. Obviously.

    1. Addie Pray says:

      Gross. My assistant clips her nails at her desk. I can hear the *clip* *clip* *clip* sound from my office. But when anyone walks by – or when I come out of my office – the clipping stops. I’m drying to catch her.

  15. Addie Pray says:

    I had a college roommate who used my hair straightener to fry a banana once. It was late, people were drinking, and she was egged on by some dude who were over, I guess. I was pissed. She apologized. And that was that. But do you know how hard it is to remove fried gooey banana bits from a hair straightener? Very.

  16. Painted_lady says:

    I lived with a really sweet girl my last two years of college, and honestly, for the most part she was great. It was a three bedroom condo, and there were two different roommates who lived with us during that time – no problems with either of them, either. The one who was there the whole time – I’ll call her Erin – was incredibly generous, more so than me, in fact. The first summer, her cousin was graduating in August and her lease was up the previous June, so she stayed with us. She didn’t pay rent, but she would buy most of the food and come home with booze or take us all out, plus she had this amazing wardrobe and she ended up insisting I keep like a quarter of it by the end of the summer. It evened out, plus she was really fun and got along well with all of us. The second summer, though, Erin’s friend Lynne was out of a place to live – similar situation – and she moved in without anyone ever consulting me. I didn’t like Lynne. Lynne was opinionated in the way that the tiniest difference of opinion justifies a massive confrontation. We once had a discussion (I thought that’s what it was) about some rock band nominated for a Grammy. I thought they totally deserved it, while Lynne didn’t. Silly, right? Not the sort of thing one should get too worked up about. I was mid-point, under the impression that it was a rational discussion between adults, and she finally huffed upstairs with a “Why don’t you stick to talking about theatre since it’s what you know, and I’ll handle the music?” Lynne also didn’t pay rent, was really territorial about her food, and would come in from the gym and leave her nasty work out clothes in the bathroom she and I shared. I’m not the cleanest person in the world, but my god, if someone’s letting you live rent-free, the only time they should e aware you’re around is when you see each other. I finally told Erin I wasn’t putting up with her friend as a roommate unless I was being reimbursed for having to deal with her. One summer with an extra roommate was fine, especially since she was a joy to have around, but twice? Hell no, especially since Lynne was an absolute beast to one of her hosts. Poor Erin was so embarrassed, and she ended up paying me Lynne’s portion of the rent. I don’t think she ever even brought it up with Lynne, and part of me feels badly, but another part of me feels like you shouldn’t take advantage of your nicer friends to keep the peace with the less nice ones.

    1. Painted_lady says:

      Oh, on a more positive note, I have a day off tomorrow, unexpectedly. I was supposed to spend last weekend and this one painting a show, but we were so far ahead after last weekend, I only have to go in Sunday! I don’t get Monday off because we have to make up for a snow day in January, but it’s the last week of school, so the ten weeks off totally make up for it. The kids are done Thursday and we have to come in Friday to clean and pack and go have lunch (which will involve plenty of beer). One of the possibilities we had was that the kids came in Friday instead and we worked on Saturday – I much prefer working Monday! Five more days and I’m freeeeee!

  17. BeccaAnne says:

    Got a crazy boyfriend. That ruined everything. Oh and they always blasted SMOOTH JAZZ when they got busy. ugh.

    The other roomie got a dog. That peed in her room and she didn’t clean up well. And now we have to replace the carpet. yaaay. She agreed to take care of it, but since we’re both on the lease I’m still getting billed and I’ll get harassed if she doesn’t pay up. We’ll see what happens when I finally get the bill (moved out 2 weeks ago and they called and informed me of the carpet replacement but haven’t gotten the bill yet…great)

  18. I moved in with a friend of mine and her girlfriend. We did all the right things: divided up space in the cabinets and the fridge, discussed dietary differences (they were vegetarians, I was not), decided how the household expenses would be dealt with, and made rules regarding privacy and use of the washer/dryer.

