Things that roommates do/have done that irritate you.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Okay, I won’t be sneaky. I’m doing research on a script that focuses on roommate relationships. I would like to thank the following for their contributions – and any great antecdotes you want to provide will be much appreciated, but probably not financially compensated (unless something really, really amazing happens).

Purvis: Got food poisinong and barfed on the hallway wall trying to make his way to the toilet. And left the mess there for THREE DAYS.

Fridge: brought his girlfriend over one day and she stayed there for seven months.

Kristina: Kristina was hot. All forgiven.

Larry: his one contribution in the year he lives with us was bringing home some soap. From a motel. The little kind. He locked his own toilet paper from his room and brought it back with him after he finished. And locked the door.

Mags: Loyed to hang around the Living Room in his underwear.

Fridge (again): took the L.A. Times sports section to work with him. Aargh!!!

Me: my iguanas got loose and shat on the window sill (multiple times). A rat I was to feed my snake got loose in the house.

Me, again: notorious for picking at others’ leftovers and rearranging it so it wouldn’t look like none had been taken. But they could always tell someone had picked. I could never stop after one bite.

Fred: was always trying to freak everyone out with his response to every political issue: aliens were behind it all.

Paul: had an alarm clock that made you think a nuclear attack was upon us.

You get the idea. Care to share?

2

I had the roommates from hell. The worst part about it is that we started out being friends.

I had been dating a guy that I’ll call T. T. and I were both good friends with another guy I’ll call R. In fact, R was my best friend at the time. R. was going to school thousands of miles away, and he wanted to come home for the summer. Being a good friend, I not only paid for his ticket home, but set him up with a girl I knew he liked named C. They became a couple. Meanwhile T and I went through a pretty bad breakup.

Fast forward to the end of the summer. I was feeling blue over T, and C was upset because R had to return to college. C and I decided to move away from this small town and ended up heading to Colorado. We got an apartment, and were roommates.

C and R continued to have a long distance relationship. C spent hours on the phone with R every night - leaving me alone, and without a way to even meet people since if they called, they’d get a busy signal. For 5 hours. C refused to get call waiting, she said she wouldn’t answer it if it buzzed.

No matter, I was happy for R, he’d been wanting a relationship for years. I tried to ignore the fact that I essentially didn’t have a phone. I looked forward to seeing R, when he came to visit for Thanksgiving. That is, until R and C made it very clear that they didn’t want me around at all. I’m not talking “we want some time just the two of us.” I was basically not supposed to be in my own apartment.

We had a nice Thankgiving - inviting over about 10 people, none of whom we knew well because we’d just moved to town. Dinner wasn’t even finished when R and C retired to their bedroom (right off the dining area in our small apartment) and proceeded to have loud sex. That was fun, me and 10 guests, with grunts coming from the bedroom.

R never did go back to school. He moved in with us. Which was actually OK with me, at first. I figured they’d eventually stop being so inclusive and turn into a normal couple, who wanted to be alone at times, but wanted to be social at times. No biggy. But no, it never happened. At least not with me. As it turns out, years later I found out that C had grown increasingly jealous of me, and was sure I was trying to make the moves on R. Never mind that R and I had been friends for years before C ever came in the picture, and had long since straightened out any sexual type relationship between us.

For Christmas, R & C were housesitting a house in the mountains. I was invited up for Christmas dinner (nice of them not to leave me alone on Christmas day). I got a frantic call Christmas morning - they’d “forgotten” to buy food for Christmas dinner. I was to stop and buy whatever I could find. It was Christmas Day - all the grocery stores were closed. We ended up eating pasta from the convenience store.

About a month later, I came home to find T in the house. Being my ex-boyfriend with whom I’d had a horrible breakup, I wasn’t to excited about this. Turns out he took a job at a ski resort about 3 hours away, and was visiting for the weekend. OK, I can deal with this. One weekend turned into every weekend. Pretty soon he didn’t go home during the week. I figured out about 4 days in that he’d been invited to move in with us. Without me knowing. Without my approval. He was suddenly living in my living room.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Luckily we had a 6 month lease, which was about to be up. I found another place, another roommate, and was out of there.

