Holy Mother of God, were you raised in a fucking WINDMILL?!? (kinda long)

The BBQ Pit
21

[QUOTE]
Originally posted by jjimm *
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that there may be some substance to Gary’s question about European students. I am thinking back to my first shared student house. We were gross. I mean fucking absolutely revoltingly disgustingly awful, and incredibly badly behaved. Examples:[ul][li]Roommate peels several pounds of potatoes and leaves a big pile of peelings on the breakfast bar. Refuses (for some reason) to clear them up. Everyone else refuses to touch them. After a few days, other detritus starts getting thrown on them. Orange peel, a fried egg. Then they start getting used as an ashtray. They remain, in a pile, in the middle of the kitchen, for a month, the mound of rotting food and cigarette ends growing bigger and bigger.[]I dropped a toilet roll down the toilet and “couldn’t be bothered” to remove it, thinking it would just flush down. It didn’t. The toilet was used in this state for a week, getting fuller and fuller. Eventually I had to put my hand in and remove the blockage. I retched for hours afterwards.[]Nobody ever cleaned any dishes, ever. If you wanted to use a plate or something, you’d scrape off the mold and rinse it under the faucet.[]We partied every night until the small hours. Our poor next-door neighbours, an elderly couple who’d lived there all their lives, could hear everything.[]My roommate and her boyfriend climbed up onto the roof and went at it like a pneumatic drill. Said elderly neighbour was out in his garden watering his bean rows, and spotted them. He came round nearly in tears. I said “they were just sunbathing”. “Nobody sunbathes by lying on top of someone else,” he said.[]When we moved out after 4 months, the landlord had to redecorate the entire building. We had been his first ever tenants.[/ul]The list goes on. Deeply ashamed. [/li][/QUOTE]

The bolded parts really made me laugh out loud.

22

I’m sorry for your plight the Scarlet Pimpernel, but it sounds exactly like a common Dutch student house. Apparently the U.S. student experience is completely unlike the European’s. Students aren’t twelve, and that is precisely why they live in such a mess. They are free from the parental oppression that has haunted them for all their young lives.

What do your parents tell you to do? Clean up, and go to bed. So what do you do in your rebellious mode? Live in a sty and stay up late. It’s just how it is. Maybe you can view it as an anthropological experience.

Do you other Europeans think that they should show The Young Ones to prospective American exchange students as a warning?

P.S. With respect to the dishwashing, there is a persistent rumor that if you wait long enough, the dishes will walk away by themselves. Unfortunately it hasn’t been disproven yet, so all students are repeating the experiment.

23

Well, if you added up all the nasty house stories listed here, you would have the house I lived in while I went to college (in the USA). We basically would just wait until one of the 6 of us got so disgusted they would just do all the dishes. If things got too nasty, we would buy a couple kegs, have a huge party, then try to get our friends to help us clean because “the party made the mess,” and “the house was spotless when you guys got here!”

And the only reason any of us went to bed before 3am was if we were still hungover from the night before. I’m amazed I’m still alive.

24

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by jjimm *
** behaved. Examples:[ul][li]Roommate peels several pounds of potatoes and leaves a big pile of peelings on the breakfast bar. Refuses (for some reason) to clear them up. Everyone else refuses to touch them. After a few days, other detritus starts getting thrown on them. Orange peel, a fried egg. Then they start getting used as an ashtray. They remain, in a pile, in the middle of the kitchen, for a month, the mound of rotting food and cigarette ends growing bigger and bigger.[/ul][/li]
Oh my God! I laughed so har dhte coworkers even asked me what it was! <shudder>

25

That would explain why people keep trying to bury me.

Well okay, only the women.

26

Remind them of how the dutch are supposed to be clean?

Nah, wouldn’t work. That was in the old days.

Put the hairs out of the shower on their sandwich?

Anyway: I feel for you. ewww.

27

You know what i hate about being raised in a windmill?
Old guys jousting my house screaming “GIANT!!!”

28

When I was about 12, I made my life resolution*:

  • never do any housework

(*yes, I was an innocent child)

Luckily I never lived in student accomodation.
But surely the dishwasher was invented not just to fulfil my life’s ambition, but to prevent disgusting situations like the OP?

Oh, and at work once, Brendan (popular chap) got posted abroad for 3 months. We were happy for him, so failed to notice his coffee mug was a) half-full b) on a window ledge in direct sunlight.
When Brendan returned, we gathered round to admire the mushroom-like being that now inhabited his mug.
He calmly rinsed it out (once!), poured coffee in and drank it. :eek: :wally
Later he took the rest of the day off with a stomach complaint…

29

Hmmm…I’ve uncovered an unpublished fragment which relates to the second problem mentioned in the OP. I assume this is the one to which you were referring:

Sadly Poe died in the gutter before completing the work, drinking himself to death in frustration at being unable to think of a way to work the word “Baltimore” in there somewhere.

30

“Oh Christ Almighty. Sinew in nicotine base. Keep back, keep back. The entire sink’s gone rotten. I don’t know what’s in here!” – Withnail & I

31

Mr. TeaElle and I own a duplex on the fringe of the university district in a city with a fairly large population of students. Someone once asked me why we don’t typically choose to rent to groups of students as opposed to young families or older people.

Stories like the OP’s remind me exactly why we don’t rent to students.

Btw, am I the only one who thought of Jonathan Creek when they saw the title of this thread?

32

I miss the days of filth and roses. I lived like a pig in my college days. I had a roommate who was worse than I was, and with that I have a story to share.

