Weird, Interesting or Embarrassing Roommate Stories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

This guy also did seem about two years old sometimes, and then was also extremely intelligent about some other things - amazing memory for facts. And a really sweet dude too.

Actually he did eat a lot of my food (I was the kind of GF who practically lived there, but it as the kind of household where that was acceptable) but it was the rare circumstance where I think he genuinely didn’t understand that you couldn’t eat everything in the fridge like when you live at your Mum’s. He had no concept of money in the slightest.

He was like a tiny puppy sent out into the real world too soon - and this was an ultra-cheap flatshare in a rundown house in one of the dodgiest areas of Hackney in the early 1990s, so that’s pretty much throwing him into a dog fighting pit; he got very lucky with his flatmates. I hope he’s doing well now.

22

Funny, until you mentioned this roommate I didn’t think to include stories about my roommate of nearly 3 years when I was an undergrad (late 80’s, early 90’s, UW-Madison, just like @kenobi_65 ). He too was a pretty pathological liar, and kept certain stories alive for years. Frankly, it kind of ruined our relationship when he admitted these stories were false, years later. But he is bright and an interesting guy. One of the most interesting things was, he was almost 10 years older than me, and pretty much hung out exclusively with people my age. He hid his own age. And his origins. Etc.

23

Oh, the memories. One of the more benign ones: long ago in Seattle, in a three-man rental house – which was very crappy except it had W/D – my one roommate bemused me and the other guy by not sorting his laundry, and by mocking us for sorting our own. He said it wasn’t necessary, what with modern fabrics and all. That’s why all his underwear was gray.

I love both those guys still, but overall, having roommates is the worst. There have been some nightmares. If I’m ever broke and on the housing market again, I will tolerate the worst neighborhood imaginable just to have a studio apartment.

24

I had a couple of stoner roommates. Mostly they were into weed, but at one point they bought a little sticky black blob of opium resin. They smoked about half of it, before deciding someone had sold them a fruit roll-up.

They smoked the rest of it anyway.

25

When I was in the Navy at one of many training commands, I had a roomie who asked me to scratch her back. Not for a specific itch - she just liked having her back scratched. After a couple of minutes, I was done. ick.

Lucky for me, a few nights later, I was gone all night with a classmate. We literally drove all over San Francisco, saw a little bit of The Towering Inferno being filmed, then watched the sun rise near the Golden Gate Bridge before heading back to the base. My roomie was absolutely scandalized and she hardly spoke to me afterwards. And thankfully, it was just a 6 week course.

I was lucky overall. Most of my Navy roomies were fairly normal.

26

During college one year, I shared a flat with someone I had known from work. She wasn’t going to college but sharing with me put her much closer to her new downtown job and 1st Avenue. (Truth, I thought Prince was a talented local musician, but I didn’t recognize his star power for another year or so.) The new roomie was the dirtiest person I’d ever lived with.

We had cockroaches, but when she discovered they didn’t bite, she stopped caring. She never washed dishes unless she needed them and then she would only wash what she needed and then toss it back into the cold, dirty water in the washtub. Once, I didn’t do dishes for two weeks, until mold grew on the floating food in the dirty water. She honestly didn’t notice. She carved a pumpkin for Halloween and then left it on the kitchen table to rot. I threw it out when I saw mold growing out the eyes. She never washed her nightshirt. I watched it go from white to dark gray and she didn’t notice. Her room was a nightmare of Kleenex, dirty makeup blending pads and cotton balls, with hairspray on the walls and window. But she always looked like a million bucks when she walked out the door. It blew me away.

I wish her well wherever she is now and I do hope that she learned to pick up a cleaning habit. She was nice. Gross, perhaps, but nice.

27

When I got accepted into grad school, I didn’t put too much effort into my apartment search, being young and dumb and all that, and signed a lease on pretty much the first place I looked at.

There was another guy already living in one of the other rooms, a middle-aged man who seemed superficially normal at first glance, but I soon learned he had a temper and something about him was just … off, like he was going to stab me if I ever looked at him the wrong way.

