Get a yellow pad of paper. During the sit down, whenever anyone has a gripe about anyone else, write it down. Then say: “I’m going to type up all these gripes and then we will all sign an agreement to clean up our acts all around. What do you all say to that?”
If they agree, great, you come out the big winner because all you have to do is start the damn dishwasher. How hard is that?
More likely, however, they will be taken aback and run for cover. To which you say: “I see this is really about personal responsibility then and I’m the only one willing to do more than bitch about it. Is it any wonder you are unhappy?” Or some such motherly disapproval.
laughs hysterically Sorry, just dealing with a roomie nightmare of my own… (He assaulted me and threatened to kill me. I left but still paid rent after he promised to get into therapy rather than going to jail, because i’m just that much of a sweetie. Guess who just got to clean a house full of rotting garbage and pay two months of utility bills when her roomie disapeared?)
No meeting. They can give you a lovey-dovey rim job.
Do what your roommates expect of you. You seem to know what their bitch points are, so you can meet them with action. If the meeting happens, listen calmly to them, and don’t accuse them with your complaints. If necessary, apologize for things that you agree you should have done. Tell them you’ll do the things they want you to do (within reason).
At the first available opportunity, move out, unless you find that the things you have to do really aren’t that bad (and be honest with yourself about whether you don’t mind, or if you’re doing it just to keep the peace).
The point of all this isn’t passive aggressive self-righteousness, and it’s not bitching rights to the neutral mediators; it’s your peace of mind. Don’t think of your roommates as people, with respect to this issue; think of them as part of your environment that you deal with, just like you put on a coat in bad weather. Assimilate to the rythm of the apartment so that your apartment isn’t a place you don’t want to be. If you don’t want to be there, move out. Think less about who’s right and wrong, and more about what will make your apartment a nice place to live in for yourself.
I lived with two passive aggressive roommates, and none of us were good roommates (though not terrible, either). At the end of the year together, there was so much built up tension that none of ever spoke again, and for the last four months, we were neither speaking nor not speaking–we were just living in the same apartment. We had a few meetings where we’d vent and try to clear the air, but those meetings just made for later troubles.
In other words, do what’s necessary to keep everyone happy, and if that’s too much, leave. When you look back at it, you’ll realize that all the petty shit that got their panties in such a knot was really small and irrelevant, and shouldn’t have bothered you so much at all. In the long run, you’ll be much happier.
I hate to say this, BlackKnight, but you sound just like my evil housemates that I hated.
Now I have known the pain of a bad living situation. I have been in situations where I have been afraid that my food was poisened. I have lived with liars, theives, drug dealer, whores and people who are just really really annoying. I have known houses so dirty that maggots crawled in the sink. I have tripped over my roomate’s dirty underwear that she keeps conveinently in the middle of the floor. Don’t think I don’t feel your pain. But I think you are wrong.
Roomate #1: Well this is pretty cut and dried. Simple mistake. I can even side on you with this- my old roomates would get a phone call about once every thirty seconds, and they’d get pissed if I didn’t take a huge note for each one of them. Ugh,
Roomate #2: This is where you run into unsteady ground. This sounds an aweful lot like previous roomates of mine, that would say "I don’t have to do (regular normal chore that we’de agreed to do) because I do (bizarre obsessive task that nobody cares about except the person who does it). I don’t have to take out the trash because I mop the ceilings! I don’t have to do my dishes because I polish the insides of the plumbing!
Sorry, thats not how it works. Every house has a general set of things that everyone agrees needs to be done. It is best off for everyone if you get that in writing. Cleaning tasks above and beyond that might earn you some respect, and might get you a couple favors, but it does not excuse you from work. Ever. Doing things to satisfy your own personal pet peeve does not mean that you don’t need to take care of these basic tasks.
My roomate, too, said they “barely made any dishes”. But somehow the dishes kept piling up. So everyone stopped doing them. We got maggots living in our sink. Not a good scene.
The only way to solve this is to write down what exactly needs to be cleaned, how often, and by whom and what the standard for “clean” is. Sign this and post copies around the house.
Roomate #3 People would pull this one on me, too.
“My grandmother is coming over, you guys all have to mop the floors!”
“My boyfriend is coming over, clean the bathroom before eight!”
That’s not how it works. Just because you invited someone over does not give you the right to order other people to jump on command. You are the one that invited them over. You are the one that decided the current state of the house is unacceptable. It is fair to ask that the house be cleaned, it is unfair to ask that the house be cleaned instantly because you chose to make plans.
