Horrid Roomie Experiences

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Not to derail Alice The Goon’s experiences in her thread, post your horrid roomie situations, or even funny ones.

Mine:

Back in about 1984 I was dating a guy that lived in a rather nice 3 bedroom house on the shores of Lake Ontario, fondly nicknamed The Concrete Beach sort of after the reggae song Concrete jungle. THere was a seriously odd situation going on, the way the lease was written the landlord could cram random people into any empty bedroom if the people living there didn’t find their own roomie. I am still not entirely certain exactly how legal this was, but I wasn’t the leaseholder, my BF of the time was.

I moved out of my apartment and was storing my stuff in ‘my’ bedroom and sleeping in my BFs when the third roomie got a job in Cleveland and moved. We looked around for a third roomie, but it was December, and nobody in Western NY will move in the winter if they can at all avoid it. Well 30 days rolled around, and the landlord dropped in for about 2 weeks with a succession of random men. Finally, he showed up wit one for a second visit and he introduced us to our new roommate.:eek:

This guy moved in with his 3 suitcases [furnished room already had bed and dressers] and settled in. His behaviour was sketchy. He would hang out and occasional skeevy buddies would drop by and they would hang for a while then leave. Oddly enough, occasionally my gas level in my car would indicate I was getting even more horrible mileage than one would suspect from a 74 mustang with the v8 … like 1 or 2 MPG instead of the 12-14 I normally got, until I got a locking gas cap. Our food would msyteriously vanish [george carlin] must have been mice in little parkas [/gc] The guy would oddly enough if anybody but Dj or I were there would be seen ostentatiously reading a bible … so DJ and I decided to conduct a bit of psychological warfare on the jackass to see if we could get him to do something towards moving out. By the way, we heard through the grapevine that he had paid the first and last months rent, but nothing else in the other 2 of the 4 months he had been there. DJ blended some hot water, chocolate exlax into liquid and gently poured it into an almost full carton of premade chocolate milk and put it back in the fridge. Ever couple days he would gently pour a little into a glass and then add water and dish soap to it to look like we had drunk some and were soaking the glass before washing dishes. Oddly enough the level in the carton was going steadily down, and the roomie was spending a lot of quality bathroom time. So after about a week of this, DJ whizzed up some pink fiberglass, red pepper flakes and black pepper corns in a blender into itching powder, and using a turkey baster whiffled it into his bedsheets, and the clothing hanging in his closet, and the clothing in his drawers. Jackass comes back that afternoon from wherever he and his buddies went, went into his room for a nap. Next thing we hear about an hour later is the shower going. then silence. Then the shower again. Then some sort of outgoing phone call we can’t understand as it is muffled by the walls and door. About 20 minutes later one of his buddies shows up, he meets and greets and gets a mystery brown paper bag and he goes back in for a shower. Copious swearing occurs. He got the quell or rid or whatever lice preparation he got into his eyes. So off goes the roomie with his buddy to wherever. We pick up the phone and nark on the roomie to the landlord for lice =) Landlord shows up, finds the lice product in the bathroom and uses that combined with the lack of rent payment as grounds to push the eviction [there was a cleanliness clause in the lease about bedbugs and personal infestations like lice, fleas and such]

About 30 days later we got lucky and notified we were moving out as DJ got a job offer from a company in Virginia Beach and we moved out ASAP.

[and yes we were deliberately trying to get the ex-con evicted. Stuff was gently and gradually going missing from our belongings. We were not at all happy about that at all.]

2

So…He’s odd. You think he’s stealing your gas and food, so you ruin his bed and clothes and get him evicted under false pretenses.

There’s definitely an asshole in this scenario but it’s not the guy you think.

3

Sometimes there’s giving people the benefit of the doubt, and then there’s times you know some people are scumbags.

4

Hey, the OP said, “Horrid Roommate experiences.” It didn’t say which person. Lest you think that I’m against the OP, I’m not really bothered by their revenge. People stealing my stuff gets me pissed off.

5

My second year of University… At my Uni you traditionally spend the first year in halls of residence on the campus, then move out for the last couple of years. Through a combination of shyness and the omigod-love-him boyfriend I had in my first year, by the end of the year I didn’t know that many people that well. I did know the girl who had the room next door to mine, C, and she was looking for an extra person for the 5 bed house she was renting.

Once I moved in, I realised that each of us were independently friends with C, but had not known each other. What became very clear very quickly was that some of us liked each other better than we liked C, and there was very quickly a deep and lasting split in the house - myself, A and P on one side, and C and K on the other. Within about 6 weeks the usual house-sharing bickering had started. We fought about food, cleaning, washing-up - the usual stuff. It was liveable though, although at times fairly unpleasant. Somehow our bills all got paid on time, and we’d paid the landlord individually in advance as it was student housing, but we communicated very little across the divide, and only by note.