3

My former roommate
[ul][li]Snuck in the boyfriend who was banned from the house - and then he punched holes in a couple of doors and walls[/li][li]Sold everything she owned to buy abovementioned boyfriend cigarettes - then accused me of stealing her stuff to save face in front of her parents[/li][li]Kept a jar of tomato paste with a massive chunk of mold growing in it in the fridge. She’d just push the lump to one side, take the paste she needed, didn’t bother throwing out the lump.[/li][li]Locked my dog up in the back room because the banned boyfriend had brought his dog over and it was pinching my dog’s food, which made my dog aggro. Of course, my dog was a two month old puppy that was still being housetrained, and she didn’t put him outside to do his business first. He went in the doorway, so that when you opened the door to let him out of the room… let’s just say you haven’t lived until you’ve cleaned puppy poop off the underside of a door.[/li][li]Hit my dog in the head with a broom (hard enough to cause him to have a life-long phobia of brooms and vacuums), then gave him paracetamol because “he looked like he had a headache”. (The dog survived).[/li][li]Keeping in mind that our telephone company didn’t offer itemised billing on local calls and just supplied a statement that said x calls @ $0.25 = total, so we decided the only fair thing was to split the bill evenly. She would ring the deadbeat boyfriend and talk for 10 minutes or so until they got into an argument, at which point she’d yell and he’d hang up, so she’d call him back, they’d calm down, talk for a while, then argue again, he’d yell, she’d hang up, he’d call her back - rinse and repeat for hours on end. Guess who got stuck paying for half of all those calls she was making? Uh-huh. Only 25 cents per call, yet our bill came to $200 a MONTH. I didn’t live with her for enough months to work out a better system.[/li][li]Finally, when she moved out when I was away, so she took all of her stuff, and all of the stuff I’d bought off her to help her out when she needed money.[/li][/ul]

4

I think Athena wins.

I had :

The Eternal Showerer. It was a typical course of morning events to awaken, needing to use the bathroom, only to find that ES had stepped in just beforehand, and would proceed to showerr for the next hour.

Oscar from the Odd Couple. Now, all three of us had our share of stuff. But Oscar… his stuff somehow kept creeping out of his room to take over the common areas. Oscar didn’t clean, either. Oscar also had smelly stuff (like kitty litter particles from his cat’s litterbox, his tanning supplies - I mean leatherworking, not self-bronzing). I finally basically shovelled up all the loose stuff in the common area (all his - the other two of us kept things in our own rooms) and put it in his room.

5

When I moved to Portland and roomed with my friend J, I didn’t have a job. I would watch J’s daughter while she was working with the agreement that I would clean the house since I wasn’t working. That wasn’t the problem; the problem was J, getting home from work, would litter the (spotless) apartment from the front door back to her room with crap. Jacket first, one shoe next, other shoe, work hat, backpack, etc. When she’d finally emerge after changing from her uniform, she would bitch at me about the “messy” house. :rolleyes: She never did get it.

6

My college roommate wasn’t Hall of Shame material, but she definitely tested my nerves.

-As most bad roommates are wan to do (or not do), C never washed the dishes, cleaned the house or bought anything for the house. We finally started keeping all consumables (toilet paper, toothpaste, shampoo, etc.) in our rooms where she was too lazy to look for them.

-C dated G, who drove the loudest crap car known to man. I dated a guy with a motorcycle :smiley: . One night, my BF came by at 3,4 AM to leave a note on my car. His bike woke up C, who thought it was G’s car. They had apparently had a fight earlier and she thought he was coming to apologize. When it wasn’t him, she yelled at me for dating such an insensitive jerk (apparently leaving an unexpected love note is insensitive :confused: ).

-Everything outside of our respective bedrooms belonged to C. I moved in after she did and I suggested replacing some of her old, ratty stuff (particularly a phone that didn’t really work and a giant Swatch watch clock :eek: ) with my nicer and, importantly, functional stuff. The answer I got was, “well, I’d rather not. I mean, your stuff is nicer, but, um, uh…well, it’s yours .” Like my stuff had cooties or something. :mad:

7

Let’s see. The apartment I shared for a year with my now (fortunately) ex-boyfriend. He threw up one evening in the living room. And didn’t clean it up. For 2 weeks. I just left the apartment and refused to come back until he did. He never did. It was left to myself and a friend to do it, after we both got exceedingly pissed off.

The house I moved into during the first year of my PhD was ‘fun’. I lived with a girl, whom we’ll call S. S was a control freak. S was a clean freak. If I left a mug in the sink for more than half an hour (generally because I was running late or something), I’d get a lecture when I got home. Heaven forbid that I should leave anything anywhere, as, yes, I’d get a lecture. Hell, I couldn’t even cook in my own house sometimes, cause she was having friends over. S was also a grade A prude. She could not stomach the thought of my (ex) boyfriend and I having sex in the privacy of my own room, and told me as such. She couldn’t watch a film which contained even mild nudity without screaming “eeeeeww. icky!” Er, yeah, OK. The kicker however was that I’d installed an ethernet network in the house so that we could all access the internet. She used KaZaa. Frequently. Without a firewall. I was lucky, I had my own firewall on my computer, and more often than not used Linux. She also hogged all the bandwidth downloading her crap. So, being the only one who actually knew how to change network settings etc, I managed to program the router to frequently drop her connections at random times of the day, generally when I wasn’t in, or when I was away. She never did figure out what was going on!

