With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemy Roommates
“I moved in with a friend of mine when I was in a bind. She had a friend crashing on the couch and said he would be there for a few weeks, tops.
4 months later, he was still there. And then weird stuff started happening. My cash would go missing, my credit cards suddenly had a ton of fraud issues (fortunately all of which got reimbursed by my bank), and when I confronted the roommate and her friend about it, they all claimed that they knew nothing.
Two days after the 2016 election, I get a call from my roommate’s boyfriend telling me that we had been evicted, the front lock had been changed, and I should come to the back door and take as much of my stuff as possible before the housing complex takes everything. It turns out my roommate had stolen my rent money and not paid it (I was subletting without a lease, like an idiot).
When I got to my apartment, my computer, charger, iPad, and most of my prescription medication was gone. My roommate had disconnected her phone.
It’s been almost two years, and I still haven’t spoken to her.”
Elwin The Awful
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“These were all the SAME flatmate.
His name was Elwin, a university student studying Theology and first time living away from mommy.
- The day he moved in, he then tells me he couldn’t afford the agreed amount of rent. I was saved because I had him sign a contract before moving in.
- Communal living areas were to be kept tidy (kitchen, living room and bathroom). The kitchen was cleaned (I had just done it) and I went out. I came home to find the toaster, 3 plates, butter and jam all left out on the bench. Ants had already found the jam. I put everything in his bed and pulled the sheet up. I was in bed when he came home, and he then knocks on my bedroom door and asks ‘do you want me to keep these things in my bedroom now?’
- I found a sympathy card on the coffee table. He was out. I read it. It was from him to his 19-year-old girlfriend and it said ‘please accept an apology. When we were making love a few weeks ago (ew), without you knowing, I took the protection off because I wanted to give you a child. Please accept the enclosed check for $500 to cover any anxiety I have caused you.’
- He was going to Queensland for a holiday for a week and legitimately asked me if he needed to pay rent for the week he would be gone.
- I would leave for work at 6 am every weekday morning and get home at about 7 pm. Many times I came home to the electric wall heater having been left on ALL BLOODY DAY while he wasn’t there. He wondered why his share of the electricity bill was high.
- I was going out on a Saturday night. Got ready, cleaned up the bathroom before I left. Came home that night at about 11 pm and went straight to bed. Next morning I went into the bathroom and found tiny little hairs EVERYWHERE. All over the floor, mirror, bath. You name it, there was a hair there. When I saw him that afternoon I asked him about it and he replied: ‘Oh, I cut my hair before I went out.’ He spent the next 3 hours cleaning the bathroom.
He lasted 3 months before he decided to move back home. I’m lucky I had him sign a contract because the electricity bill arrived 3 days after he moved out. It was almost $800. I called and let him know, and he put his mom on the phone. She decided he didn’t have to pay it. After I sent him a demand letter from my friend, who is a lawyer, a check arrived.”
This Guy Was Expecting Way Too Much
“I decided to find a roommate off Craigslist because I was in need of a quick room after my former roommate bailed on me. The dude seemed normal at first, worked some construction job, smoked grass a lot (it’s legal here), and had a cute puppy. He owned the house and wanted to rent two of the bedrooms. One room went to another guy, more of a bro-type but really nice. I’m a female, but living with two dudes seemed fine as long as they weren’t creepy. I told the guy who owned the house that I was just looking for a place to sleep during the day since I was working overnights at a hospital, and my dog would come to work with me so we would both be pretty invisible. I even cooked at my boyfriend’s house most of the time, we just couldn’t live together because of the dog and his stupid apartment rules.
My boyfriend and I went over to get keys, made small talk with the new roommates, everything was cool. The next day, I get off work at 7 am, bring my bed and some clothes over. My boyfriend comes by later on to move some more while I was sleeping. He knocks on the door, and owner acts like he doesn’t recognize him at all. He threatens my boyfriend and tells him to leave ‘her stuff outside and learn to respect his property’. My boyfriend texts me and tells me what happened, but I’m like what the? that doesn’t sound right. The owner ‘has no idea what I’m talking about’ when I ask him about it. Very weird.
