Things that roommates do/have done that irritate you.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Back when I was going to college, I lived in a rooming house with 5-6 other guys. They were party animals who’d come in late night drunk, bang on my door and shout at me to wake up, bang on my wall, and yell at each other till they passed out.

I’d get up early the next morning, kick the door in to their rooms, and tilt their bunk beds back and forth while shouting at them to wake up.

They never complained about this.

They DID complain that my cereal bowl kept waking them up every morning.

I’d get up, take a shower, and eat breakfast out of a ceramic cereal bowl with a metal spoon. They said the TINK TINK TINK sound kept waking them up. It was the most inconsequential thing I could ever do, and THEY COMPLAINED ABOUT IT!

22

Actually it was my roommate’s boyfriend who annoyed the shit out of me. He would come over nearly every night, walk straight into her room without acknowledging my existence, and stay there. She would come out to get him drinks or cook dinner. She and I would talk and listen to music and stuff, and the whole time he would just sit in her room, listening. It doesn’t sound that bad but it was super creepy! Imagine having someone listen to everything you do after you come home from work, with out ever actually speaking to you. He made me feel unwelcome in my own house! Also, it’s really awkward to hang out with your roommate, have her excuse herself, listen to them have sex, and then have her come back out, and you have to pretend like you didn’t hear every little thing they just did. Ew!!

23

The most aggrivating thing I’d ever had a roommate do to me was when this chap and I got a 2 bedroom apartment. I chose to rent/buy furniture for the apartment, and he felt that the only furniture he needed was his weight bench in his bedroom.

Okay, it’s his life, his bedroom, he can do whatever he wants.

Then I got myself a TV and VCR. And he bitched continually because I had the TV and VCR but NO CABLE. Mind you, he wasn’t willing to get cable HIMSELF, just hated that I had a TV and didn’t care to get cable so he could watch it.

Then he decides that he does want some furniture himself, after all. And gets a sofa bed. So, yes, he’s sleeping in the living room. And I didn’t really care, I still had my room and bathroom, and didn’t have to deal with him. But still, he still had his own bedroom, where he kept all his clothes. (On the floor in a clean and dirty pile, of course.)

Then he gets a girlfriend, and she starts spending nights over. And I start getting yelled at for coming into the kitchen to get some ice water in the middle of the night. I’m afraid I had no sympathy: If he wanted a bed with privacy, he should have it in his BEDROOM.

24

…years back before I tied the knot with MrsDangergene I shared a flat (with her blessing) with two women. Woman #1 a friend of a close friend, woman #2 was a distant friend of a friend of #1. For the most part it was nice, and I made lots of ‘Man About the House’ jokes, (that’s ‘Three’s Company’ for the 'Merkins), cos really it WAS Man About the House. I had to do all the manly-man stuff, like fixing toilets and puting up hooks and changing lightbulbs, etc (how many Dangergene’s does it take to change a lightbulb, indeed).

Anyways, all would have been perfect, except that Housemate #2 NEVER, in two and a half years of sharing the flat, EVER did any housework beyond cleaning the parquet floor of her room with a tissue. So all housework fell to Housemate #1 and me. Which was ok, except when the toilet seat in their toilet BROKE! (I had the master bedroom with an en suite, which was, therefore, my bathroom). The seat didn’t snap of smash or anything. It just came unscrewed. I was kind’ve sick of picking up for #2, so #1 and I advised that since she had broken it (I beleived #1) then she could fix it, which was a simple thing to do and I’d be happy to show her how to do it, or, if she asked me, I’d do it for her. We had three bathrooms in the house, so #1 started using the other toilet, but #2 insisted on using the broken one. Six months passed and the toilet it literally black (#1 and I stopped cleaning that toilet too), and the seat is still not fixed and #2 hasn’t asked for any help. The was no animosity, she was just bone lazy and knew I’d do it if she asked, but she didn’t care enough to ask! Finally our lease was up for renewal, #1 and I figured we broke the seat, so we felt a moral obligation to fix it, regardless of any possible legal permutations.