April was being a bitch, for sure, but you shouldn’t have gone into her room. She obviously had an agenda there, it’s not like she accidently put the DVD remote in there. And in all fairness it is not your DVD remote (and stuff belonging to an SO who you live with is pretty much your stuff, too). Not your DVD player. Not your room. She was wrong, but you were wronger.
I’ve dealt with the personal stuff in living room issue. I came up with a solution that worked pretty well, and didn’t cause too much tension. I brought in a big box and wrote “stuff box” on the side with permanent marker. I declared that anything that was in the living room that did not belong in the living room had the potential to get put in stuff box. It was people’s own responsibility to look in the stuff box for their stuff every once in a while. When the living room got too messy, I would just pick everything up and put it in the box, instead of trying to sort out whos stuff it was and what to do with it. I was happy because I could clean the living room. They were happy because they could leave their stuff all over the living room without having to hear me complain.
A house meeting is probably a really good idea, even if things get a bit tense. What you guys really need to do is write up a very clear and very detailed agreement that covers all the bases, especially regarding cleaning, personal/signifigant other property, and privacy. That way when you have a dispute, you will have a solid document to refer back to in order to figure out what is acceptable or unacceptable.
I admit I have my faults. However, I also think some of your criticisms are missplaced. (Not that I blame you - there are details which were not included in the OP that can make a difference. The OP was necessarily not comprehensive. Hell, I write long enough posts as it is. )
Preach on brother!
Kim at one time was juggling three men. (None of them knew about each other, of course, because then they’d, like, you know, no longer do stuff with her. Silly cuckolds.)
When she left she’d leave precise instructions for each boytoy: “If poor-sap-one calls, tell him blah blah blah. If poor-sap-two calls, tell him bleh bleh bleh. But don’t tell him where I’m going. If poor-sap-three calls, tell him I’m on my way. And ask poor-sap-one for his phonenumber if he calls. I lost it. You can tell him where I am, but not who I’m with. Oh, and tell poor-sap-two I won’t be here tomorrow. You can tell him where I’m going but don’t give him the number because I don’t want him to call because I might be there with poor-sap-one.”
I understand where you’re comming from. However, I don’t think my situation is quite like that. (Mind you, I do admit I should clean the dishes more often than I do.)
Here, cleaning up the stove and counter is not what I would consider a “bizarre obsessive task”. Well, ok, it is sometimes bizarre. If you’ve seen Spaghetti-O’s splattered on the wall above the six-foot line (judged roughly from my height), you have an idea how bad it can get.
(I cannot explain how this occurred. To my knowledge, Spaghetti-O’s have never come laden with explosive devices inside the can. But it happened, and after a couple days of it congealing there I ended up cleaning it off.)
The wall gets caked with crap like that and the stove gets coated with crap like that. Sometimes uncooked meat is left on the counter for a disturbingly long time.
Their messes cause junk to get into the burners. When the burners are on, this often causes smoke and an unpleasant odor. A while ago a burner started on fire because of accumulated debris. If I hadn’t quickly turned off the burner and blown out the licking flames with deep panicked breaths I would have at least burned my noodles, if not worse.
More than once I’ve had to call a roommate into the kitchen because something they had on the stove was boiling over and making a mess. (Which I would later clean up.)
They don’t vacuum or clean up their messes in the kitchen. They don’t sweep. And I know it’s minor, but they don’t even empty the lint trap in the dryer. Once April saw me emptying the lint trap and asked what I was doing. She had no idea what a lint trap was.
So I guess you could say that there’s an accepted set of chores and I’m doing lots of stuff not on the list. But the set contains only two elements. (And I take out the garbage regularly. They have a valid complaint about the dishes.)
Both of those demands are clearly time-consuming. Cleaning a bathroom most especially is a serious task. Moving a scattered pile of books, papers, photos, assorted pencils and pens, a bookbag, and a magic-8-ball (which says, “Reply hazy, ask again later” far more often than simple chance would allow) to your room isn’t. At most it would take three or four trips, and be done in less than a minute and a half if you hurried.
No visitor really cares if the floor is mopped or they are able to safely drink soup from the squeaky-clean john. But if they are unable to sit on the couch because there is stuff on the couch, or unable to walk in the living room without tripping or stepping on something, then there might be a problem.