    Things went south very quickly. I discovered they never washed dishes (after complaining to me about their previous roommate who never did either). I was the only one who owned a big pot. I let them borrow it, only to find it at the bottom of the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. They spilled bleach on top of the dryer and didn’t clean it up, resulting in the ruination of some of my clothes. (Bleach does not show up well on a white dryer.) One of them had a habit of leaving coffee mugs on the floor near the couch and then kicking them over. The carpet was covered with coffee stains. Oh, and they spilled hair dye in the bathroom. Things got so bad I had to put a lock on my door. One of them actually asked me about it. I asked her why it mattered to her, being that it was my room and all.

    We had a house meeting once. They told me that my living there was “not an option”. This after paying their share of the rent late and bouncing some checks. I asked, “Not an option for whom?” They threatened to get the landlord involved. I called him myself and he told me he wouldn’t throw me out if he could, since I was a good tenant. I also told them they had no cause to get at me, given that they had violated every agreement we made: they used my things without my permission, put their things in the areas designated as mine, broke my things and didn’t even bother to mention it…I could go on. I found out later they were trying to move out, but their credit was so bad nobody would take them. Their alternate plan was to get me to move out instead. When I refused, they began sending me threatening emails, saying they weren’t going to be nice anymore. (Nice?)

    Note to self: when threatening your roommate, don’t do it by email…from your primary email account…with your name on it. You’re just giving her all the information she needs to file a police report and have the police come to the house. You probably also shouldn’t steal your roommate’s mail when she works for the USPS Law Dept. and has contacts in the Postal Inspection Service. (This is a story in itself. Another time…)

    Eventually, they moved out, I stayed in that apartment for five more years and loved it. People are probably going to ask why I didn’t move. I don’t have a good answer except to say that I don’t like being threatened. I’m a Scorpio, what can I say?

  19. My university roommate febrezed our cat… My ex-roommate desperately wanted to adopt a cat, and eventually I caved and agreed. With the deal being she would take her home at Christmas and other holidays. Needless to say that didn’t happen and I ended up with the cat all year. I had already decided I was moving to another city at the end of the semester but hadn’t planned to take the cat with me. But the final straw came when I got home from a weekend away and commented that the cat smelled nice (she was supposed to give the cat a bath while I was away, since she wouldn’t clean the apartment and the cat was gross) So I asked if she’d given the cat a bath, and she looks up at me and says “no I sprayed her with febreeze, its fine I didn’t spray her head”
    Maybe its just me but the cats head is the only part of her she can’t lick…. after that the cat and I were on a countdown to move out…
    and from what I heard from her next roommates she turned into the roommate from hell cleanliness wise after I left.

  20. I’ve had 2 horrible roommate experiences, but the worst involved a threat on my life.
    I rented a room in my condo to a girl who worked with a friend of mine and I vetted her w/ background and credit checks. Things were ok for the first few months. She was pretty clean, we had opposite schedules, and she seemed polite enough. I had asked all the questions about food, privacy, schedules etc. I realized early one we would never be bffs (way too different backgrounds, values, outlooks on life), but could certainly live together as roommates. Well this was literally a “single white female” situation. Once she realized I didn’t want to spend every waking minute with her shopping, hanging out, getting drunk and bringing sketchy dudes home like she did, she became the biggest bitch to me ever. You could cut the tension with a knife. Soon enough, her lease was up and the day before she was supposed to move out she texted me (her only form of communication) asking to stay another 2 weeks “so we could give it another shot”. I politely answered we should stick to the original agreed upon in writing schedule and she flipped on me. When I saw her later she started screaming at me calling me a snob, bitch, c**t, wh**e, among other things and that I thought I was better than everyone else, and the meanest person she had ever met. She even said my boyfriend had broken up with me because he really wanted her….haha they had met a total of 3 times maybe. Even though we were broken up, he also still thought that was insane.
    Well the next day I come home to her dramatically moving her stuff out with her best friend, (fine by me). While she was outside, I see in one box she’s attempting to steal most of my kitchen supplies as about 80% of the kitchen stuff was mine. When she returned I mentioned that some of our kitchen supplies “might have gotten mixed up”. She went psycho and accused me of trying to touch her stuff, then pulled a butcher knife out of the box and came at me with it!!! The icing on the cake? While doing this she threatened to call the cops on ME for “touching her stuff”. I ran to my bedroom, locked the door and called the cops myself. When they arrived, they escorted her off the premises and I had my locks changed the next day.
    TWo weeks later I received a certified letter in the mail asking for her security deposit back (which she wasn’t getting for a list of whole other issues) and saying she wanted it mailed to her friend’s house because “she no longer felt safe in the apartment due to threats made toward her” HA. She really was crazy. Well my dad who’s a lawyer had written the lease and he responded to her rediculous letter and reminded her if she continued with this slanderous behavior we’d take legal action. I never heard from her again, but every time I see a car like hers around town I shudder.

