Depending on the school, “dry campus” means your RA could say anything from “I saw that wine cooler; you’re now expelled” to “Guys, seriously, would you at least try to hide the alcohol when I come in your room?” I know a lot of “dry” campuses in Minnesota, and I don’t know of any where booze has been a big issue with anybody. Check it out with floormates, though.
As long as we’re trading bad roommate stories, I’ve gotta share mine. A friend’s roommate got wasted and puked in my friend’s bed and then slept in it. Ugh.
I think a roommate who crreates a smell that makes you sick and keeps you from sleeping sucks pretty bad, even if the smell is caused by a “normal college kid” activity. Adding in that this activity both breaks the law and the school rules and could result in the OPs expulsion, well, that sucks even more.
He has a right to complain.
OTOH, my former roommate used to complain to everyone within earshot that my sleeping was making her GPA go down. She came into the room one night when I was asleep, turned on all the lights, and began complaining loudly on my phone about what a bitch I was for sleeping. Then, when I left, she took all of my food out of the fridge and left it on my bed to spoil. She also had her own roll of toilet paper that no one else could use, but she complained when we didn’t buy more. She used to go out all night and leave her beeper at home, so that the same guy could beep her, call (whereupon I would tell him that she was out and that her beeper was here), then beep her again, then call again – about fifteen times in a row every night. Did I mention that she used to turn my alarm clock off because it interupted her watching TV?
Damn Silentgoldfish, that is hard to beat. I sure as hell can’t.
Apparently, my ex-roommate would get mad because I came in late at night sometimes (I’m talking, midnight, one a.m. at the latest). And the thing is, I would have attempted to come in earlier on occasion if she had confronted me about it.
But no. She just bitched and moaned about it to my other roommate (we’re in a triple) and to her deadjournal online. I mean, how did she expect my behavior to change if she wouldn’t even let me know I was doing anything “wrong”?
She moved out eventually. Thank God.
The moral of the story is…
If you have a problem with your roommate, try talking with him/her about it. Complaining about it to other people isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Well, since this appears to be a not-often occurence, I think I’ll sort of “live and let live” as it were. But I need somewhere to complain, don’t I? I just can’t let all this “rage” bottle up inside me!
I’m putting myself up for a bad-roommate-award™ certificate…
We normally didn’t have too many problems, got along decently, respected each other’s things, and avoided each other when one of of us was too busy to be social… but atleast once I pulled a serious bad-roommate transgression…
I was (and unforunately still am) a smoker, he was not… one night a few friends of mine (also smokers) came over to hang out and have a few drinks, my roommate was out of town… so after a couple drinks, I decided that we should avoid the cold weather and just smoke in the room with the window open… yeah, that worked out well… the next morning the room smelled like a fireplace.
he got home kind of early in the morning… and just asked (actually nicely) what had happened the night before… and I felt like a total piece of crap… I knew it smelled like dead smoke, I knew he didn’t smoke, and I knew I had agreed not to do anything like that… bobo sucks.
to try to mitigate my screwup, I immediately walked to the nearest store and bought a couple cans of air-freshener… “here ya go dude, hose down what ever you think smells bad… sorry, I was drunk, and I’m a a dick”… granted, that doesn’t absolve me from guilt, but atleast I tried to fix the problem.
(fyi, I now only smoke outdoors… unless I’m in a pool hall
I once had a roommate complain because my boyfriend had leaned up against her bed.
Very small room. Her bed is opposite the TV; mine was perpendicular to it. We wanted to watch a video, so we sat on the floor with our backs to the bed. That’s it. We didn’t have sex on it; we weren’t on it at all. But she came home (after he’d left) and found one of his thick black hairs on the side of the bedspread. Maybe she thought it was a public hair and flipped, after which nothing I said would have appeased her, but she got right up on the cross and started weeping about how her bed was the only thing she could call her own. (Desk? Closet? Knapsack? None of which I ever gave a second look.)