The DVD remote (and the DVD player, VCR, etc.) are all Paul’s. They are in the living room, and we all have express permission to use them. They are officially for “public” use. By taking them she was deliberately making them unusable for others. No matter how much they may be hers, they are his more explicitly and his standing rule should, er, stand.
Assorted Tidbits
(You don’t have to imagine the radio tower on the globe; this isn’t that important.)
Damn you, Legomancer, for getting that song stuck in my head.
My name is on the lease, and I have my own copy of the lease. I’d just like to see those fuckers try to kick me out! (Well, not really. But they couldn’t if they tried.)
I’ve done the dishes a couple times now. Nobody has said anything, which is probably a good thing. However, the plethora of stuff is creeping slowly back into the living room. I was getting used to it being barren, too. At the current rate of creep, I have at least a couple of days before it reaches previous levels. If it should stop significantly before then I shall be grateful and will accept that lesser level as inevitable.
Medea’s Child, sounds like you put up with a hell of a lot worse than anything I’ve been through. Thank you for helping me keep this in perspective. (And thanks for the “killing them in their sleep” suggestion. I will take that under advisement.)
Flash News Update: (You’ll need the imagine the radiotower this time.)
As I type this, I hear crying in the other room. I have no idea the circumstances, except that April loudly proclaimed, “You LIED to me!” at Paul and then burst into sobs. :eek:
I wanted them to stop being so factious, but I didn’t want them to end up fighting like this.
Wear a pair of underpants on your head, and stick pencils up your nose. Answer every question with the word “Wubble”.
sit down quietly, listen to everything they say, before taking out a can of Tear gas, letting it off, and running down the street laughing.
Take notes of roommates gripes, and at the end, insert into rectum, drop pants, and squeeze back out saying “thats what I think of your gripes”. then strut out of the room like a b-boy.
come to the meeting with 3 apples, one with a name of each roommate. as each roommate speaks, eat from that apple. (if its a long meeting, you might consider grapefruit.
politely agree with all of their points, and then go on with your business until you have a chance to move.
If anyone wants more terrible houseing stories, check out my rant from last year. Rereading it, I realize that it does not have half the venon or loathing that I felt. Imagine everything I said, but smellier and worse.
I’m still voting for killing them in their sleep. Think of it as a pre-emptive strike. But then, I’m now biased against any roomie I’m not sleeping with.
Glad I can offer perspective, may my personal hell give some light of hope to the rest of the world.
Seriously though, if they don’t care about the messes on the stove, you cleaning it up doesn’t mean much. Do your dishes, move her stuff off the couch and into a corner. If you like it better do all your dishes by hand and drop them back into the cupboard. Or get your own dishes and only use them. (Did this, one of the roomies from hell refused to wash dishes. Decided that his only chore was taking out the garbage and anyone asking him to do anything else was torture. He got his own set of dishes.)
Deal as best you can until you can get out. Take the high road but prepare for it to bite you in the ass.
I once had a roommate who wanted me dead. Unfortunately, I am not exaggerating. The roommate from hell had her gang banging crack dealing boyfriend threaten to kill us and get his homies to follow the rest of the roommates around campus for over a month, eventually incriminating herself by leaving a message on the (brand new) answering machine in response to a phone call the previous night that she couldn’t possibly have known about because she hadn’t been home in 3 days.
She found new living accomodations after we (the rest of the roommates) finally told the police we wouldn’t put up with death threats and stalking.
Her main gripe? That the other four of us used a combined total of 2 hours per WEEK on the telephone. She thought this was ‘excessive.’
I know many people will disagree with me, but in my opinion, moving in with a couple is a BAD idea.
you will never win in a situation like this.
Either they both will side against you when one has a problem.
or
they will fight and then expect you to take sides.
I know its not financially possible for a lot of people and I sympathize, but I think couples should never take in room mates.
I think that as a couple, having a 3rd or 4th party intruding (be it as it may, intentional or not) is simply not a good idea.
none of the people I knew that roomed as couples with roomates in college are still together.
Me too! And Klaatu, that was a most hilarious way of putting it (IMHO) which almost cost the demise of another computer keyboard (we are very bad at losing them due to liquid spills in this house).
)
And Klaatu, that was a most hilarious way of putting it (IMHO) which almost cost the demise of another computer keyboard (we are very bad at losing them due to liquid spills in this house).