  21. My first college roommate (who I only lived with for a semester, thank goodness) drove me nuts. She seemed perfectly fine at first. Of course, it’s always the ones you least suspect. After a few weeks, I could not STAND her. For one thing, she would always leave her iPod radio on. I mean, ALL THE TIME, even when she wasn’t in the room. And it was always Christian music – which, while I’m sure it’s nice, is really not my taste at all. Then, every time she was on the phone, she would always put her conversation on speakerphone. It’s bad enough I have to listen to her talk, but I have to listen to the other person too?? And it just baffled me. I mean, I’m deaf so it wasn’t like I could understand the conversation, but why would you want someone else listening in??? Then she would always watch TV or do homework late at night when I was trying to sleep. I cannot sleep well with light, so it REALLY bothered me. I thought it was so rude and she should have gone somewhere else. Plus, she was messy. She would leave food out a lot. Once, she left a bowl of cereal out for five days. FIVE DAYS.

    Gross.

    She also didn’t have a good concept of what it meant to be a good pet-owner. In my opinion anyways. Despite the fact that only fish are allowed in the dorms, her previous roommate the last semester had apparently kept a rabbit in the room. Now, being a rabbit owner and lover myself, I was horrified when she told me the rabbit was constantly in a cage under the bed. That poor rabbit! I was even more horrified when I later found out the rabbit died. Then while I was living with her, she got a puffer fish. 1) she did not know how to take care of that stupid fish (and I know because my best friend loves fish and knew all about how to take care of puffer fish – in fact, I even enlisted her to tell my roommate about what she was doing wrong), and 2) the aquarium she bought was SO FREAKING NOISY. I’m serious, it was so loud and it was on all the time. It was so bad that I usually just wouldn’t wear my implant/hearing aid while I was in the room or just go spend time in my best friend’s room. I was actually kind of happy when the fish died, because then the fish didn’t have to be sad (and it really did look sad, I felt so bad for that poor thing) and I didn’t have to listen to that damn aquarium anymore.

    Then there was her laugh. OH, her laugh. It drove me nuts. It was just the final kicker for all of the other things that annoyed me. Actually, the last month of the semester she ended up staying at her friend’s apt for the month, for whatever reason, so I ended up having the room to myself. It was bliss. Too bad I didn’t get to avoid saying goodbye to her. I ended up spending a LOT of time in my best friend’s room during the semester. But that was just fine with me, really.

    1. Oh, and I am really not a very confrontational person, so I never could talk to her. I should have, but I didn’t…..

    2. wait? you’re deaf? are you being sarcastic?

      1. i only say that because pretty much everything you complained about was noise related, so maybe she just assumed your hearing implant was less sensitive. Or maybe it was more sensitive bc all the things she did sound like really normal things to me.

      2. No, it wasn’t sarcastic. I am deaf. Those are just a few examples of things that she did – there were more. Like the time her mom came to visit for the weekend and stayed in our room and then they ended up having a huge fight because her mom found out from me that my roommate was in a Catholic sorority/fraternity that her mom wanted to be in (which wasn’t my fault, I didn’t know her mom didn’t know and she asked me where her daughter was and I told her the truth). Anyways, they got so mad each other my roommate basically stayed out of the room all weekend and left her mom in there by herself all the time. That was really, really awkward. Even more so when her mom asked me if she could have my phone number so she could call me and check on her daughter. I politely declined.

        Honestly, a lot of background noise is really distracting. I will admit that. Probably more so for me than for most other people, but I’m sure plenty of other people would have been annoyed by the same stuff that I was. But there was more than what I just said, I just didn’t want to go into every example that I could think of.

