This thread invites you to tell an interesting, weird or embarrassing (keep it anonymous?) story about a roommate you had while attending university or college.
I went to Europe on a trip with college classmates in 2007. My assigned roommate-classmate was a very heavy guy. We were in a hostel with a very soft mattress. When he lay down, he caused the whole mattress to cave in - thus causing me to roll on top of him. I told him he could have the whole bed to himself; I was going to sleep on the floor.
I also had another roommate who liked to sew things with a sewing machine in our room, tailoring and fashion was his hobby. Needless to say he was mocked and teased greatly for it.
Another roommate was from Alaska and liked to parade about in shorts and T-shirt in winter to show us cowardly Virginians what he was made of.
(emphasis added) Why “needless?” How long ago was this? Or do we take it for granted that male college students are, as a rule, jerks?
Maybe it wouldn’t be the norm at other schools, but at the college I attended, yes, it was mocked as effeminate and he was even made the subject of our school’s parody student webpage.
Don’t get me wrong; I was/am squarely on his side. But at the culture of the school I went to, it was mocked.
I had a roommate who got engaged to “Abby”. He met Abby’s family and her younger sister “Beth”.
He started dating Beth without telling Abby. So, he could come home with either sister.
Then he got engaged to Beth while still engaged to Abby. Abby was still clueless.
Eventually he broke off the engagement with Abby, letting her know that he was now engaged to her sister.
Sounds like Abby and Beth also communicate really poorly as sisters.
My roommate in the dorms during my freshman year of college was intending to major in engineering mechanics (which, as I understand it, is an obscure and math-heavy field). He was a math prodigy; he also had a learning disability (which he described as dyslexia, though I’m not entirely sure that that’s accurate).
About once a month, he would be doing his homework in our dorm room, and his learning disability would flare up – the numbers would start “moving around,” in his words, and he’d lose his temper. This usually resulted in him throwing his calculator (a rather expensive HP calculator, back in 1983) across the room, shattering it. So, yes, he was buying a new HP calculator every month or so.
Also, he never showered. He said that he had eczema, and that showering made it worse. He did have a certain odor about him.
I had a roommate who sleepwalked and talked in his sleep. A number of times I was awaked by him yelling about something or warning me about some imaginary danger. One semester the two of us moved into a three-person room with another guy who ALSO sleepwalked. One night I awoke to find the two of them standing in the middle of the room, engaged in a heated argument while both were asleep.
Oh! This reminds me…
My sophomore roommate and I were already friends before we became roommates (we were in the same Dungeons & Dragons group), and we are still good friends today. One night, after we’d turned out the lights, it was taking me a while to fall asleep; I could hear him snoring in the lower bunk, below me. A few minutes later, he suddenly called out, “Plunder! Plunder!”, while he was dreaming.
The next morning, I asked him if he remembered dreaming about plundering something – alas, he did not, but he laughed when I told him why I had asked. Now, almost forty years later, whenever he and I get together, the topic of “Plunder!” will always come up.
I had a roommate one year in college who in retrospect was very emotionally abusive towards his girlfriend. He would do things like threaten to break up with her if she didn’t do what he wanted, like doing his laundry for him, and she would eventually give in and do it because she was afraid of being alone. It was not a healthy relationship.
On the laundry thing, he never learned how to do laundry himself, and absolutely refused to learn. If he didn’t have an opportunity to go home and have his mom do it, he would try to get other people to do it for him (like his girlfriend as mentioned above).
On a different note, he was a political science major and had ambitions of running for office some day. And he was also deeply conservative – Jessie Helms was his hero. Oh, and a member of a rather fundamentalist church. He had this idea that instead of focusing on things like the economy the government should work on what he considered “social problems” – like gay people. Because that would make God happy, and God will take care of the economy. I really hope he outgrew those kinds of ideas by the time he graduated (he was a freshman at the time).
