Odd/Mildly irritating roomates

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve heard some entertaining roomate horror stories here, but what about the more frequent ‘mildly irritating or odd roomates’?

I have one right now. Some gems:

-This was the roomate that specifically wanted to make sure the landlord (if a guy) was married, because 'A woman all by herself has to be careful these days" :rolleyes: (what does being MARRIED have anything to do with it?!)

-Locks her bedroom door all the time. Maybe this isn’t that wierd, just strikes me as a teensy bit paranoid that when she comes home/goes to bed she shuts/locks her door and window. As I said, taken by itself its pretty benign but combined with a few other things and it starts to look a bit kooky.

-Leaves post-it notes everywhere. Supposedly this was to communicate with roomates on different schedules, but honestly I think its passive-agressive. Myself, the landlord and his wife run into her at least once every day, so there’s no reason she can’t tell us in person. The thing is, this woman is incredibly non-confrontational. One time my girlfriend was dyeing my hair, and 3 drops got on what turned out to be her roll of paper towels. The next day I got a very harshly written post-it on the roll saying “someone RUINED my paper towels. PLEASE replace them immediately!” :dubious: Anytime anything of hers is missing/marred there is a post-it note about it, but she NEVER verbally says anything. If people are noisy late at night, rather than thumping the wall/talking to them about trying to STFU, she’ll leave a whiny note to the landlord about it.

-Uses her own toilet paper. Organic, I bet, since everything else she puts in/on her body is organic. Somebody voilated her toilet paper by having the nerve to erronously tear off a few sheets of her roll, wipe their ass, and flush them down the toilet. Again, a post-it note followed, and from that point on she actually kept her own toilet paper in her room, and brought it in the bathroom only when she was using it. This got a little annoying in situations where we’d accidentally run out of toilet paper; I actually put a post-it warning bathroom users that there wasn’t any toilet paper in the cabinets, and that I’d get more after work.

-We have another roomate that is somewhat on the noisy side. He has loud sex with his girlfriend occasionally, but overall it doesn’t bother me. The guy is also quite a shut-in, and rarely talks to people/goes outside his room. I don’t have a problem with him. Kooky roomate did, apparently, because one night she actually wrote the landlord a hastily-scrawled note saying she couldn’t stand the noise anymore and she was putting in her 30-day notice to move out. Before this she hadn’t said ANYTHING about noise. One day while she was at work the landlord asked me about it. I said I was surprised, because she NEVER complained that I was too noisy. I have sex in my room, and the windows are sometimes open (so people might hear some noises) but she didn’t say anything or gave some indication that she was uncomfortable. He told me that she was also suspicious about why my girlfriend was around all the time, and concluded she must be ‘keeping an eye on me’ since I obviously have some cougar of a hot roomate whom I might be tempted by :rolleyes: which was funny, she said to him, “because he’s totally not my type” :confused:

-Generally acts really sweet and polite to people, then has loud conversations on the phone in her room about what douchebags we all are, easily heard in the hallway, my room, etc.

None of this is a huge deal to me, most of it is funny/perplexing if anything. She’s moving out soon anyway, so I guess all the better for her. My landlord and I guess she’s just not used to living with people, because the way she deals with conflicts (leaving post-its but pretending everything’s hunky-dory) is rather bizarre to me.

2

One of my roomies has some odd behavior as well. Picture if you will a morbidly obese, 42 year old woman who never leaves her room EVER! She works the night shift and chain-smokes. The only noises I ever hear from her room are the loud packing of cigarettes and violent, hacking coughing. She is a staunch republican and loves Reagan and also has a bunch of witchcraft and Wiccan books.

3

Minor: my roommate my sophomore year in college used to eat chips by crunching them loudly before his mouth was completely closed. The resulting CRRRrrunnnnsshh sound nearly drove me to homocide on numerous occasions.

4

Incubus your roommate sounds like my sister’s from college. There were four women in the apartment. The one went nuts a month before college was done. Nobody was safe, until she was locked up after laying in the middle of a busy road. Better watch your back.

5

When she’s out, steal all her post-it notes.

Alternatively, take all of them, write things like “I hate post-it notes” and “adults deal with things in person” and place them all around the apartment. On her door, on the toilet, inside the refrigerator, etc.
I had an Actuary as a roommate from 1986 to 1989. Smart as a whip, dumb as a rock.

Said that we should be happy to trade our “worthless” money to the Japanese (remember, this was the 80’s) in exchange for all of their “valuable” trade goods. That when we were done, we should just declare that the money we’d given them wasn’t worth anything and essentially, “ha ha”. Didn’t quite grasp the two ideas that a> All those trade goods rot in short order, leaving us with nothing in the long run, and b> the US Economy would lie in ruins and no one would ever trust our money again, not even us Americans.

I bought a window Air Conditioner. Came home the next day to find it running full blast and every window in the apartment open. He said that it was hot and he needed “air flow”.

Actuaries study for exams several times a year. During those times, he would throw parties at 3am in the middle of the week. Did not grasp why I might be annoyed at being kept awake at those hours.

6

Well at he time I was one of the odd roomates. I was doing a lot of drugs back then. But they were the the kind of drugs that made me want to come home a scrub the kichen floor. Really, they should have sent flowers to my dealer.