My roomie, known only as Bagel, was creatively disgusting. We had a huge old refrigerator. It had the old-fashioned curved door with a curved chrome handle. The handle, alas, was a thing of the past. So instead we opened the fridge door by hooking our fingers into the screw holes where the handle should have been.

The top hole was level with the counter top. One morning we woke up to find a large mouse had made a bizarre dive into the tiny hole. Presumably, he smelled something in the refrigerator which was, as always, full of rotting food. The poor guy had become stuck half in and half out of the hole.

I was not present for the rescue attempt. I was away for the weekend and only saw the handiwork after the fact. The rescue failed. If they tried to push the mouse in it would fall into the frame of the door. To pull it out they needed some part of the mouse to pull on. I am quite certain that given some effort they could have managed to save the mouse.

Bagel came up with a unique solution. He had two problems, a lack of a door handle and a dead mouse. He took our barbecue fork and jammed it into the now dead mouse’s posterior. He then wrapped gobs of duct tape around the fork.

It stayed that way as long as I lived there.

33

I just had flashbacks to one of the student apartments I lived in. There were three of us living in a three bedroom. We were young, and we were slobs.

One of my roommates, Red had a rice cooker. From what we later guessed, he used the damn thing in October, but not being a big rice eater, forgot about it for several months. Sometime around the middle of January, I took a look inside and what could only be described as a biology experiment gone wrong was in there. Apparently, Red had never bothered to eat his rice and had added to much water to the mix. The damn thing was multicolored and had some sort of liquid basis. The best part was that neither he nor any of us bothered to clean it out or even throw it out. Hell, it was never even discussed.

We were all smokers, which is why we lived together. There was a big clay pot outside of our door. This was where we would empty all of our personal ashtrays. Those we would let fill up until they were overflowing. The coffee table which was the main eating surface had a gray tinge to it that would only come off when cleaned with some sort of cleaning fluid, which only happened when we moved out since it was student housing and we didn’t own the furniture. Actually when Red moved out, we discovered that he had smoked so much in his room that he had yellowed some of the wall, so you could see where the pictures had been.

Dishes were almost never done. The sink never became a massive problem since we only had two pots and a frying pan between us. I personally used paper plates. The fridge was full of aging food, beer and freezer foods for the microwave.

One day after it had been a while, I decided to take out the garbage. By a while, I mean over a month. It took me three trips and we used those big hefty sacks. Apparently, the smell was pretty overpowering according to friend of mine. Between living there and being smokers, none of us noticed.

Red was a pretty heavy pot smoker. By heavy, I mean I went a month where I didn’t see him not stoned. The smell just mixed in with the rest, except for the fact that he would burn a lot of incense to cover up the smell, which was kind of stupid since none of us cared but he was pretty paranoid.

The worst part of it was that we never cleaned the bathroom. When I say never, I mean it got cleaned every four months. It got so bad, that I took to wearing rubber flip flops when I showered. By the time we moved out, the place was toxic. It took us a full day of cleaning an empty apartment to get it looking passable so we could get our security deposit back.

34

Gyrate, you’re brilliant.

I, too, lived like a pig in college. Meaning, I didn’t much clean up after my roommates. I had one that had mastered the art of cleaning by stacking into neat piles. I still use that trick. When I was out of town one Thanksgiving, she had a raucous dinner party for the fifteen or so friends that weren’t going anywhere. I got home to a mess, but we cleaned up most of it that night. Except the turkey carcass. I wouldn’t throw it out and she wouldn’t touch it. It stayed on the table, rotting, for something like a month.

I think I eventually threw it out. Rotting turkey carcass, even when it’s been cooked, smells pretty bad.

35

Eugh. One of my former roommates had a pile of dirty dishes in the corner of our shared bedroom for months.

Not to mention when we moved out, I was stuck cleaning up all her used chewing gum that had resided under mounds of papers she kept on our floor.

The current roommate likes to leave dairy projects on the counters or remains of spaghetti on the oven eyes until they rot and mold and ferment and stink up the house. And then she asks ME to take out the garbage.

Not to mention we had insects in our sink because I protested having to do all the chores and let the sink fill up with dishes and half-rotted food. I stood it for a month or so, then broke down and washed all the dishes.

She still is not cleaning. We’re going to have to have a talk soon. I’m not a neat freak, but I expect a moderate level of hygiene, and this isn’t cutting it–especially since the first year we lived together, she was more obsessively neat than I am.

36

So Scarlet how do you feel about your place now? It could be worse – you could live with jjimm or fruitbat.
Just cause after reading all these other stories I feel for you here’s a little advice:

I think Alma’s trick would work for you, when you need to use the sink and it’s filled with dishes just stack the dishes to the side (scrape off food before stacking)

Make it your job to take out the garbage when it’s full and you should be able to get by.
And the best advice!!!
Don’t be afraid to leave a dirty dish around for an hour or two.
It sounds like the opposite effect of what you want, but really if you’re going to be pissed off right after you eat that you’re the only one washing dishes, then you’re just going to get ulcers.

37

Two words for you, Scarlet:

paper plates

38

I had a room-mate who made us wash the damn walls when we moved into new house, the big freak. He also left post-it notes around the place, saying things like “Please clean me” and “Please don’t leave your dishes on me.” He was Canadian and, strangely, every Canadian I’ve ever met was a total hygiene freak. Must be a spotless country.

39

You see how a moment of weakness means that your roomie is NEVER going to wash up. Now she knows you will eventually do it.

This is a definite insight into the minds of students (practically all of us, not just you!):

“we had insects in our sink … I expect a moderate level of hygiene” :eek:

40

An unpublished first draft, later revised into its better-known form: