My college filthy dish drama ended when I bought a ton of cheap paper plates at (gasp) Wal-Mart), as well as dirt-cheap plastic utensils. Problem solved.
The Wal-Mart thing and college thing was many years ago, so please forgive me.
I still have nightmares about mold not only growing, but MOVING in the bath area. After times, it takes on a life of it own.
Peace Lady
God almighty! Why couldn’t I have had roommates like this when I was in college? They would have made me look good!
At my second college, I lived for part of a semester (until she moved off campus because she hated everybody, not just me) with an Austrian. Now, at my first college, I had been fairly tidy, but then the rooms on that campus were all subdivided, so you had a semblance of privacy, and more space. With the Austrian, we were sharing a small space, and it was hopeless.
She hardly had anything, because she’d come from overseas. I, on the other hand, had all the dreck you accumulate after two years in college, plus, I was in a more intense program than at the first college, so I used the “stacking” method described by Alma. Also, it was the heyday of grunge, so I washed my hair once a week.
Given everything I’d heard about Europeans, I assumed “Katya” would be okay with this, and even surpass me in hedonism. WRONG. She was a hygiene fanatic, had conniptions if there was a straw wrapper on the floor, and even picked arguments about the best way to clean. The scrubby vs. washcloth debate went on for days. I favored a scrubby (I did take showers, I just didn’t get my hair wet), while she insisted only washcloths could do the job. Again, I was amazed at this: I had thought scrubbies were a European invention! (Aren’t they?)
Crimeny crumbcake. I had to get the one European who was a clean freak.
Oh, it is soooo good to see that the younger generation have at least inherited something from us oldies.
My second shared house was a wonderful old Victorian mansion in a Very Posh Part of Melbourne. Alas, my three housemates were not terribly ‘posh’ even though they came from incredibly upper-class families. Actually, they were complete grots.
I figured this out the second week I had been living there. I’d been doing a number on the mountain of dishes and cleaning the stove and the bench tops to maintain some basic hygiene when one of the other housemates decided to ‘help’ me. She connected the hose to the outside tap and proceeded to ‘clean’ the kitchen by giving the floor, the walls, the stove, the fridge, the table, the chairs, the vents AND the ceiling a liberal hydro-type washing. It took four days to dry out.
And that was the last time the place was cleaned during my tenancy.
I moved out about 4 months later. I’m very domestically challenged myself, but THESE folk took grunge to a whole new level.
Ahhhh, memories.
Ahhhh… I had one housemate, post college, who did Not believe in washing dishes … ever. It was amazing! The three of us had put in, what we thought was comfortably leinent 24hour dish rules. If you used it, it should be clean and in the dish drainer within 24 hours. After watching his stack of used dishes sit and grow (The other roomie and I were just washing our own dishes around his) … I gathered them all up and put them (feeling generous, I put down newspaper first) on his bed.
He amazed me, he left them there and continued to let them grow! So the other housemate and I just adopted the practice, when we needed something that was in his stack, we’d retrieve it, wash it, use it, then put it, dirty, back in his stack.
This continued till he got a girlfriend … and he actually got this woman to sleep with him in that room, with the moldy dish stack in the corner!!! … but, the next morning She was out at the sink working her way through the stack … and she continued to do the dishes for him till they moved out, to get their own place.
Memorable, to be sure!
Ah, memories of good old All-American filthy living. I’ll take jjimm’s clogged toilet and raise him a toilet that was puked in, and on, and around, during a party. We wiped the seat. Not “cleaned” or “disinfected”, because that would be uncollegiate, but we wiped the seat. And left the sides and rim of the bowl, and the front of the tank, and the floor around the toilet crusted with puke. And we used that toilet. We sat our naked asses on that barely wiped seat inches from dried vomit for over a month before one of us cleaned. By that point, it was biodegrading naturally anyway. The door of the bathroom, the only bathroom in the house, was missing the bottom panel. Nobody cared. Roommates, party guests, visitors from out of town-- all peed, bathed, and changed right in full view of anyone who happened to be in the kitchen and looked through the hole.
We didn’t put our garbage out at the curb. Instead, there were half a dozen heavy-duty plastic trash cans outside, and the landlord would take them to the dump in his pick-up truck every month or two. We’d pull a can inside the kitchen, never washing it out, and use it until it was full. Then we’d take it back outside and bring in an empty can. We’d always run out of empty cans before the landlord made the run to the dump, so when the last can was filled, we’d put a trash bag on the floor, intending fully to put any garbage we produced inside the bag. Instead, we’d just chuck the garbage-- food scraps, the contents of ashtrays, the dregs from the cat’s (the completely illegal, not-allowed-on-the-lease cat’s) litter box-- in the general vincinity of the bag. We’d end up with a pile of trash on the floor, at least partly on top of a garbage bag. Eventually, when we gauged it to be big enough, we’d scoop it with our hands into another garbage bag, take it outside, throw a new bag on the floor, and repeat the whole cycle.