I just happen to think she was overreacting. She also had a fit when I brought her her mail (we shared a box), saying she didn’t want me to look at the return addresses. WTF? I only looked at the name of the addressee, and separated her stuff from mine without further examination. I tried to tell her this, but how can you reassure someone who’s paranoid enough to think that just handling an envelope addressed to them is an invasion of privacy?
Again I say, I know how important privacy is to a college student. But at some point, you have to accept the fact that in a small space, some molecules are going to bump up against each other. Going through someone’s bag: not cool. Moving the bag because it’s near the door and you have to bring in a large, heavy box: deal with it.
I’d recommend talking to your roomate and going to an RA if he doesn’t shape up. How do you even manage to end up with the room smelling like liquor? You might be able to solve things by talking to him, if not then CYA with your RA (and consider switching roomates if possible). I remember when my parents bitched me out because they visited and there was a bunch of beer in my fridge, but it was my roomate’s fucking beer, not mine. I wasn’t a non-drinker, but at the time I didn’t like beer much and didn’t keep any kind of alcohol around, but I had to listen to the lecture.
OTOH, I seemed to have good luck with roomates - my first roomate worried me because he seemed to be a real neat-freak (and ‘neat-freak’ I am not), but it didn’t cause any problems. AFAICT, his parents forced the neatness on him, and he used my mess as an excuse not to keep his stuff all that neat. I apologized to my second roomate for leaving the room a mess when he came in (my original roomate ended up working that semester, and I didn’t know the replacement was showing up), but he kind of blew it off and we kept to a manageable mess most of the time. I left for the second semester, he didn’t get a replacement, and on a visit I discovered why he didn’t worry about my ‘mess’ originally - I was actually a neatening influence on him, he kept the room in an incredible mess (no floor visible, drawers filled with wadded up paper, etc.).
My advice: try as hard as you can to work it out with the roommate before you go to the RA. If you are worried about getting in trouble for having alcohol in your room, tell him so. Be direct. Most college roommate problems I experience or witnessed were primarily due to one or both of the parties involved being unwilling to directly talk about what was bothering them. (Mostly they’d just sigh a lot.)
Also, the sooner you can get used to other people drinking or smoking pot around you, the better off you’ll be. You don’t have to do it, but you probably should get used to being around other people doing it. For better or for worse, it’s a common part of socializing in college and beyond.
The best move I made as far as living arrangements go at college was to live by myself. No one bugs me, no one to bother with my odd hours, and when I want company I ask for it.
I’ve told this tale of roommate horror before on the SDMB, but I cannot remember which thread it was in. Here’s the shortened condensed version:
The worst roommate I have ever had was a spoiled rotten only-child princess of a bitch with a nasty violent streak. One night after I had used the phone for 15 minutes (which was about 1/4 the total amount of time I typically spent on the phone in a week while living with her) she went to her drug-dealing (he sold crack and LSD) boyfriend and his buddies and paid them to kill me. For good measure, she also found things that pissed her off about the other three people who lived in that suite aside from her and I and wanted them shot dead too.
Thankfully due to police intervention and a couple of really nice Marine ROTC guys who hung around us all the time so we’d never be alone to be a target, she failed in her endeavor to make us dead and was moved out of our suite.
Your roommate sucks, but look at the up side. Your roommate’s not trying to kill you.
Moved into my first dorm room…got there first, no idea who my roomate would be. Got my stuff set up, left for lunch.
When I got back, my new roomate had fallen asleep on my bed, while smoking one of my cigarettes, listening to one of my CD’s on my CD player.
I like my roomate over all, but sometime his religious attitudes get on my nerves. Basically, he’s a Baptist as long as the rules don’t apply to him. He’s also obsessed with Natalie Portman. Discussion he had with one of his friends yesterday:
Him: “Wow, Natalie is so fucking hot.”
Friend: “Hell yeah, man.”
Him: “Too bad she’s Jewish.”
Me: “What the hell? What’s wrong with that?”
Him: “No, it’s not like that. It’s just that I don’t agree with marrying somebody outside of my religion. It’s not right, the Bible says so.”
Me: “The Bible also says that you can’t have premarital sex or eat pork.”