Over the next month, the owner would randomly text me very angrily that I’m ‘avoiding him’, not helping with housework, and that I don’t deserve to take up space in his house. I respond that I was upfront about just being there to sleep, I always clean up after myself (the very little I did use the kitchen and bathroom), and I’m paying rent. He threatens to raise my rent because I won’t help him build a rock wall in his backyard during his day off (while I’m freaking sleeping because I work overnight did we not got over this?). I decide to ghost him after paying the following months rent in full.
The day I was moving out, I saw his pup had chewed up some junk mail and the other roommate decided to text the owner about it. The owner comes home while I’m about to leave with all my stuff, and proceeds to beat the snot out of the dog for chewing up the mail. He texted me later that day to tell me I still owe him a deposit even if I’m moving out and that I should have tried harder to pull my weight in the household. I did not respond.”
Her Best Friend Became Her Worst Enemy
“My former best friend got into coke and developed a serious drinking problem. She moved in with me after my mom died (her dad died a week after my mom) and she just went off the rails. Picking fights with homeless people (and it was me to drag her butt into an Uber and putting up with the tantrum and then give her the lowdown on what she did when she woke up and couldn’t remember a thing).
Next thing I know she’s sleeping with her married boss in my bed and bringing addicts at warehouse parties into my house when I was asleep: one day I woke up to find a bunch of people running rampant, and several people doing lines of blow off the alter I had set up for my mum and dad’s ashes.
Another night her best friend’s violent, closeted boyfriend tried to smash a bottle on my head, then he threw me against the wall and told me I was an ugly inbred autistic mongrel and he was going to assault me up the rear and then slit my throat when he was done, before the other two girls dragged him off.
Then she started bringing stray cats into the house and leaving dirty spoons of cat food in my cupboard. Then she got her loser brother to try to strangle me and scream at me that I was a lazy worthless son to my dying mother and my mother would be disgusted with me if she was still alive…. all because I wouldn’t lend the friend money for blow anymore.
She was like my twin sister and I miss her but I can’t forgive her. I feel sick when I think of the stunts she pulled on me.
I hope she sorts herself out, but I’m not holding my breath. She’s convinced a ton of people I am beating her up as revenge, and despite her long history of wasted, abusive out of control behavior and substance abuse, everyone is happy to take it as gospel and a few of her addict ex-friends threatened to throw acid in my face as punishment for ‘making her cry”‘
It sucks, but that happens when you’re a pretty, skinny, loose blonde girl: everyone believes you if you turn on the waterworks fast enough.”
The Filthy Cat Litter Wasn’t The Only Thing
“My female roommate decided to get a cat. She never cared for it or cleaned its litter box (or did any sort of cleaning in general). Over the course of four months, I was forced to clean the litter box when I couldn’t take the smell anymore (it was basically a solid chunk of feces at this point.) She claimed she could never smell it. She never paid me back for litter even though I asked multiple times. The cat started peeing on my bed because it was cleaner than the litter box (I’m guessing the cat also might have also had a UTI.)
Her clothes were everywhere, her dishes were everywhere, even though she took showers she never used soap so she smelled bad, and she consistently brought men home between 12-3 am and would hook up with them loudly (the ones I talked to expressed regret). Not to mention she was basically the most narcissistic person I’d ever met. She incessantly took selfies and invited herself into my room whenever to show them to me or ‘give me the update’ on her life. Every conversation I had with her was entirely one-sided. She handled most confrontation by basically claiming that she was a feminist and that people just resented her because she was a strong and aggressive woman fighting against the patriarchy.
I’m pretty terrible at confrontation and I’m usually overly nice so that’s what landed me in this situation. I just got my things together and left incognito when I finally snapped. She went around spreading lies about me for the rest of college.”
The Grossest Jar Of Peanut Butter Ever
“My horror story starts with something innocent that most people wouldn’t think would be an issue. It was an open jar of peanut butter.