The next year, I moved in with some trainee maths teachers. Would have been fine and dandy, if it weren’t for J screaming like a fishwife at all hours of the day, coming in late, absolutely pissed and stoned, and waking me up. I’ll say this much, if I ever have kids, she’d better never teach them. The other kicker was my flatmates’ obsession with sport. Didn’t matter what it was, if it was on the sports channel, they’d watch it. Aaaargh. Another year I spent confined to my room.

I live on my own now.

8

I was pretty lucky. Worst things my roommate did was bring home a boyfriend to stay overnight (a boyfriend I really didn’t like), and, well, she was clumsy. I think she broke every glass I owned. We ended up with nothing but plastic tumblers. Eventually, when it became apparent I was probably getting married within the next year, she found other digs, and gave me a big set of glasses as a wedding present. :slight_smile:

I probably annoyed her by…not allowing her to put down poison or traps for mice. I had cats, and told her no poison on their account. The sticky traps and the snap traps, I told her she could put down, but that she had to immediately kill any mice caught in them, because I can’t stand any animal to suffer. She chose not to put them down. The cat took care of a lot of them, but hey, he’s a cat. What can I say?

9

Just out of college, I moved in with this woman who was about 10 years older than me. We shared a 2 bedroom, 2 bath apartment with my bath being the “common” bath which wasn’t a big deal. She then said we would each pay half on the utilities and the groceries, which she would buy. And her ex-husband sometimes stayed over, hope that isn’t a problem, when he’s over, just stay in your room.

Well, I soon realized that the ex lived there half the time, used to be a football player, and would eat all the groceries the moment he walked in. So I’m living in an 8x10 room, with no guarantee that when I walk down the hall, Ex won’t be in my bathroom or eating my food. So I explained to Roomie that I didn’t think this was fair and that I would start buying my own food. She said I’d have to keep it in my bedroom if I was going to be that way about it. Christmas was the final straw. She expected me to pay half of a $150 live tree that she would decorate in blue and white only and that I wasn’t allowed to be near. I moved January 1.

10

I don’t have any personal roommate horror stories, but my brother’s first college roommate had some quirks. He was apparently a medieval reenactor (you know the type - people who hold jousting matches outside of movie theaters and convention centers), and he took it upon himself to build a suit of chain mail.

In his dorm room.

Dorm rooms aren’t very big.

11

The most irritating thing I can think of is if a roommate tried to use me as research for a screenplay :wink:

One minor thing that happened yesterday. My new roommate is the laundry police. I was sitting there watching TV and he asked who had laundry in the washing machine. I told him it was me I didn’t know it was done washing. He told me he was just checking. He didn’t have any laundry to do. He was just checking to see if there was anything in the washing machine :confused: WTF? Who goes around randomly checking washing machines? Not on par with the other posts but it irritated me.

12

Ah yes. One of the reasons I love living alone.

Former roomate whom all my friends refered to as simply ‘creepy guy’-

Would hang up on anyone who called that wasn’t his mother. (“Hello, is ArrMatey! There?” click)

Would constantly tell me, “I know what you’re up to!” And refuse to explain further.

And the one that took the cake- we (sadly) shared a room. One night I awoke at about 3 AM to see him sitting on the edge of my bed, just -staring- at me.:eek: He didn’t move, he didn’t blink. I nervously went back to bed.

A month later, I was outa there.

13

I once came home to find my roommate bathing her cat in my Calphalon soup pot. I was horrified. Particularly because her cat doesn’t have a tail, and the muscles in that area are not very strong, so the cat constantly had poop dangling off her butt.

Even worse, about a week later, I came home and the entire apartment smelled of rootbeer. Turns out her mother had given her a bunch of sassafrass roots and she was boiling them in the same stockpot she had bathed the stupid cat in! :eek:

14

Man, have I lived with some clowns over the last few years. best one was Olex, a big massive russian guy in the last house I lived in. Never have I heard someone make so much noise, both eating and clomping up and down the steps.
The guy never cooked anything that wasnt drenched in garlic, and everynight used all the pots and pans at once, resulting in me having to wait around an hour before I could even think about making my food, after a nice hour and a half bus ride home from work. He would then proceed to sit in the tiny living room and eat like a fucking pig. You literally could not sit in the room with it. Got pissed off with this after a few weeks, so asked him if he wouldn’t mind either eating earlier (he was at home from college by 2pm everyday) or hanging on till i’d eaten. Yes he says, and this lasted a day. Give it two weeks, and compounding this was his team of russian mates that would be round every night, shouting at each other even though they’re sat a foot away.
Plus the coming in late singing russian songs. I went ballastic at him one night because i’d had enough, and he really didnt think it was odd to do this.

I got out. His final words to me, as I sat surrounded by everything I owned in the living room waiting for a mate to come pick up me and move me, were “my friends are here, they need to sit down.(puzzled look) are you moving?”