      3. No, it wasn’t sarcastic. I am deaf. Those are just a few examples of things that she did – there were more. Like the time her mom came to visit for the weekend and stayed in our room and then they ended up having a huge fight because her mom found out from me that my roommate was in a Catholic sorority/fraternity that her mom didn’t want her to be in (which wasn’t my fault, I didn’t know her mom didn’t know and she asked me where her daughter was and I told her the truth). Anyways, they got so mad each other my roommate basically stayed out of the room all weekend and left her mom in there by herself all the time. That was really, really awkward. Even more so when her mom asked me if she could have my phone number so she could call me and check on her daughter. I politely declined.

        Honestly, a lot of background noise is really distracting. I will admit that. Probably more so for me than for most other people, but I’m sure plenty of other people would have been annoyed by the same stuff that I was. But there was more than what I just said, I just didn’t want to go into every example that I could think of.

      4. Sorry, my internet is stupid and posted my comment twice. The second one is a corrected one that I was trying to post instead of the first one.

      5. *so mad at each other. The typos are really bad this morning!

      6. katiebird says:

        I’m going to apologize ahead of time for being so ignorant and I really hope I don’t come off as rude….but if you’re deaf, how does the background noise bother you? Do you have partial hearing? Or can you sense it?

      7. I think she was saying that she couldn’t wear her hearing aid with the loud background noise.

      8. If she has a cochlear she can hear pretty well I would expect.

      9. Yeah, I have a cochlear implant so I can hear pretty well. I really only have problems on the phone.

  22. My horror roommate happened recently… I was living in a 3 way shared apartment where people would move in and out frequently. I had a good relationship with the landlords so I signed the lease. When one person moved out my boyfriend took his room and than soon after that another guy moved out and replaced himself with a random guy from the internet. Let’s just say when he moved in I went over the straight forward questions, tell me if you are having people over, the flat is messy we don’t care and these are the bills I expect you to help pay. Well within one month, he had thrown out all my food, wrote messages on the ceiling with dirt, moved in his girlfriend without even introducing her (I still don’t know her name) and come time to pay the bills refused to pay anything.
    Needless to say, I asked him to move out calmly because I told him it wasn’t working out. He freaked out and started screaming and throwing things while I hid in my room with the door locked. He began pounding on our shared wall as I frantically called my boyfriend. When he calmed down, I approached him and told him we needed to have a meeting about the situation as adults and come to an agreement about the problem. We set a time and date. I let my boyfriend run the meeting since I was terrified of him at this point. The meeting went badly. He used vulgar language and refused to leave. That night I found a vacant apartment nearby, signed the lease and moved out in two days. The best part was we did it without the roommate knowing and the landlord had the police remove him. The landlord was kind and understood why we left. It was such a nightmare.

    1. He wrote on the ceiling with dirt?

      1. Yeah, he wrote please clean me (with dirt from outside). When I confronted him about it he said it was a joke. I said it wasn’t funny and he said in America people consider that funny. I just stared at him because I didn’t know what to say.

      2. Can’t speak for all Americans here, but tracing “Wash Me” into the dirt on a car might be funny, and at worst only slightly annoying. Bringing dirt inside to write on any surface is just bizarre!

      3. Seconded.

      4. I mean I am American too… I live overseas, but he was just bizarre and crazy. The whole thing lead to a way better living situation so in a way I am glad it happened. Just wish he hadn’t been so threatening.

    2. SpaceySteph says:

      My roommate in college posted her sublet on craigslist when she went away one summer. Then she mailed the girl a key to the apartment and went to france for the summer, leaving me and my other roommate to wait in fear of who would replace her. We were so furious at the girl, and a little afraid for our lives.

      Luckily the girl turned out cool and normal, but I am so afraid of the kind of people you can find on the internet. Because of stories like this.