Then there was the hole in the wall. Well, we made plenty of holes in the wall, but remembered making most of them. This one just appeared in the wall at the top of the stairs, and it was as big as a person. It looked like somebody had just slammed his or her self, or was slammed, forcefully against the wall. Several times. Nobody knew how that hole got there. Oh, and we had to sweep our living room carpet with a broom before we could run the vacuum cleaner because such a thick and interesting layer of debris would acculmulate.
Good times, good times.
Wow. I mean, I’m certainly messy but I was never dirty, even in university. Ugh. I have to go be sick now.
I bet you’ll even clean the toilet after you’re sick.
I was the Magic Dish Fairy back when I had roomates. Four of them. One was a very neat girl who kept ahead of the general mess, but she was an education major who finished two months before the rest of us. Once she was gone, the place went to pot.
It wouldn’t have been so bad, if we didn’t have a dishwasher. The effort required to put a dish in the dishwasher when you’re finished with it seems so small, but none of the remaining three roomies were capable of it. I can’t say I blame them, since they had discovered that leaving dishes on the counters, on the stove, and piled in the sink, led to them reappearing magically, cleaned and stacked, in the cupboards within a day or two. Because there was a Magic Dish Fairy in our apartment.
Until they decided that they effort of moving dishes from where they lay when the meal was over ( be that on the couch, in a bedroom, next to the tv, or on the rim of the bathtub) to the kitchen was too much. At that point the Magic Dish Fairy went on strike, kept her water glass in her room and washed it out to refill as needed, and just cleaned dishes as she needed them, in the sink.
Roomies were persistant. They refused to believe that the Magic Dish Fairy would abandon them. They vaguely recalled something in the lease about a Magic Dish Fairy being included in the rent, or something. Oh, and a Litter Pan Gremlin, but no one worried about him, since even if he got tired of the roomies, he’d never let the poor cat suffer.
They ate from old margerine containers. They ate from frying pans. They ate from the decorative sun-moon plate Roomie #2 had in her room. They ate from the extra cat dish. They ate from the pieces of broken dishes that hadn’t been thrown out yet (there being no Mystical Garbage Gnome, as the two male roomies were expected to at least handle the garbage on a monthly basis. Sometimes they even did it, too).
Then the Magic Dish Fairy’s boyfriend planned a trip up to come get her so they could fly east to have him meet the Magic Dish Family, and the Magic Dish Fairy cracked. She ran three loads in the dishwasher to clear out what was piled up (since two different roomies had brought a household worth of dishes with them), not counting all that was lost in the Pit of Dish Despair (also known and roomie #2 and #4’s bedroom), never to be seen again.
The school year ended soon after, and the Magic Dish Fairy fled forever. She lives in a single room on campus now, and has no dishes.
Gyrate, you are a genius.
Im feeling muuuuuuuch better now. I have laughed (and gagged) so hard at everyone’s horror stories.
Apparently I moved in right before the Weekly Cleaning Ritual. The second night I was kept awake by the sound of running water and clinking dishes until the wee small hours. The next morning - voila! the Magic Dish Fairy had done his thing. Of course, it was only a matter of hours before the dishes started piling up again, but I will take what I can get.
When I fished the hair out of the drain I stuck it on a tile next to the shower (there being inexplicably no garbage thingy in the shower room), and that seems to have delivered the message. Unfortunately, this particular tile now seems to be the Designated Spot For Depositing Your Hair Wad. Oh well, at least the showers not overflowing anymore. And I wear flipflops in the shower on principle (two years in the dorms, remember?)
Last night they were playing the run-up-and-down-in-the-hall-making-lots-of-noise-after-midnight trick again, but I just cleared my throat really loudly (oh, those paper-thin doors!) and they got the hint and shut the hell up.
Theyre all really friendly, and I love the location. If the level of mess is how it is right now I can live with it, no problem. The entertaining thing is, not only am I the only student over 21, and the only non-Dutch (and an American to boot!), and the only one not studying hotel management (Im one of those weird music types), but judging from the activities I was an inadvertent witness to this weekend (thin walls, remember?), Im also the only non-heterosexual. If the mess gets too bad I can amuse myself by imagining all the ways I could exploit this state of affairs to make their lives a living hell. 
[sarcasm]
Hah!
[/sarcasm]
One would think so, but one would be wrong.
1st time dishwasher is used, it’s a bliss. The dorm kitchen / kitchenette in the office is magically clean and free of dirty dishes. But…
Someone has to empty the dishwasher, and put all the dishes back on shelves and drawers. Do you think that gets done?