But as to the others, I asked him one day for a subway token. When it was about 1.50. He never let it go. I gave him back his token (remember tokens?) but not till he gave me shit about it for days. (Ok it should have been sooner but I was broke as shit at the time. And given that he could have been a gentalman and showed a bit of largeasse if I didn’t get back to him in time

Meantime, I had to put up with his blaring Cheech and Chong tapes night and day. I think that’s worth a dolla 50
But that doesn’t beat the other one who told me her parents were members of the Illuminata.

Oh and there was Ophila (yup, real name) who was 35 and living in the dorms with us. And wrote poems about her lava lamp. And got hysterical when I A) left my shoes in the living room B) left a pot to soak in the sink C: had a male guest over, despite the fact that he was queer as a 3 dollar bill.

7

Sue never left the apartment except for class. She never, ever had friends over. I don’t need to be best friends with my roommates, but she would never, ever ask me, “Hey, how was your day?” or “What are you up to this weekend?” She’d come home, turn on Oprah and not speak to anyone for the rest of the evening.

Sue also had a series of fish that died horribly. Several times they all got ick. Once her cats dragged them out of the tank and across the carpet one by one. Once one of them got stuck in the filter. I swear, this woman couldn’t keep a goldfish alive for more than two weeks. She kept getting new goldfish, though.

The weirdest part? Sue was getting her masters degree in counseling. Yeah, lady, you’re the one I want to turn to when I’m having personal problems.

8

Incubus the next time you are in the bathroom and there is no toilet paper use one of your roomie’s Post-It notes.

True story: My first roomate in the dorms, freshman year of college, Buffalo NY early 1980s. The meal plan was optional, but we weren’t allowed to cook in our rooms. There was a very basic kitchenette in the basement of the dorm but it got closed by November because the people who used it weren’t cleaning it. It didn’t matter because my roomate didn’t really know how to cook.

He ordered pizza. Every day. I don’t know about breakfast but certainly lunch and dinner, supplemented by Buffalo chicken wings. September, October, November, into December the guy ate pizza at least 15 times a week.

Round about the beginning of December even he would admit he was getting sick of it.

9

In college for the first time (a bad decision all around), many years ago, I had several doozies:

The two very tightlaced and naive Puerto Rican kids, one of which would routinely sleepwalk because he was terribly homesick…

The seemingly quiet and normal guy with the cheesy moustache who listened to Jim Croce. That was until his strange “friend” showed up, replete with every gay stereotype you’ve ever imagined (and some you haven’t). The bugger would hit on me constantly, and once I walked in with them on the bed, in a perfect “69” position, tho thankfully everything was in their pants (or hurriedly stuffed in there when the lock clicked). But they weren’t the worst…

That honor goes to the “mountain man”, a guy 250 pounds of pure muscle on the school’s crew team. He’d routinely jump me and wrestle me to the floor when I walked in (not in a gay way thank God), talk all the time about his desire to go live in the mountains and live in a little cabin. I’m sure he’s there now as we speak.

10

Oh, come on, that’s rather endearing.

11

That reminds me of when I went away to summer camp in 4th grade. The last day every one packed for the bus ride home. I went back to the cabin to grab my sleeping bag and found two of my (male) cabin counselors with their hands in each other’s pants. If I’d been a little older, it would have been really awkward. But I was young and naive and I just grabbed my bag and hightailed it for the bus. [/end hijack]

12

Your stories are making me grateful that I make enough money to live alone.

13

Well, I have a roommate that sleeps all day and is up all night, bugs me a lot for food, eats the same damn thing day after day, throws up on the floor, and craps in a box.

Wait, that’s the cat.

I’ve only ever had one roommate and luckily we got along just fine.

14

Over the course of my freshman year I probably had 5-6 actual conversations with my roommate, which is fairly impressive considering we were within 4 feet of each other in the cramped dorm rooms. 1 of those conversations, memorably, was when Mike Jones first released his (terrible) CD, and my roommate was listening to it and I turned around and just said “what the FUCK are you listening to?” “I dunno, but this is terrible”. Another time he disappeared from the room for approximately 3 days, without apparently ever coming back during that time. entire conversation next time I saw him “hey dude, what’s up” “not much”.

15

This brings back memories of my first roommate ever. This was in college, and I had moved in a day or so before my roommate (he was local, I was from out of town). The parents and I are unpacking and getting situated, and “Ralphie” shows up presumably to survey the digs. He comments on how they spelled his name wrong on the sheet on the door, then proceeds into the room just staring at us. No greeting, no introduction. Cool, quiet shy type, we think, just a “starer”. First weekend in the dorm, and I come back to puke over the room, Ralphie quietly reading a comic book at his desk. After several diplomatic requests, he has still not cleaned up the puke. Okaaay. I won’t clean it up for him, so I’m sleeping elsewhere that night. After three days of repeated requests to clean up the puke, in-and-outs to grab stuff and quickly leave, and further appeals and cleaning products brought by the Resident Assistant, Ralphie still lives happily in his puke-filled room without me (but with my stuff). Finally, I got a room transfer on the Fourth Day of Barf. Later found out that Ralphie has never touched a drop of alcohol to this day. Weird dude.

I also had a roommate from Japan who constantly moved the heater to 11 on the dial, even in the sweltering days of early autumn. Turned out to be a cool guy, but the thermostat was a major point of contention.

16

Edited to fix bolded text.