It was our very first year attending college, we lived in an apartment complex that was a few miles away from campus. The apartment itself was a nice 2 bed, 2 bath, 1060 square foot apartment. Being college students, and due to stupid reasons, all three of my roommates dropped out and had gone back to live at home with their parents. Also, because it was in the lease that we had signed, we also needed to pay rent for 1 year total. With this being said, they didn’t feel the need to move all their stuff immediately, as I was still there, and it just worked out better for them as well.
Flash forward three months after they moved, it was a hot summer night and around 11 pm, I was sound asleep until I heard someone come in from outside. I tiredly walked outside and came face to face with someone who was not my roommate, but my roommate’s mom whom I had met only a year prior. She said she was sorry for the late arrival, but needed to move the rest of my roommate’s stuff. She opened the door to the bedroom and turned on the light, but immediately closed the door tightly while going inside. It was kinda weird I thought, especially how brisk the door shut. Then came the screams.
I opened the door to make sure she was alright, which was the equivalent of opening Pandora’s box. There she stood in the center of the room holding a peanut butter jar festering with maggots and hundreds upon hundreds of flies line the walls. Everything was just covered in flies and the whole room was buzzing. Needless to say, it took weeks to get rid of all the flies. Luckily we did get a large portion of the deposit back on that apartment.”
She’s Wasn’t Her Secretary
“My freshman roommate sort of thought of me as her personal assistant.
If I went to do laundry, it’d be, ‘why didn’t you wash mine too?’
She expected me to be available at any hour to take her shopping. For groceries, clothes, whatever. Even if it was 2 a.m. (Me: ‘I couldn’t take you to Old Navy even if I wanted to. It’s the middle of the night. They’ve been closed for hours.’)
She once got ticked off, threw her phone full-force into the brick wall in our dorm, and then didn’t understand why I wouldn’t drop everything immediately and skip class to take her to the Verizon store.
And I never quite understood why she always insisted on GPS-ing her way across campus. Every day. To every class, to the cafeteria, to chapel, everything. First of all, our campus wasn’t that big. Second, if you’ve been going here for six months and it’s the third time you’ve been to the cafeteria today and you literally haven’t left sight of the cafeteria building, why are you mapping your way there?”
Raw Chicken Rotting In A Closet
“My college roommate bought raw chicken and seltzer and then threw the grocery bag into our shared closet. He forgot the chicken was in there and then it rotted…that smell still haunts me to this day”
A Nightmare In Every Way
“I had a roommate that was SO obnoxious. Every night he’d spend screaming in the room over while playing video games, played his music loud enough that neighbors told him to turn it down, and would never do the dishes, just as a start.
He used to break our console accessories (headphones, controllers) and then never replace them, just grab one of our extras without saying a word, smoke all of our pot, and drink all of our hooch. He drank so much that he would finish large jugs of Absolute in 3 days at most, and then wouldn’t replace any of it. He did this on 3 separate occasions without even apologizing. His worst offense was drinking my fiancèe’s very expensive bottle of Johnnie Walker when she said he couldn’t have ANY.
He never did dishes, even though he made some of the most noxious hamburger helper messes that would be left without even being cleaned out or thrown out so it wouldn’t get encrusted. By the end, he was talking bad about us to people and began telling everyone he was going to take our dogs and that we were terrible pet owners.
I never once acted mean towards him, I might not have talked to him all of the time, but that’s because I’m a closeted introvert. He also ‘forgot’ to pay rent, as in he was ‘hoping no one would notice’ (his exact words) even though he had enough money at the time to pay the rent almost 9 times over. The biggest insult was after the talking smack about us, and the broken items and the unpaid rent and everything else, he still had the gall to ask if we would let him stay another 3 months. I obviously said no.”
Just Sort Of Sad, Really
“One of my college roommates was so bad, I felt bad for him.
To start off, he’d spend the entire day laying in bed in his underwear, watching anime. He only wore clothes when he was going to class. He’d watch it well into the night with the brightness turned up all the way, causing the entire room to light up. He also had a bunch of random alarms set early in the morning, even though he usually got up after me, and sometimes he would sleep through the alarm blaring from his phone right next to his face.