Since my apartment was only about a 50 minute drive from my parents, I would occasionally visit them on the weekend. Well, one Sunday night when I came back from my parents’ place, I arrived to see a bathroom door with a massive splintered hole in the bottom.

Turned out my roommate had somehow locked himself in the bathroom while taking a shower, and with me not being there to free him, he had to violently kick his way out of the door.

I mean, I get it, if I was trapped in the bathroom alone in the apartment I would probably do the same thing, but that scene still gives me the heebie-jeebies. Needless to say, I didn’t renew my lease when it was up, I might not be here to tell this story otherwise.

28

I have a very sad roommate story. That wasn’t included in the title, so I’ll spoiler it.

Only roommate I had was for one semester in Los Angeles. A nice kid from a smallish town in the Southeast. Fish out of water in LA, but really tried to make the best of it.

Found out that he had been the victim of sex abuse. Rape, specifically. Kinda messed him up, and he had some issues. That, the culture shock of being in LA, some kind of thing while being a pledge in a fraternity, and probably having to put up with me and my horrible girlfriend every other weekend crushed his spirit. I moved out after the fall semester and moved to the campus, he stayed in the apartment miles away, but I never really saw him again, and heard he bailed out and moved back to his hometown. He was a decent kid and I felt bad for what happened and I always hoped he did okay.

29

y.
On the roommate and Abby and Beth story (for those that remember). Beth and the roommate were keeping their romance and engagement a secret from Abby. And they did get married. I’ve always wondered how family get-togethers were after the marriage.

30

I was the bad roommate.

My buddy and I pulled the transfer case off of my 76 Chevy truck. Took it to the dorm room that I and another guy shared with the intent of rebuilding it (had done it before, there are 157 lose needle bearings in the thing, I remember the number well).

Anyway, we get it to the dorm room and the fire alarm rings. We had to split.

Came back to a few quarts of 90w gear oil that had leaked out all over the floor. Bit of a stinky mess.

Gawd that was stupid. we should have just put it in the bed of the truck and re-built it there.

31

How about fresh out of college? I shared an apartment with a childhood friend (Jeff). His roommate from college (Karl) stayed with us for a month until he got his own place. Karl had a very large personality. Every day he came in from work and would say “Let’s watch Raising Arizona, or I’ll kill you.” So I’d shrug and watch Raising Arizona. We watched it 20 days in a row before he moved on to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Which I had to watch or he would kill me.

32

I had one roommate who was quite a manipulator. I can give two examples

1.)

Him: My family’s coming to visit this weekend.
Me: Yeah?
Him: The place is a mess.
Me: And?
Him: Well. I thought we had an agreement – you would clean the downstairs and I’d clean the upstairs (this was a kind-of two-level townhouse)
Me: We’ve never had an agreement like that. And you’ve never cleaned the upstairs.

2.)
He wouldn’t clean his dishes after he cooked and ate, and I wasn’t about to wash his dishes for him. When the pile of dirty dishes got too high, he’d invite someone over for dinner.
“I’ll cook, if you’ll clean the dishes,” he’d offer. the mark would accept, not realizing that he was agreeing to wash a week’s (or more’s) worth of dishes.

33

When I was in college, I lived in a balcony-style dormitory. This meant three things:

  1. Your exterior door opens to an outside balcony that leads to all the other rooms on your floor, and to the stairs and laundry rooms.
  2. You live in a “suite”: two rooms - each of which houses two people - that share a common shower and toilet with the room next door in a “Jack and Jill” style.
  3. The bottom floor has card-locked doors that lead to the stairs, so you need a key card to access the second and subsequent floors… but the ground floor rooms opened out to the courtyard.

During the week, the routine was pretty much the same for me: my alarm clock would wake me up, I’d get up and shower, get dressed, dry my hair, and either go for breakfast or go to class, depending on which was more imminent. My roommate, Henry, would usually sleep through most of this, and I would do my best not to disturb him unnecessarily.