#2 STILL didn’t get it, and didn’t do it. I don’t think she was even aware we’d fixed it!

And then there was the time #2 went to Bali for a ‘conference’ (she seemed to go for a LOT of conferences and seminars in places that most people go for holidays) and went horseriding on the beach, wearing only shorts and a t-shirt. No chaps, no pants, no boots, no shoes. She rode the horse for four hours. The sunburn was bearable, but she kept riding and riding and riding. Even when her legs started to hurt. She STILL didn’t get off and walk when the skin on the insides of her legs was red and raw. By the time she got back to the Corale, he legs were stripped, bleeding and seriously messed up! She came back from the holiday telling us how wonderful it had been, and how romantic and dreamy riding a horse on the beach was, and the sunsets, and the food and, and, and… could one of us help her put the antibiotic cream on her legs?
‘Why?’
‘um… cos of this…’ [pulls back sarong to reveal legs]
#1 and Dangergene: ‘EEK!’

And then there was me… I’m cool with me, cos, y’know, I’m ME! So I’d wander the house in my boxer shorts (the temp here averages 35ºC every day, no winter), which was cool, cos the girls did the same. Skimpy singlets, undies, etc etc etc. But #1’s BF came to stay from Europe about 8months after we all moved in, and despite being a super-cool, very nice guy, who I’m still friends with, he wasn’t cool with my semi-nudity. He never made an issue, except one time he asked if I was embarrassed? ‘Remember, when we were talking in the kitchen yesterday?’ (#1, BF and me) ‘and… er…’ (paraphrasing here) ‘your… um… thing… was showing!’
‘Was it? Cool! So, what, was #1 upset? Did she complain?’
‘No’
‘So what’s your point?’
He turned red and wandered off into #1’s room. I acknowledge this is only mildly amusing, but I could see how it could have made ME the housemate from heck!

Oh, and what about the time #1 left her laundry in the machine, so I pulled it out and found a panty liner in the bottom of the machine. Ewwww! (actually, I wasn’t so fussed, but my GF (now wife) was kinda grossed out at the nastiness of it).

And #2’s different ‘guests’ (of both genders) every single weekend! But NOOOO, they were ‘just friends’ who stayed over late and had to sleep there, with #2, in the room, cos it was WAAAAAAY too late to go home (it takes half an hour to get anywhere on this island, at any time of the day or night. Taxis are cheap and easy to find). These guests came over EVERY weekend. Did I mention they were NEVER the same guy twice? O, so it’s none of my business. Except the several times they’d leave early and forget to lock the front door when they left. Or they’d be going through the fridge when you got up for breakfast. #1, #1’s BF and I NEVER knew who was a burgler and who was a ‘guest’.

But, none of these stories seem bad as the folks you guys hve lived with, (if not for the salacious nature of it all I’d have nothing to post). We all lived together for a long time, and were pretty good friends for all of that time. We’d have family come and visit (we all had family overseas, so the loungeroom would be family central for one or other of us constantly). And no one ever had problems with that. If anything, it was a pleasant thing, cos we all got to know each other’s families as well as each other.

but sadly I’ve lost contact with #1 and #2. Rumour as it #2 is now in Japan, and #1… dunno, but I still talk to her ex-BF, cos he’s a cool guy, even if he’s scared of my dingletwang!

25

I love my roomie! She’s a sweet, kind, wonderful person with a heart of gold, but BOY!! Some days I could KILL her…

  1. I’m allergic to peanuts. SO she makes a cake. With peanuts on it. And gives a slice to me. She says, “Oh, it’s only a FEW peanuts and you’re not THAT allergic…” as my throat starts to swell up… :smack:

  2. I am allergic to cats too. So she lets in the downstairs cat as often as poss. (She DOES shut my door tho’…) (It IS a cute kittie tho’!)