To which I replied “no. you fucking ignorant cunt.”

then my mate turned up.
theres more, but i’m leaving work now.

15

  1. One roommate used to making smacking noises when he ate. I would try to walk away, but he would follow me around. Picture a guy eating a sandwich making loud smacking noises following you from the kitchen to the living room to the front porch, etc.

  2. One roommate used to talk through the bathroom door. I’d be in the bathroom with the door closed, and he’d start talking to me. This is simply breaking the guy code. The bathroom is supposed to be a sanctuary, a place where a guy can be left alone if only for a few minutes.

16

Gosh. My experiences are nothing compared to this.

–We lived in a studio, so her boyfriend, who had the filthiest mouth ever, started spending most nights in her bed. Tacky. There was the day when her cat got the used condom out of the bathroom trash and was found playing with it–she put it back in the trash, so that the cat could get it right back out. Yummy! Oh, and then she went psycho and announced that she was pregnant, but oh, no, it was ectopic and she needed surgery right away, and, well, pot was the only thing that helped with the pain, you don’t mind the headache you get from it do you? It turned out that she had faked the whole thing, apparently getting the idea from a soap opera. It was rather badly faked, since the last time she’d slept with the now-ex-bf was well over 3 months previous. He started crank-calling us at 4 am, which was lots of fun.

–Another roomie was a good friend who was just one of those people who really ought to live alone. She was very high-strung and neurotic, and would hoard up every little thing that bugged her until she had a messy emotional melt-down all over the place. Everyone was much happier when she got her own place.

–My college bf’s housemate appeared to become schizophrenic or something before our very eyes. It was quite frightening, and no one knew what to do about it. He still functioned pretty much, he just got scarily weird; he would tell extravagant stories about his physical heroics, which he clearly believed were true, and (similarly) would deny having done something that he had just done, and believe it. There was other stuff. I don’t know what happened to him. :frowning:

17

One roommate would cover the face of my Wonder Woman refrigerator magnet because Lynda Carter “stared at” her while she was drinking her coffee. She covered WW’s face with another magnet in the shape of a skull, which for some reason was better.

Same roommate insisted that we keep separate trash baskets in the kitchen and would go through her trash basket, pick out anything that wasn’t “hers” and dump it in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Another roommate moved five of her friends into her 8x10 room with her for over a month and then, when I finally objected only after they started stealing my food and breaking my things, threatened me. Same roommate, now pregnant, moved her nasty boyfriend in after she was told by the landlord that she’d be evicted if she did. So I got her evicted.

Another roommate in the same place was a hopeless alcoholic who called the police on himself on Thanksgiving to take him to detox.

Another roommate in the same place (the same room, actually, after drunkie vanished) was on various anti-psychotics and would steal my food while I was standing there watching her. Most notable theft was a tub of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” which she put into her fanny pack and carried into her room.

Why yes, I do live alone.

18

My college authorities sent a detailed form for me to fill out before I moved into Halls of Residence so I could be matched with a suitable roomate. So J (rightwing teetotal strict Christian innocent with lung problems) ended up with a multipierced chainsmoking Guinness-guzzling atheist Socialist punk with male friends who she truly believed slept on the floor. We got on pretty well, considering.

A couple of years later, I shared a house with A, who was the perfect housemate. The only problem was that his girlfriend was petrified of large, tattooed, pierced men with mohawks. Virtually all of my friends and lovers answered the above description, so the noise levels were high - her fear manifested itself in a series of piercing screams followed by hysterical sobbing.

Also sharing the house was M. She too was the perfect housemate, until she moved her disgusting creepy boyfriend in over our objections. Aside from the fact that he was the most disturbingly horrible person I’ve ever had to avoid a conversation with, he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t have sex with him, since I was such a slut anyway.

Me. The roomate from hell, with scary lovers. Plus my cats infested the fitted carpet with fleas.

19

I lived with a male roommate for a year and change before I discovered that he didn’t know that you had to put SOAP in the dishwasher to make it get the dishes clean.

He also never used laundry detergent. A mutual friend that came over to use our machines brought pre-measured baggies of detergent as “payment” for letting her do laundry. They were really hints that, yes, you DO have to use soap on things to get them clean.

He also used to steal the hand soap from my bathroom (which I shared with another male roommate) and shower with it because he “couldn’t afford soap”, but he could afford $50 worth of cheese for a picnic with his scary girlfriend. His scary girlfriend was exactly like Moaning Myrtle from the second Harry Potter movie. Looks, voice, etc. Exactly.

20

I had a housemate who used to “borrow” my porn. Nothing worse than settling down for a nice tug and discovering my current favorite magazine (back off, this was pre-internet) on the back of the aforementioned housemate’s toilet.

Otherwise, he was a pretty good guy.