He and I would sometimes have our girlfriends over for the night, although not usually at the same time, as both girlfriends lived off-campus and were thus not always around. One weekend, when my girlfriend Becky was spending the night, and we were crammed into the little twin bed the university provided for balcony dorms, Chris, one of the guys from next door came through the bathroom into our room and got into bed with us!

He was obviously very drunk; it wasn’t but 30 seconds or so and he was passed out - completely dead to the world. This made the already cramped sleeping arrangements even worse, so Becky and I decided to pass through the bathroom into his room and sleep in his bed instead!

This seemed like it was going to work out all right until my alarm clock went off the following morning. Without me there to shut it off, it just kept blaring, and woke Henry up - which he was not accustomed to. He shuffled over to turn off the alarm (or at least wake me up to do it), cursing all the while.

Then Chris woke up.

“Henry, what are you doing in my room?!?”

Becky and I had a good laugh when Chris staggered back through the bathroom, terribly hungover, to find we had commandeered his bed since he had taken ours.

34

My roommates were pretty normal really.

But I was a RA in college, and there were some interesting pairs of roommates in my dorm, that’s for sure.

My favorite had to be the two girls who were like oil and water; one was an absolutely unyielding neat/Jesus freak, and her roommate was not a neat freak and a tad promiscuous as a first-semester freshman. (FWIW, the roommate was actually a fun cool person). Anyway, the neat/Jesus freak girl got agitated about something, and when her roommate was out, took masking tape and a measuring tape and measured out the halfway point in the main room and in the bathroom, and put a tape line dividing her half from her roommate’s half, for… reasons. Apparently whatever minor slobbery or crap encroachment drove the neat/Jesus freak girl insane, so she resorted to this.

I probably didn’t help matters when I burst out laughing in her face when I saw what she’d done.

The other roommate story that stuck in my head was when a friend of mine “J” ended up with a new roommate “P”, who I also befriended (ended up being a groomsman at my wedding in fact!) . The guy across the hall decided to play a prank on them, and took a raw chicken wing and perched it up under their sink on the u-trap. Over the course of the next week, both P and J came to me very concerned about the other, thinking they’d gone crazy and stopped bathing or wiping their ass or whatever, because of the smell. I had been tipped off to the prank, so I just solemnly nodded and suggested they discuss their concerns with their roommate, and that if it kept up, we could discuss moving into another room later in the semester. I figured that someone would spill the beans long before that, and after about 9 days, someone felt pity on them in their stench-cave and did. We still laugh about that one to this day, nearly 30 years later.

35

I rented a room in a house that was leased by a truck driver and his wife. When I answered the rental advertisement, the woman asked if I was a cop and she said I legally had to tell her if I was. Later it turned out that she rolled joints for her friend who was a quadriplegic drug dealer. She asked where I was from (in Canada) and I told her Saskatchewan; she replied by asking if Saskatchewan is in Alberta (no, they’re both provinces) and she excused herself by saying she fried her brain in high school.

She had absolutely no filter when she talked, so she’d casually talk about her asshole surgery or how her husband had screwed all of her friends. Her husband was relatively normal, although he did once bring home half of a moose that was lying dead on the side of the highway.

36

That’s pretty impressive.

37

I once worked with a guy like that. He claimed that when he was in the Navy, his ship was sunk and he rode into shore on the back of a whale.

38

I knew a guy like that in high school. I’m sure he had more stories, but the one I remember is when he claimed he hacked into the school’s computer and changed his grade. Or tried to. I don’t remember the details. But his story made no sense to anyone who’s actually used a computer. Namely, he claimed the computer kicked him off because it thought he was a virus. He supposedly knew this because he typed “why?” and the computer responded “virus detected.”

This was back when computers weren’t yet completely ubiquitous, so I kind of suspect he actually didn’t have much experience with computers and was basing his story off of what he’d seen in movies.

39

I knew someone in high school who hacked into the Pentagon’s war computers and was on home arrest so could only go from home to school on a very specific route because of some sort of implanted tracking device (contained in what looked like a nasty boil on his neck). This was back in the early 70’s.

40

I’m pretty certain that bringing home half a roadkill moose results in immediate loss of your normal status.