  3. She has this DAMN irritating habit of “baby talking”… It. Drives. Me. NUTS!! AND she has The Most STUPID Baby Name for me which I HATE!! (I cannot BEAR nicknames or diminutive variations of my name!!) :mad:

  4. Everytime the house creaks, it’s spirits trying to contact her. :rolleyes:

  5. She’s a Clean Freak. I am a “Ah, I’ll do that when I have time”-kinda gal. (I freelance, so I’m busy most days)

  6. She likes Whintney Houston. I like Ministry :slight_smile:

  7. She’s the only person who will spend an hour in the cleaning aisle in the supermarket smelling every cleaning product until she finds one that “we like”. (I have a very poor sense of smell - all cleaning products smell like floral cat-wee to me!!)
    BUT…

I love the girl to PIECES!! So much so that she’s dating my best friend and he’s a Male Version of ME!!!

She and I have nothing - NOTHING - in common, (She’s Mrs Corporate, I’m Miss Alternative Rock Chick) neither do they - but it WORKS!! If I could have ANY person in the world for a roomie, it WOULD be her. Coz for all her (very few - and let’s face it, non-severe) random irritations, she’s a DAMN fine person. She’s one of my best pals and DEFINITELY one of the very few people on this planet who I would trust with my life!

And I’ll be very VERY sad to see her leave when she moves out with her BF. :frowning:

…

And I’m SURE I drive her NUTS as well at times too!! :stuck_out_tongue:

26

I used to share a house with D. and A. No problems for a few months until D. met J. Within a few months J. had moved in much to A. and I’s disgust.

Now D. is not the smallest guy around. Actually we call him Tall D. because for the amount he weighs he should stand about 8’ tall. J. could do with losing a fair bit as well.

It was bad enough that they both would laze around the front room in their skivvies, taking up both the sofas. It was bad enough that when they woke in the morning the house was treated to an hour’s worth of coughing and hacking. But the thing that really took the biscuit was when I came home unexpectedly early one day and caught J. coming out the bathroom stark naked. Not a pretty sight I can assure you. So when the landlord decided to rent the house out to some students and made us find another place A. and I decided not to move in with D. and J. again.

Don’t see them very often now but last time I did D. is even taller then before and I just can’t look at J. for very long at all without getting the shudders.

27

My most annoying roommate didn’t pay rent one month and mysteriously moved out two days later while I was at work. I haven’t seen him since, the asshole.

28

Some of you are just bitches.

THESE are roommate stories:

I came home from school once. Roommate had left something on the stove and left the house. The something had burned down to nothing and started filling the house with smoke. I had to crawl to the kitchen to stay under the smoke and everything in the house smelled like burnt smoked meat for weeks. A stomach turning stench on everything. I couldn’t sleep in the house that first night.

Roommate took a hot pot off the stove once and placed it on the linoleum floor, causing a burnt plastic smell, and a big burnt hole in the linoleum.

I came back from vacation once. Roommate had left a hot iron on the carpet and burnt an iron-shaped hole in it. He told me “I didn’t do it,” and he wouldn’t admit to it. Never admitted to burning the hole in the carpet that wasn’t there when I left for vacation and was there when I returned.

He left 6 sodas in the freezer once and left for a day. I came back to find coke-slush throughout the freezer and dripping down into the fridge.

And the TOPPER: He left the house one day after (apparently) taking a dump and wiping with paper towels. I came home to a bathroom covered with overflowed roommate shit-water and a shit-water toilet that I had to remove paper towels from.

And your roommate is a neat freak? Poor you.

In his defense, all I can say is that he was Chinese. Apparently in China, toilets flush wads of paper towels, frozen water doesn’t expand, burnt objects don’t give off smoke, and hot metal objects don’t burn through surfaces.

And, apparently, they take pictures of their babies with the baby’s balls and wang sticking out of the baby clothes.

29

My roommate’s 5-year-old son stole all my frilly underpants and stashed them under his dresser “because they were pretty.”

Scared the hell out of me. I thought a stalker had broken in while we were at work.

30

During my junior year of college, I shared a dorm suite with three other guys. There were two single rooms and one double. I managed to score a single, but my friend Dave had to share the double with John, who was a great guy, but messier than a pig in shit.