  23. My one and only roommate (that wasn’t a SO) was a female before I got pregnant with my oldest boy. I was 15 and she was 19. She told her mother she was living alone so she could get 3/4 of her rent paid for by her mom, while collecting 1/2 of the rent from me. It was a 1 bedroom apartment for $500/mo (all utilities included, including cable). Her and I had been friends for a while and we had shared two apartments together. The first one was nothing more than a partyhouse. She had invited a friend to stay overnight, who brought her kid and a boyfriend, and they never left the living room. And the 4plex was run by a slumlord that filled the place with stoners. We moved partially so I could get away from the stoners (and the Hells Angels and the “Bunny Club” across the street after I got pregnant) and partially so we could get rid of the couch surfers that took over our living room.
    Our second place wasn’t bad, until she decided that she was dating a guy she knew from high school, who was still in jail for molesting his sister, and was being released. No questions asked, just was moving him in. I was pregnant, just turned 16 – he couldn’t live with ME as a part of his probation. She started sabotaging my jobs. She wanted me working at the McDonalds on the street over from us so I could bring hom free food (she was 375lbs). I worked retail a few blocks away. She started calling me in sick while I was in the shower, then would tell me that they called while I was in the bathroom to say I didn’t need to be in. Needless to say, I got fired.
    I got a job babysitting for a guy that her new boyfriend (the sex offender) knew. To this day, I still don’t know how the hell we ended up dating, let alone got married. That was husband #1. I ended up moving in with him because she took me off the lease to accommodate the sex offender. I found out after I was kicked out that her mom didn’t know I was living there and that her mom had been paying her part of the rent.
    I’ve heard from mutual friends over the years that she gained even more weight, had a kid by some random guy, moved to FL, lives in a grungy trailer and is on welfare.

    Never again will I live with someone like that. I barely like living with people I’m in a relationship with! *laugh*

  24. eel avocado says:

    This is more of a weird story about a roommate. My senior year of college, I lived with three other girls. I had been friends with two of the girls for years. My other roommate had a naturally deep voice…but every time her mother called, she would start talking in high-pitched baby talk! A couple times, I thought there was another person in the apartment. It was a little strange.

  25. Bluebella says:

    I lived with someone who was the most passive-aggressive person I’ve ever met. I’m very even-keeled: you don’t need to leave me notes, just a straight up, hey this is what’s going on will work.

    I’ll spare you all the stories, but the one that really makes me laugh to this day was the kitchen furniture. Instead of talking it out like an adult, if we did something that made my roommate angry, they would just steal kitchen furniture and put it in their room. Imagine coming downstairs in the morning and seeing your kitchen table gone. It became a bit of a joke between the other roommates: “Alright guys, the microwave is gone. Who pissed off [roommate]?”

  26. SpaceySteph says:

    My freshman year of college I had a pretty bad roommate experience. When I arrived, she had already been there for a day and had set up her stuff.
    She had a giant cross hanging over her bed (directly opposite the door), a boyfriend in seminary to become a pastor, and when she found out I was Jewish asked me whether I had “ever considered Jesus.” This being within the first week of us living together.
    Though there was no rule in the dorm to this effect, she tried to get me to get visiting boys to leave by 9pm, even though she was going to be up talking to her boyfriend on the phone until midnight. Also when she was on the phone with her bf she adopted this creepy baby voice.
    Let me state that I was a virgin til my senior year of college and didn’t even really date- these boys in question were friends or study partners, we had all our clothes on, kept the noise level down… I found out later it was because she was afraid her boyfriend would accuse her of cheating if he overheard a boy in the room, even if she told him it was my friend or boyfriend or father or whatever. Some relationship.
    The second night we lived together, I bumped into my best friend from elementary school. We had gone to different high schools and kinda lost touch. I knew she was going to the same school but I didn’t even know her new cell number. Well when we ran into each other, I invited her back to my dorm to catch up. She told me all about her (admittedly pretty slutty) high school life. When she left my new roommate said to me “Is she gonna be around alot? Because she’s kinda slutty, it makes me uncomfortable.” Calling my childhood best friend a slut… not really a way to endear yourself to me.
    Well between the bible thumping, judging, and also her eating all my food when I wasn’t looking… it wasn’t a good year. I played my own part in being immature about the whole thing (we were both young). But now, 7 years later, we actually are good friends. Around the middle of our sophomore year, she broke up with the boyfriend, became a little more openminded about people of other religions, and became kinda slutty herself. We stopped living together, but had alot of classes together because we had the same major… eventually we stopped hating each other. Funny how that works.

    1. caitie_didn't says:

      I love that there’s such a happy ending to this story!

  27. My roommate was pretty great, other than one event. Apparently months before we moved out she had a guy friend over who somehow lost a little baggie of cocaine in our apartment. When her mom was helping her move out her mom found the cocaine, and my roommate denied it was hers, and so her mom assumed it was mine.