Hah!
Roomie one, comes to grab a mug. Nothing on the shelf, so he opens dishwasher, fishes out a clean mug, dirties it, and then puts it in the sink.
Pretty soon roomie two comes along, but doing it a bit better, puts dirty mug back in dishwasher. Now, there are clean dishes and dirty dishes mixed. Pretty soon it’s a quagmire and people are taking dirty dishes out of the dishwasher, rinsing them in the sink and then using them. Meanwhile, the dishwasher gets full, the newly dirtied plate gets thrown in the sink, where the leftover food get stuck in the drain, clogging it up, so now, the sink is a miniature pool of water, dirty dishes and leftovers. Meanwhile, dishwasher breaks down, becuase no one thought of rinsing the plates before putting them in the machine, so that drain is clogged too.
After repairs, some rocket scientist about do wash dishes, can’t find the special detergent, so uses the liquid stuff designated for washing by hand.
Foam party!
Basically, if no one feel responsible, and if the people are slobs, nothing will help. Well almost nothing, but I’m gonna patent that solution and make mega bucks from it.
Thank you, Gyrate! You are talented, funny, and intellectually attractive!
Wey-hey! Thenk kyew all veddy much.
To be honest, I had the first two poems (Milton and Frost) on hand because I had posted them in the communal kitchen way back during my shared house days. At least we each had our own dishes, so I only had to worry about moving a sufficient amount of other people’s moldy dishes out of the sink long enough to wash my own.
At another location where I lived in married student accommodation, it was rumored (and unofficially confirmed) that the Accommodation Office used to rotate families in on a North American - > European -> Asian (i.e. Indian/Pakistani) -> North American cycle, as they believed (and here I apologize for perpetuating any stereotypes) that NAs were the most fastidious and Asians the least, and that NAs would, upon moving in, automatically clean up the disgusting mess left behind by the years of first European families and then Asian ones.
In that regard, I don’t know who was in our flat before us but by God there was some serious gunge in the kitchen and bathroom. And yes, we scrubbed the place down before we moved in (and when we left). And anecdotal evidence from other Americans and Canadians suggested at least that NA’s were indeed the most picky about cleanliness (or at least the married ones; the single students were pretty much uniformly pigs regardless of background); I can’t comment on the other ethnic groups with any degree of statistical certainty.
Gyrate, please stop being so utterly brilliant - you’re showing us all up. (Prostates self before Gyrate and does Wayne’s World-style “I am not worthy” movements.)
The poop’ll burn through the glaze and we’ll never bea able to use the dinner service again! Fork it! Fork it!
Anyway, I’ve just found this in the archives:
Well now this makes me feel good about our flat. There’s four of us, and I’m by far the messiest. I make up for this by using about one dish a day - that’s more a result of poverty than any consideration for my flatmates - can’t get dishes dirty if there’s no food to dirty them with!
The only time the place is cleaned is half an hour before a party in which all glasses and mugs are stacked in someones room, all stereos are dragged out and hooked up, and plates make it off the lounge floor and into the dishwasher. (Not to be washed, you understand, just stacked - no powder)
The best part is that the morning after one of my friends will do a major clean up, because they still live at home, and are still conditioned to think that mess has negative repercussions. Yay!
Not David “Bagel” Baker, also of Richmond, Va? Because if it is I’m going to fall out of my chair.
All I know is that was fucking hilarious fruitbat. I have tears! TEARS! Rolling down my face! My coworkers think I’m having a seizure. You are a very wicked person to be posting that during business hours!
In Netherlands did Pimpernel
A cheap accommodation share
Where garbage overflowed the can
And water o’er the threshold ran
Due to excessive hair.
Wheeee! Im famous! I have been immortalized in poetry! Thank you, Gyrate!
Gyrate–wonderful!
My story. I had this friend. I’ll call him Ron. While visiting, I broke a glass in the sink. His wife said not to worry about it, so I didn’t worry about it.
Shortly thereafter, his wife moved out.
Two-and-a-half/three months later, or so . . .
Ron moved to a smaller place. I went to help him move, which turned out to be a gawdawful job. I attacked the kitchen, which had a sink full of dirty dishes (as it had before, when I visited). I pulled them out, wiped them, packed them. Toward the bottom I found the glass I’d broken, months before. Or an identical glass.
Asked Ron about it. He said he and his wife had taken turns doing the dishes and she moved out (months before) when it was her turn!
(I hope this isn’t some kind of faux pas where the thread-starter gets the last word. If so, my apologies.)
Nah, Pimpie can’t get the last word, because Gyrate hasn’t shown us Lewis Carroll’s take on domestic squalor yet. (Added points for anything outside of Jabborwocky.)
(The Coleridge was brill, by the way.)