However, 3 weeks after we’d moved out of the house at the end of the academic year, I got a phone call from a friend of mine. He was glad I’d got the birthday card he’d sent. When I denied ever receiving it, he was surprised, since the cheque he’d sent me had been cashed. By the end of the police investigation, we discovered that K (under, we’re sure, C’s instructions) had taken and cashed 3 personal and 4 housing benefit (rent support) cheques, along with 2 new bank cards posted to the house, several pre-pay phone cards, clothing which had been drying in the bathroom, a compact camera and cash totalling god knows how much. The most disturbing thing to us was that we had no idea how long this had been going on. We knew we didn’t get on, but had no idea that things had descended to that level.

K was issued with an official police caution and returned the stuff - an outcome neither we nor the investigating officer were happy with. K and C reappeared at our very small Uni at the end of that summer and there were no further sanctions against them. At the time it was a devastating experience - now I look back with mild irritation!

6

When I was 8 months pregnant, Emo (TheKid’s dad) and I moved in with a buddy of his from work. Jim really needed roommates, as his left him high and dry. It was a decent sized house. Emo, TheKid and I would have the main floor, Jim’s bedroom was upstairs and his bathroom was in the basement.

The bedroom for TheKid has been used to pen two large dogs for who knows how many months. It was rank. Jim promised he would help clean it out. Instead, Emo and my Dad ripped out the stained carpet, cleaned the floors with bio stank removers, and painted the room a few days before TheKid showed up. Actually, I went into labor just as I finished removing tape from the woodwork. Jim claimed he could not handle the smell of the cleaning supplies and paint. You could live with the stench of animal urine and feces, you worked in a dirty kitchen, but you coldn’t handle the smell of cleanliness and paint? Sure.

For the most part, he was not horrible. He worked late nights, then got drunk. Every night. 2am he would stumble in, reeking of kitchen funk and alcohol. He wouldn’t eat our food, but our supply of plates, glasses, and silverware diminished until I would have to nag at him to bring everything out of his room. He would - everything crusted and disgusting. Showering was optional. I had bought a super size thing of bar soap, put a bar down in his bathroom, as I had noticed the soap holder was empty. It sat there for over a week, unopened.

He was always late in paying the rent. After a few months there, I started going and paying the landlord our portion directly on time. The first time I did this, Jim wondered why I hadn’t asked him for the money. I told him I didn’t want to get booted because of always being late. Thereafter he tried to get his rent to the landlord before us, to show us up. Problem was- he didn’t have a license and couldn’t get to the landlords’ office. He would ask me to drive him to a grocery store near the office and drop him off - despite us having a grocery store 1/2 block away. I did it once, then refused.

Ten months into our year lease, Emo and I split up. It was not pretty - I removed all of his belongings into the front yard. There wasn’t any yelling or fighting, just everything out. Jim was upset that I wouldn’t tolerate Emo’s cheating and lying, so decided to ‘get even’. Around this time I had gone back to work. I came home to a call from the phone company - did I know my phone bill was $900? Uh, NO. Jim had been calling porn lines. I went and pulled his phone out of his room (the first time I had stepped into his room the entire time I lived there. I am so shocked we did not have vermin - food all over the floor, ground into the carpet, beer cans used as ashtrays, knocked over, and I can’t even begin to describe the smell up there). He, of course, went and bought another phone and rang up another few hundred bucks in a few days. I ended up ‘accidently’ breaking the phone plug in. Every day when I left for work, I removed all of the downstairs phones, locked them up, and even installed a locking cover over the plug in the kitchen. I also switched to using paper plates / plastic cups / plastic silverware as he suddenly had butterfingers and most of my glasses and plates were broken.

I had already given notice to our landlord that I would be moving out when the lease was up. The landlord knew our arrangement (Jim upstairs and basement, TheKid and I main floor). During the last few weeks, Jim would purposely damage things on the main floor - break the kitchen faucet, kick a hole in a wall, one night he “forgot” his key and broke open the back door. All so I would not get back the damage deposit. I had really needed the damage deposit in order to pay off his phone charges on my phone bill (I had managed to talk my way out of all but like $250 of his charges). When the landlord started dithering about returning my portion of the deposit, I did a bad thing. I sicced my Mom and Dad on both Jim and the landlord. Mom had been documenting everything better than I had, and Dad was pretty scary when riled up (Dad at all of 5’7", Jim at 6’3" - Jim ended up cowering).