    I mean, i can understand her not wanting to be like, Oh yea mom, that was my friends, sorry… but we were pretty good friends and I knew her parents well so now her parents think I’m this terrible influence and I never talk to them anymore. I would feel too awkward. It sucks!

  28. Christina says:

    I had a roommate that was a coworker but she was also the mom of a girl I went to school with. Her kids had moved out and I had moved in a year later. She always wanted me to sit with her in the living room for family time in the evenings. She would crochet and watch tv and wanted me to pick up a hobby like crochet or embroidery to stay busy while we watched TV. Weird.
    I used to make muffins to keep around for a quick breakfast and I’d pop them in the microwave to warm up and take with me to work. One day I came home 9 hrs later and there was my muffin on it’s little plate sitting in the center of the kitchen island…..with a sticky note on it. No, really. on the muffin. It said, “Dont leave food out. It draws ants.” So why wouldn’t she put the muffin up and just leave me the note??? It was also obvious that I had just forgotten it. A one time thing.
    I moved out after I came home to a 3 page letter taped to my door, in an addressed envelope, telling me that I wasn’t the substitute daughter she expected me to be.

  29. Ah – weekend plans:

    Saturday – woke up late. 2 year old was up half the night screaming in his sleep. Not sure why. Maybe he’s developing night terrors like my 2nd son, maybe he’s teething, who knows. In any case – I’m beat. Especially after spending the last 10 days in a walking cast (stress fracture in my foot) and being sick earlier in the week which has now left me anemic again. My lower back is acting up and I can’t stand up straight again, so yay – more muscle relaxers and my back brace again.
    After the SO gets home, all of us are going out to Ft. Richardson (army post) to the cemetary to lay flowers before the Memorial Day rush (we both have friends and family out there). I’ll stop out at the Elmendorf AFB mall and say hi to a few people (I used to work for AAFES a long while back) and then we’ll pick up some dinner, fill up the suburban (good bye money!) and drive up to Talkeetna (125 miles from Anchorage – 4 hour drive depending on my lead foot) to visit the spot we spread my grandpa’s ashes. The drive back will really be bad, considering how late it will be.
    Sunday – work on potty training the youngest. His bladder control is still iffy at best, but, I’m trying to get him to stop standing when he uses his chair (he pees over the chair when he does). He wants to be one of the big boys. Thank goodness we have tiled floors right now. The kids and I are going to work on my kitchen herb garden and plan my next brewing foray (mead, honey wine and teas) for the summer solstice. After the SO gets off work, we’ll be going to Lowe’s and looking at carpet samples (we’re getting carpet this year for the house) and I’m looking at ideas for custom shelving and other things for the house. Plus paint. Need to repaint a few rooms – we’ve been here 2 years and this place hasn’t been painted since before we moved in, and some rooms are multiple colors from the crazy 13 year old kid who spray painted.
    Monday – might go see the races in Butte (Mat-Su Valley). About 1.5 hours north of Anchorage, dust, dirt, and if it rains – mud. The vehicle noise should keep the bear and moose away. Hopefully the 1st ex-husband will still be an 11 hour drive away in Fairbanks. If not – I’m bringing guns with me to go target shooting 😀 We’re going with the SO’s brother and he hasn’t gotten to play with my guns yet and both he and my brother are itching to take the Thompson out for a spin.

  30. I get severe anxiety even thinking about my last roommate, so I’m not going to go into the details of it all… The short version is that we lived together for 4+ years during and after college. She was a mean, rude, bitchy person- in college it made her funny and entertaining, once I grew up a little, I realized she was just mean. She caused a huge fight between me and my best friend which caused us to not talk for over 2 years. Eventually when I was having anxiety attacks on the train on the way home from work every day I realized that I needed to get out, and fast. I moved out 6 months early and spent well over $3000 paying rent at a place I didn’t live in. I have’t seen or talked to her since, and I never plan on it. My life improved 100% after I moved out.

    Living alone was amazing, and I loved it. I only wish I’d moved out sooner.
    I’ve been living with my fiance for almost 2 years now, and he’s the best roommate I’ve ever had.