He never tried to make any friends, but he started off the school year dating a girl who was still a senior back at his high school. He would FaceTime her constantly. Usually, he’d call her when he got back from classes around 2 pm, would talk to her all day until he fell asleep sometime from 2-4 am, would keep FaceTime running all night while they slept, and continue talking to her when he got up for classes at 6 am. They eventually broke up, and he stayed inside even more, except now he wanted to talk to me constantly. I’d have my headphones in while watching stuff on my computer, but he’d start talking to me every 5 minutes (usually just to tell me what was happening in the anime he was watching). I was both annoyed and felt kinda bad because he wouldn’t attempt to talk to anyone else.
Like I said, he never left the room. He didn’t even leave for meals, even though he was paying for an unlimited meal plan, and I would sometimes ask if he wanted to come with me. He didn’t eat much in the room either. He usually had an oatmeal cream pie every day or every other day, and that was it. My mom heard from his mom that halfway through his first semester, he had dropped 30 pounds.
He also didn’t seem to put much effort into schoolwork. He’s an engineering major, but he misses assignments, didn’t study for exams, and didn’t do homework until the morning the assignment was due. He has also failed a few classes and decided not to take certain engineering classes during the recommended time because they aren’t prerequisites for any other classes. He has also mentioned that he might stay an extra year in college ‘just for fun’. I might add that my university costs more than most of the other colleges in my area, and I don’t think his parents have that much money.
I ended up moving out at the end of the year but still talked to him from time to time. He refused to move in with anyone else, so he’s been staying in a single room.”
He Had A Photo Of His “Friend” From Craigslist
“My old roommate (male) brought a streetwalker home and I woke up at 4 am to her going through my things in the bathroom.
I assumed he brought over a girl and she needed a feminine product. He heard me wake up and rushed her out the door.
He comes back in a few minutes later and says that he had given food and water to a homeless girl. He had heard her in an altercation with our downstairs neighbor and took pity on her.
Keep in mind, at this point, he could have lied and said he brought home a date from the bar.
I had a bizarre feeling about it, I went to ask the downstairs neighbor the next day and the neighbor had no idea what I was talking about.
I confronted my roommate about it and he shows me a single photo of the woman to make me ‘calm down about him letting a stranger in the house.’ A photo from craigslist.”
The Roommate That Just Didn’t Care
“My freshman roommate was a foreign exchange student who was at the university for fun, not to study. He would play pranks on me like putting tiger balm in my boxers, playing smut at full volume on my computer, blowing up eggs in my microwave and even threw away my new toaster because he thought it was funny. He would also play soccer, then come back and hang his sweaty socks to dry on my fan. He would also drink underage in my room, which wasn’t bad, but he decided to save all the cans and make a chair. He never washed out the cans first, so my room started to smell like ketchup and stale brew.
Then, he and his buddy were out drinking during finals week and came back at 2 am and sprayed the fire extinguisher down the hallway. The entire dorm (400+ people) had to be evacuated and we weren’t allowed back to our rooms until the dust settled around 5 am… DURING FINALS WEEK! Finally, I started reporting him to my RA, then the hall director and after nothing was done, I went to the housing director. He wasn’t attending classes and had bottles of Jack in the room illegally and was preventing me from doing the work I needed to do.
He was eventually kicked out but didn’t tell me and nobody said he shouldn’t be there for another week. When my RA asked how it was having a room to myself, I got confused. He wasn’t gone, but he legally shouldn’t have been in the dorms. They gave him to the end of the week, but he just moved off campus until he went home. What a jerk. I still hate him.”
The Roommate With Only Two Hobbies
“My college roommate got a girlfriend just a few weeks into the first year. Obviously, he wanted her to move in, which I didn’t mind at first.
Little did I know that the only thing this couple was capable of doing was watching tv shows and getting it on. 24/7, for months, they would either be hooking up or loudly watching sitcoms and similar stuff. No matter the time, no matter the day; I could be woken up at 4 am by the sounds of vicious behind slapping accompanied by The Office opening theme.
Luckily they moved out the next term – so I had twice the space at half the rent”