I got my damage deposit back and got the hell out of there. Never saw Jim again.

7

I was roommates with a guy I didn’t know too well and appeared to be a bit of a deadbeat, but was generally a nice guy. That is, until he didn’t pay rent one month and just moved out while I was at work on the 5th of the month. Literally never saw him again.

8

The guy in question was an excon who had convinced the landlord he was some sort of seriously devout christian. Many of his anciliary behaviors would ping QtM and any other of our prison workers excon-dar. The bible reading when you are observed, calling people boss, some other behaviors, combined with this thieving ways and the group of excon buddies definitely makes it a him or us situation, and we wanted him uncomfortable enough to move out or to get him to do something that we could use to have the landlord force him out. It was bad enough that I did not ever want to be home alone with he and his buddies. When DJ went for the job interviews to Virginia, I spent the 3 days back at my parents house.

You may like living with a skeevy excon, but we certainly didn’t, and if we had a choice of all the people being tromped through our house by the landlord, he would certainly NOT have been the one. He put on one hell of a good ‘christian’ persona.

Damn … that is one sucktastic roomie.

9

I haven’t had but a couple roomies. One had a habit of eating my food. The other was a public masturbator. They convinced me that a shitty place to myself is better than a nice place I have to share. Never had another roomie.

10

The Scarborough Slobs. It’s saga in my Live Journal.

I moved back from California after getting divorced, with basically nothing. I lived on my sister’s couch for a few months until I could find a job. I started temping, so the only place I could find was a roommate situation. I should have been tipped off by the interview I had with the guy who owned the place (it was a 3 bedroom condo, and he was essentially renting out two rooms): “There’s one guy who asked about the room this morning; if he doesn’t want it you can move in this weekend.” That was over the phone, without having met the guy or even having seen the place.

Anyhoo … it was cheap and I needed to get out of my sister’s place so, I moved in.

Slobs. Effing slobs. And this coming from someone who has dirty laundry on his bedroom floor and a dirty pan in the sink as we speak. Horrible slobs. They never once did the dishes while was there – and we had a dishwasher. Every single time I wanted to cook something for myself, I ended up washing every plate in the house. Of course, first I had to collect the half a dozen dishes left in the living room for the week with food crusting onto them.

And they never took out the trash. Oh, they maybe put a new bag in the trash can, but they’d leave bags of trash piled up in the dining room until I got sick of it and hauled them out to the dumpster.

And then there was the one roommate (who moved in after I did) who never left his room, except to eat other people’s food. Whole pizzas, or take-out containers of Chinese food would go missing. And when confronted he’d say, “Oh sorry, I didn’t realize it was yours.” Well, did you think it was yours, asshole?

I got out of there as quick as I could. I think I lasted about 7 or 8 months before I managed to squirrel away enough dough to find a better situation.

Oh, and yes, I did pee on a chicken salad sandwich and left it for Guido the Killer Roomate. Sue me.

11

The worst I had was the guy who tried to start his own Christian cult because he got depressed and became hyperscrupulous. I still don’t get how his position of “if I screw up again, I will go to Hell, even if I ask forgiveness” didn’t make him much more depressed.

Fortunately, I have good information that he got better. And he only got one convert in the whole thing, and that was a friend he had before college. Everyone else just talked about him behind his back.

12

I’m guessing it was only a little pee. Otherwise, you’d have dissolved the bread.

I had a sort of bad roommate. But I wasn’t that great at the time, either. So I can’t claim moral superiority. Just that my revenge was warranted.

He was a divorced father of one who had come out of the closet after the divorce. He was the main renter subletting his spare room to me. For this he charged me 2/3 of the rent on the basis that I wouldn’t have to pay anything else. A month later, I had to start paying my share of the phone bill when he redefined “utillities.” He never had money for child support (to the point of visits from deputies). But he was always coming home with an expensive cute new knick-knack for the already over-decorated apartment. And was getting notices from the IRS about his under reported income. He apparently expected me to be the “house boy” and do all the chores even though I was paying more rent and working 40 hours a week AND taking a couple of classes at night.

One day, it hit the fan. During the day, I had fantastic luck. I’d been accepted to grad school and would be moving out of town. Before I could tell him this, he gave me 30 days to get the hell out of the apartment because I was such a slob. (This is the part where I have to agree with him. My room and my bathroom weren’t the tidiest even if though I kept the kitchen and living room clean.)