  31. missmolly says:

    Get this–my current roommate is moving *across the hall* from our current apartment to live by herself. Kind of makes me not feel sorry for her all those times she whined that her money was tight. If you can afford to live all by yourself, money ain’t that tight, honey!

  32. A friend of mine moved in with a girl he went to university with, and was on somewhat of good terms. Within a month she had met a homeless man, began a relationship with him and let him live there rent free. He ate my friend’s food, put random crap that he picked up places, like a washing machine placed in the kitchen that blocked the stove so my friend was unable to cook. Then my friend’s roommate broke up with the homeless guy to move by herself across the street because she needed space, leaving my friend to live with said homeless man, and unable to make the rent. He would spend as much time as possible away from the apartment until he was eventually evicted.

  33. I just moved out of my apartment where I had the worst roommates. They never cleaned everything, they would leave food out for days and worst of all, one came to me ant old me that she couldn’t pay me $80 for bills that month because she needed to buy a $5000 car. To make it even better, she didn’t even have a license.

  34. So, really, what you are all saying is that the best move is to have a single room while in college and then move in with the boyfriend/fiancé once you graduate.

    That’s just sooooo old school. Maybe they knew what they were doing back then…

  35. StephanieSays says:

    I moved into a small two bedroom in college, and lived in the living room. One of the roommates was great, quiet and tidy. The other roommate was an older lady who would be there maybe one week a month when she’d visit from abroad. The first night she was back, she had the radio on full blast, locked her door, and left for the night. Around 2 am after trying earplugs and hourly knocking on her door, I left her a note asking her to keep her music down and left to sleep at my boyfriend’s.

    The next morning, I walked through the door and she started screaming at me about how disrespectful I was. Every time she was there and saw me after that, she’d scream at me… I was never sure why. I’d generally just walk past her and shut and lock my door (ok, sometimes I got too annoyed and gave her the finger as I was walking away). I eventually ended my lease early, it was just too stressful.

    Well, turns out that lady was the husband of a local slumlord who was in prison for human trafficking and the murder of an underaged girl he’d imported from India. Worst roommate ever.

  36. Meaghan Self says:

    My dorm roommate was a hard partier; so much so that she wouldn’t shower between her outings. This went on for the first week and she reeked of pot, sweat, and booze. Finally I started Febreezing her while she slept all through the day until she got it out of her system and started up with the hygiene. She never found out and we got along great after that :]

  37. SpaceySteph says:

    Can I interrupt this weekend thread to ask for some opinions?
    Today my boyfriend and I went to kohl’s. He needed work clothes and is terrible at shopping. I need a dress for his brothers wedding so I figured, kill 2 birds with one stone by going together. We collect some shirts and slacks for him and some dresses for me and go into the fitting room in side by side rooms so we can get opinions.
    Well then, I kid you not, THREE salespeople come in to remove my boyfriend from the fitting room because someone said there was a guy in the fitting room and it made them uncomfortable.
    Is this weird? Or am I the weird one. You go to express, old navy, gap or any other store I’ve been in and the fitting rooms are unisex. Yes it was located in the misses section but it wasn’t labeled as the women’s dressing room.
    We gathered our stuff and left but still I find this really strange.
    Would this weird you out? I promise we were in separate changing rooms, always coming out fully clothed, having appropriate conversations. I’m a little miffed. And it made our shopping trip take twice as long to use separate fitting rooms.

    1. When I worked at Macy’s, I know that the fitting rooms are not unisex, and that you should go by the department (whether it’s men’s, women’s, children’s, etc). That’s how I think of it at other major stores, although I know there are some stores that do have unisex fitting rooms, but they usually have an attendant present at all times.

      1. SpaceySteph says:

        I haven’t been in a department store in so long, I guess it never occurred to me. Even my Target has coed dressing rooms.
        Also I usually shop at odd hours (one benefit of being a shift worker) and during daytime hours when only bored housewives are shopping, I’m frequently attendant-less in dressing rooms. They’re just sitting back there unattended.

      2. I’ve never seen a Target with coed dressing rooms before, but I think coed dressing rooms are actually a really good option (easier for families, friends of opposite genders, spouses), so long as there are unisex dressing rooms as well for those who feel more comfortable with that.