After one weekend visiting my girlfriend, I open the door to my room and drop my stuff. As I sit down to check my email, I notice a hairpin sitting by the keyboard. My eyes start scanning the room for anything else out of place. I notice several strands of long brunette hair on my comforter. I wouldn’t have thought anythng of that were my girlfriend not a blonde. OK, so maybe someone’s girl crashed on my bed. No big deal. But then I spot the stain. It’s white. It’s unmistakable. It’s not mine.

Since Dave was the real lady’s man among us, I concluded–correctly as it turns out-- that he shagged some chick in my bed. To be honest, I actually didn’t mind, knowing what it’s like to have to share a room. What bothered me was the fact that I found out about it by almost sitting on his giant cum stain. I told him as much as I handed him my comforter and a bottle of Tide.

Epilogue: The stain never went away, but I just flipped the comforter around. Today, I throw it in the back seat of my car whenever I travel with my dog. She doesn’t seem to mind.

31

Umm… Kalhoun, you do have my sympathy. I can only imagine the way you felt when you found that scene.

But…

Umm…

:smiley:

32

Neither is chainmail. I assume you mean plate mail. Chainmail doesn’t take a lot of space or equipment.

I just lived with an opera singer who didn’t approve of having people of the opposite sex in one’s bedroom with the door open. Weird, but not too bad. I did anyway.

33

I just want to say that I’ve lived in three different housing arrangements with three different sets of roommates. We’ve all got along splendidly and I remain good friends with all of them. I’m honestly puzzled by all the bad roommate stories I hear.

And, what’s with all you guys and your pets? Very, very few landlords around here allow any sort of pet (of course, I live in the student ghetto area so maybe in more adult settings the trends are different).

34

Three of us sharing a house. When we move in, we all decide we are going to take turns buying groceries on a weekly basis. So I buy groceries the first week, and roommate #1 buys groceries the second week. The third week, roommate #2 goes out and buys a week’s worth of food, but decides (after eating all of our food for the first two weeks) that maybe we should all just buy our own food from now on, so all his food is off limits.

Same roommate owned the TV. We’d all be sitting around watching something, then suddenly he would decide it was time for bed, he would get up and unplug the TV and carry it off to his room.

Had a roommate once who, one weekend while I was out of town, had a party and let a couple of partygoers have sex in my bed.

Had another roommate who would cook dinner and then fill the pots and pans with water and let them sit in the sink. For about a week. He couldn’t manage to rinse the dishes out and put them in the freakin’ dishwasher.

35

Yeah…once I realized that a crazed slasher wasn’t casing the joint, I laughed my ass off. Then I realized that five-year-olds find me hot and I slipped into a deep depression.

36

But when you’ve got a few thousand metal rings scattered around in such a confined space (a small freshman dorm)…

Well, I imagine it’s not fun. :stuck_out_tongue:

37

You have all cheered me up so much! I thought I had a hard time, but it seems things are so bad by comparison.

Nevertheless, it irritates me that two of my four housemates:

  • cannot manage to empty the dishwasher. Ever. Instead what they do is take what they need and often stick dirty stuff in with the clean dishes.

  • used to also put dirty dishes in the drying tray. We told them not too. Often. Honestly, I would prefer it if they just left it one the table to mixing the dirty with the clean so no one knows which is which anymore. In the end we threw out the drying tray.

  • do not do any cleaning up at all, in fact. And I’m by no means a tidy person myself. But I draw the line at things that get smelly.

  • smell. Really, I can smell whether they’re in (or have been during the previous two hours or so) the house or not, even if they are in a different room. Take a shower, please oh please.

  • steal things from the common areas. Then they deny ever having seen them. Note: I do not ask “did you steal this or that”. I just describe the item and ask if anyone has seen it. They say they have not, even though I have spotted it in their room with my own eyes (one of them leaves the door open. Probably so ask not to choke on the smell). When items are retrieved (by eventually mysteriously appearing in the cupboard as if it had been there all along) the smell takes weeks to get out.