So I didn’t tell him about grad school or that I was going to move out in a few days anyway. While he was at work, my friends helped me move everything out and we split. I took his TV remote with me. This was a special annoyance for him because one of his irritating habits was that he’d walk around with the remote and leave it all over the apartment without remembering where. So I knew he’d look a long time before he’d realize it was just plain gone. I also did something worse. I took the notice from the IRS about his tax problems that arrived that day and threw it in the dumpster. Yes, I know that was illegal. But I did it anyway. I did other stuff, too, but won’t get into that.

13

It was a sub. I have good aim.

He didn’t eat it anyway, but it felt good, on more than one level, to render a little urinal-justice.

14

Not me, but some friends of mine - shared part of a communial house. Unfortunately, they guy living in the basement was going crazy - not a euphemism.

He would haul all sorts of random junk into the basement, made it a kind of impenitrable fortress of junk from which he’d emerge into the upper world of the house, unbathed and stinky, to randomly make vaguely threatening statements and take stuff.

Eventually, the others had enough of him - and tried to get him evicted - but that proved impossible. He stopped paying rent; they nailed the door to the basement shut; he started creeping in through the windows to steal stuff when noone was around; they called the cops, who hauled him off to the looney bin - from which he emerged a few days later, broke a window, started living in his junk fortress in the basement again. They called his parents, to learn that they had essentially washed their hands of the matter after dealing with his growing insanity for years; they appealed to the landlord to do something - the landlord replied he was an old man, what could he do? They called the cops again … etc.

Upshot was, they gave up and moved out when the lease was up. They felt sorry for the landlord, who was left holding the bag, and as far as I know that guy may still be living in his basement den-o-junk. The whole thing made me seriously question what my society does with the mentally ill.

15

I’ve had a huge number of roommates but most of them where while I was in foster care so they don’t really count. Surprisingly enough, most of them weren’t all that bad.

Other than living with my sister (twice) and my boyfriend, I’ve only had one roommate as an adult. All in all, she wasn’t that bad. We got along quite well. She was a very well-functioning alcoholic and smoked a huge amount. I also smoked but not nearly as much and I didn’t drink alcohol. But, those weren’t the problems. She was about 25 years older than I was (I lived with her from right after I turned 19 until I was almost 21, she was in her mid-late 40’s).

Problem 1. Her boyfriend. He was an absolute bastard. He was as much of an alcoholic as she was but he couldn’t hold it nearly as well. He cheated on her and got kicked out, came back, cheated on her and got kicked out, came back, threatened her and got kicked out, came back - over and over, it never ended. For the most part, I felt fairly safe around him. He didn’t seem to have a problem with me. But, my roommate had a very bad heart condition (she said her heart would kill her before the alcohol and cigs) and I was always afraid that he’d do something like screw with her medication. Anyway, I had gone for a long weekend visit to my grandfather’s house and my best friend had gone with me. The three of us (grandfather, friend, and I) were hiking at the state park when my cell phone rang. It was my roommate, asking if I could stay in NY a few days longer. She said the police were coming by with her boyfriend to clear out his stuff and she didn’t want me there for it because she was expecting a scene. It was nice of her to want to protect me like that. She got a restraining order on him and he was sent to rehab. Well, less than a month later, he was back and it all started again.

Problem 2. Cats. Living in this house actually made me hate cats for a very long time. When I moved in, I was told that there were 2 cats. One was a big old bastard named Tigger. The other was a much younger cat that was only living with her temporarily. The cats hated each other and Tigger hated me. He would hide under the couch and lick people’s feet. When I walked by the couch though, he’d sink his claws as deep into my leg as possible. He also pounced at my face a few times - thank god for glasses. One day I came home from work and the smaller cat was gone. But, there was another cat in her place. This one was pregnant and since Tigger was such a bastard, she was living IN MY ROOM! Apparently one of my roommates customers had found this cat living in the factory where he worked and my roommate had agreed to take it in until the kittens were born. Shortly after the cat arrived, it started soiling all my belongings - to the point where it would jump on my bed and crap on my pillow. Then the babies were born, all 8 of them. Seven survived. Roommate’s customer never came to get them so we had them for about 4 months. The entire time, they were living in my bedroom. I had already started hating cats before the kittens arrived but that doesn’t make me a mean person though. I could have complained and made her take them out of my room but that would have put them in danger so I put up with it. When I finally managed to convince roommate that her customer wasn’t coming back, we packed them up and brought them to the shelter. Two days later, I came home from work and the other cat that had left was back and sleeping on my bed. Luckily for me, my boyfriend decided to buy a condo and asked me to move in with him because I was on the verge of a feline-induced crime spree. It took me about 8 years to get over my distaste for cats but I’m back to loving the little fuzzies.

Compared to other roommate nightmares, mine aren’t bad at all. I consider myself lucky that I got off so easily. In foster care I had a roommate threaten to kill me and one who would have very loud, two-sided arguments in her sleep. There were the usual hygiene problems, and theft problems. But, it could have been a hell of a lot worse and most of the kids were just normal kids with a bad home life who just wanted to make it to adulthood without too much drama.

Oh, I forgot, she also used to wear housecoats, with nothing on under them, and she never buttoned them correctly.

16

I was working with a young man who was living in a tiny house with his ENTIRE family, like 13 people in a 2 bedroom house. He was sleeping in a recliner and often came to work exhausted. I was giving him a ride to & from work and we became ‘friends’. I had a spare bedroom and asked if he would like to rent it so he COULD get some sleep. He jumped on it. $80 a week included room, utilities & food, and I also let him borrow my van often.

Now, I knew he had done some jail time for dealing, but he assured me he was working hard to get his life in line. It wasn’t long after he move in that I found out he was still smoking weed regularly. He would stay up all night long and sleep until time to go to work. He would bring his girlfriend over on Friday and she would stay until Monday morning… and I was feeding her.

After about 2 months, he left without paying his weekly board on Friday…and didn’t come back until Sunday to collect his belongings. He owed me another week as well… and I never collected that, either.

After he left, I found that my dog’s pain medicine was gone from the cabinet. And about a month later, I came home to find my back door standing open and my bedroom ransacked- he had evidently had himself a key made and came in the back door, knowing the dogs KNEW him, and stole the little bit of jewlery I had in my bedroom. No proof it was him of course, but no one else had a key and knew the dogs…

17

A few years ago I was trying to make extra money by any means necessary, so I let my ex boyfriend (we were still friends) talk me in to letting his wayward buddy stay here as a tennant. Dude had been living in a storage unit he was renting and I’d offered to let him shower here. That turned in to him living here.

I basically told him he would live in the basement and give me $250/mo and stay out of my way. But soon after he moved in, he got laid off from his job and that’s when the fun began.

I decided I wasn’t going to get paid unless he got unemployment, so I helped him get his unemployment because he was too stupid to do so. Then, he got a DUI. So I found myself driving him to court appearances. Then, he got his job back but he couldn’t drive, so if I wanted to get paid I had to get up every day at 7 AM and drive him to work. And I did. I also lowered his rent to $200 because I wanted to be paid.

Yeah so eventually I told him he was pretty much costing me as much money as I was making on him living here, so he had to go. He actually went without much upset.

Boring story but I forgot to mention the kid is insane. I’ll make a list.

  • His mom has MS, and has it bad. He’s convinced she’s got bugs in her blood tho. If he could just get the doctors to test for bugs, they would find the bugs and get rid of them and she’d be cured. Or maybe it was worms…
  • He’s a dumpster diver.
  • He pays for a storage unit which is filled to the brim with crap from dumpster diving.
  • I never set up a “room” for him in the unfinished basement. I told him to make his own room. He never did - he just put up a TV and stereo and an air mattress right in the middle of the basement.
  • He was convinced people stole parts off his car when it was in impound after the DUI. When I went away on vacation I let him put his car in the garage. I came back and all the garage windows were covered in black paper. He was hiding his car.
  • He decided he’d had a bug in his ear for a few months, and he wanted to get it taken care of before he got re-hired so he could go to the ER for free (is that how it even works?) So he left work early one day and went to the ER, for a bug in his ear, that had been there for months.
  • When he was in the ER he started getting a little crazy I guess, so they checked him in to the mental institution.
  • I only found out the next day when his new therapist called to talk to me. Turns out they found binoculars, duct tape, a knife and wire in his backpack. The therapist was worried about me, being that I’m a single woman living with this lunatic. I told the therapist that that does sound like a strange lot - for anyone but Dan.
  • He used to take suuuuper long, hot baths. This drove me nuts because I only have one bathroom.
  • He fell for not one but two “sexy blonde foreign chicks” on dating Web sites. He got very excited and had me look at their profiles for him.
  • Other than his suuuuuper long, hot baths, the kid did not bathe on a regular schedule nor did he seem to wash his clothes. When he left I just threw away the linens I’d let him borrow.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s a lot of heavy stuff for only living here 9 months or so. In the end, I told him he had to leave because my buddy really needed a place to stay ASAP.

I let my buddy stay here for free, in exchange for him cleaning the house once a week and paying for water and electricity. I would really prefer not to have any roommates anymore, but I sure prefer the current guy to Basement Dan.