So not really “needless to say” at all. In case I’m not being clear, I am objecting to that phrase, which makes the mocking and teasing sound like perfectly normal behavior.
My then-BF had a room-mate, a young student type, who had many, um, interesting ideas. One of them was that TV was actually made by little people living inside the set. He was completely serious about it and became very upset when people laughed at him.
Eventually the landlord (who lived in) contacted his parents and the flatmate ended up getting sectioned (taken to a psychiatric hospital).
I was in need of a place to live very quickly, so I rented a room from a guy I didn’t know (newspaper ad). He told he that he and his wife were separated, I found out that I knew his wife, because she was a waitress at a bar I went to. He rented another room to a woman neither of us knew. The woman was … odd. The landlord got into a heated argument with the woman and he turned off all of the power to the house, which caused me problems, too. She called the cops, and they told him he couldn’t do that. So he turned the lights back on till the cops left, then off again. I moved out very soon afterwards.
His estranged wife came back to live with him and they got into a roaring argument which wound up with him taking hold of the big screen tv (back in the day when big screen tvs came in large boxes), and pulled it onto the floor, smashing it.
When I was in college I rented a house off-campus with another young woman, and she was the strangest roommate I ever had.
She never shopped for her own groceries, but had her mom bring things by and leave them on the counter, then she would put them away. She always got frozen waffles - and put them in the fridge. I tried to tell her they needed to be kept frozen until used, but she said it took too long to toast them that way. She used to stand in the kitchen with a buttered waffle in each hand and eat them, saying to me that I should try them, they were the BEST blueberry waffles ever. They were NOT blueberry - it was mold.
She also used to take cookies or little debbie treats and stuff them between the couch cushions “to save for later” and then forget about them. I was continually pulling the cushions off the couch to clean the food out. One day she had a man over for a blind date she answered in the paper. Told him she had to get ready and went to her bedroom, leaving me to entertain him. She took so long I went to see what was going on and she said “I don’t like him - he looks funny - make him go away.” I went back out in the other room, and there he was pulling food out from between the couch cushions and he said to me “Do you know there’s food in your couch?” Yep. Happens allllll the time, I told him. Then he said “She’s not coming out, is she?” I shook my head, and asked if he wanted to go for a walk with me instead. We had a lovely time, got some ice cream and went along the shore to watch ships (we were in Duluth). Weird roomie.
I believed that at one point. In my defense, I was about two years old at the time.
I roomed with a woman who was sleeping with a North Korean guy. Her understanding was he was studying architecture, was born in a forest, and shared her vegan lifestyle. Turned out he was sponging off her and his parents, spent his days eating burgers and was from the States. She, and his parents were pissed when the truth somehow came out.
A guy in our dorm did not shower or go to class and spent all his time hacking and playing Sun Ra on his synth. He would leave his room once a week to buy a few dozen Big Macs, most to freeze for later. Although crazy, he was a brilliant programmer and either ended up a bajillionaire or sleeping under a bridge - both about as likely.
In Aus, when families received the ‘personal effects’ of soldiers killed in action in WWI, the most common thing they got was the soldiers sewing kit. Soldiers not carrying around much in the way of personal effects. Dunno about the USA, but in the UK and Aus, it’s still the case that real soldiers do their own sewing: there not being opportunity on the battlefield to send out to have buttons replaced.
So was there ever a wedding? That must have been a very strained event.
My roommate my freshman year of college was a pathological liar. Well, maybe that’s a little harsh, but he told stories that were completely unbelievable, but I think he actually expected people to believe them. Among the things he claimed to have done:
- Flew helicopters for some air rescue group in the Missouri Ozarks
- Flew commercial airliners for TWA
- Did scuba work on oil rigs off the coast of Libya
Most of us on our floor in the dorm would just roll our eyes whenever he started in on another whopper. The thing is, he was a pretty decent guy otherwise, but it just seemed sad and pathetic that he felt like he had to tell these stories.
ISTR being issued a sewing kit in basic training for the US Navy.