Mind you, they are okay with my annoying habits which are:

  • harp practising
  • occasional accordion (!) practicing
  • odd music being played on the CD player. A lot.
  • multiple guests, waifs and strays sleeping on the sofa.

So I guess that’s why I put up with it.

38

The only roomate I’ve had was while I was attending a boarding school when I was 16. She came from a strict Christian background, and was away from home for the first time. And boy, did she take advantage of it! She was kind of homely, but had the biggest boobs I’ve ever seen on a kid. Aparantly she was unaware of her boobage until the boys at school started sniffing around. She would sneek out at night to makeout with them, but not have sex. Wherever I went, I would be bombarded with messages and gifts to give to her. Horny teenaged boys would wake us up in the middle of the night, throwing things up to the window to get her to come out. One guy, set his HUGE stereo speakers up outside our window and blasted us with Pink Floyd because she had mentioned she wasn’t allowed to listen to Pink Floyd at home.
Then there was the Jello Bombs. Some asshole mixed jello with water and soaked wads of toilet paper in it. Then threw the wads at our window, where they dried into blobs of pink concrete. Did I mention, this was 150 year old building? Our parents had to pay for the dammage.

39

A very preggers MissTake and E (the Ex) moved in with a workmate of his, J.

We knew J was a unique kinda guy. In a toothless, paranoid, matted beard kind of way. But he said he would stay out of our way. E and I had the main floor of the house, J had the upstairs and a room in the basement for his “get togethers”.

E and J worked a 4 - 1am shift at a local restaurant. E would come home and shower right away to get the kitchen stink off him. J would come home and drink. A lot. He would pass out on our living room floor, reeking of kitchen and booze.

My silverware and dishware would “disappear”. Once a week I would brave his room to reclaim everything that wandered up there. J, of course, would become very upset that I entered his space. Well, gee, we have NO forks, knives, bowls… The bowls were always used as ashtrays, even though I bought the man two HUGE ashtrays. I guess dumping the butts in the trash was too much effort.

We has lived there a month or so when E made the offhand comment that J had not taken a shower since we moved in. A month. Of kitchen stink and booze. For the heck of it I went down into his bathroom and took a peek. No soap. No shampoo. No TP. I purchased some supplies for him, left them on the floor outside his bathroom. They were not touched for two weeks.

Skip ahead 10 months when E and I split up. It was messy. We’re talking all of his belongings thrown into the front yard. Into snow. J was pissed that I tossed his “buddy” out. At that time I was the one paying most of the bills. E wasn’t working, J was always late. The landlord knew the situation, he also considered the place “mine”. J’s revenge was to make porn calls. To the tune of $2600.00 in a week. On my phone bill. I disconnected the phone jack in his room, and had to take the phones with me whenever I left the house. I know- he could’ve bought a phone to use, but that would’ve taken funds away from his 5 bottles of JD/week habit.

I moved out a week later. Managed to get out of all but $600 in phone charges.

40

Hmm… my roommates (when I had them, before I moved out)

[ul]
[li]Refused to do dishes. We had a dishwasher but even when it was empty it was impossible to put them in it. They’d eventually get slimey and smell and only then would they do them (I refused, morning sickness did not go well with them)[/li]
[li]They ate all my healthy food and left me with only hot dogs and ramen. Or they ate everything in the house and left me nothing, with no money to spend on food (because I spent it already on food and they ate it all) then they’d go and buy fast food and sit on the couch eating it in front of me while I starved.[/li]
[li]Druggies and strange people over all the time. Various people, majority of which were street kids and would crash at our place and eat our minimal food and who were addicted to or did a variety of substances including Meth, K, ecstacy, crack, mushrooms, weed and hash. Some of which were done in the house. (I’m amazed the cops never showed up…)[/li]
[li]Not paying they’re share of the bills. Not paying rent on time (the landlord called me ‘the good one’ because my money was in on time or at the very latest a couple days after the first. They never got their full rent in for the month until the 20th or so.)[/ul][/li]
I was kinda dumb, but when I got pregnant and realized… hey there is no way I am going to raise a child in an environment like this, I moved.