      3. Wow, it’s late and I didn’t meant unisex dressing rooms as well..separate male and female ones is what I meant.

    2. The Express, Macy’s, Kohl’s at the mall near me are not unisex. It doesn’t bother me personally, but I can see other people not liking it.

    3. When there is a fitting room specifically in one section of the store, I think it’s meant for only people shopping in that section to use. I don’t have a problem with it, personally, but I could see how some people might.
      However, yesterday at the Gap, I went into the fitting room with my fiance while he tried on pants. I only went in cause there was a bench in there and not out in the waiting area.

    4. Britannia says:

      Express is not unisex here in Arizona… Nor is any other department store fitting room, for that matter. It would weird me out if men were actually allowed to share a fitting room, because that meant that the attendants weren’t doing their jobs to look out for me. Virtually every clothing store now has policies in place to rule against unisex fitting rooms in order to avoid potential attacks, sex escapades, or peeping toms.

  38. Since it was a women’s fitting room, I can understand the salespeople asking him to leave. It’s a bit different with department stores than it is with a store like Old Navy. There is an expectation of privacy in the designated-sex only fitting rooms in the department stores, and it’s not uncommon for women to walk out of their individual dressing rooms in various stages of undress to ask advice of girlfriends in another dressing room and/or to use the larger mirrors that typically are in the common areas of the fitting rooms.

  39. I’ve had fairly good luck with roommates overall, but my last one had one habit that drove me crazy. She refused to soak dishes before putting them in the dishwasher–even if there was dried food or something really sticky inside. Our dishwasher was not the greatest, and anything substantial stuck to a dish was transformed into something like cement during the cycle. And if tried to soak anything, she would filp out about how the dishes were piling up. I finally realized that she was such a neat freak that having a dirty dish out in the open was more than she could handle, even if leaving it out would save us practically having to take a chisel to it later.

  40. Lexington says:

    Wow. All of my roommates have been pretty amazing. The worst was when one girl would have the lights on all night in our room during finals week, and I’ve had to deal with A/C wars. I also have to give mad props to my sophomore year roommate who put up with me the year after my mom died, because I was a hot mess. Seriously, so many points to her.

    As for what I did this weekend- went to Austin and got engaged!!! Yay! 😀

  41. I’ve had really great roommates and really awful ones.

    One summer, I lived at a university while I had an internship nearby. I had a random roommate and she was actually terrifying to live with. I would come home to every cabinet in the kitchen open with the knives laid out on the counter, wake to her opening and slamming shut every dresser drawer, and enter my bathroom to find that she refuses to flush or clean up after herself. She also spent a good deal of time running in a small circle moaning, and I even woke up to her standing over me, watching me sleep. I questioned whether she was homeless because she moved in using only plastic bags from a grocery store and wore the same few items of clothing, and didn’t even have sheets on her bed. She was also Eastern European so there was a bit of a language barrier. The last straw was I woke in the middle of the night to her screaming at the top of her lungs that someone needed to help her because she was going to die. I was terrified but found her on our futon. She had a sore throat and a runny nose. She couldn’t take care of herself and didn’t know what to do. I moved out the next day. Unfortunately, looking back after having worked for a non-profit autism advocacy organization, I think she may have been on the spectrum and was just never diagnosed. When I moved out I told the building supervisor that she should be referred for some sort of psychological services. I hope someone looked after her. Needless to say living with her was terrifying, and kind of sad.

    My current roommate is a nightmare to live with. I could talk for hours about it but I’ll spare you. She’s a little ‘single white female’. But I’m moving out in a month and couldn’t be happier to never have to see this girl again.

  42. McLaughlane says:

    Good god. Reading these is making me feel the urge to clean everything I own just on principle…and my room and bathroom aren’t even that messy, I just have laundry that I need to put away.

    Apparently reading awful roommate stories is enough to inspire a cleaning rampage just out of paranoia?

  43. My old roommate threatened to have me arrested because she thought I drank two bottles of water. Yeah, two bottles of Nestle water. Oh and she called the police and said my boyfriend tried to attack her because she thought he was also stealing her water. Of course she was drunk all the time and skitzed out of her mind. But that on top of the fact that she didn’t clean or do any chores or take care of her dog was just too much.

Leave a Reply to Bethany Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *