Having roommates can be tough—but it isn't supposed to be THIS tough. These Redditors revealed the worst roommates they ever lived with, and they've got some real doozies...
1. Room Service
For a full year, my college roommate secretly slept with my boyfriend while I was at class. I routinely took more than a full course load and was in math and science classes or study groups every morning. One day, I walked in to see a horrifying sight. They were just fully in the act after I came back early from a cancelled class.
I moved out. I was more angry at her than heartbroken. I also lost most of my friends through the breakup, and they stuck together for a good while. Fast forward five years later. Those two throw a crazy expensive engagement party at the guy's parents' beach house, which was attended by some still-mutual friends who told me everything.
At the party, she caught him sleeping with one of the waitresses from the catering company in a bathroom. They still got married. I feel a little bad for her despite the karma balance. She feels like she can't do better than being with a cheater.
2. Be My Guest
My roommate keeps the place extremely messy and never helps with any of the household chores. So, I pretended to be a hot girl on Tinder and matched with him, telling him I was coming over in the hopes that this would get him to clean up the apartment. My plan failed spectacularly. He did not clean up, and also sent me a picture of his junk that I didn’t need to see…
3. When The Cat’s Away, The Roommates Will Play
I've sat on this story for years, but I think it’s finally time to tell it. Just pure jerkery and the end of life-long friendship. A good friend of mine, Jay, was moving to New York City with his girlfriend and another friend of theirs from college named Lisa. I had been in New York City for a few years already, in a lousy but manageable apartment.
I traveled a lot for work and I was fine with my situation. Once they realized the rent costs out here, Jay and his girlfriend started pushing me to join them in getting a nicer two-bedroom apartment, saying that we would split the costs three ways. Since they arrived, Lisa pretty much disappeared, having her own friends, who she spent most of her time with.
She would occasionally stop by on the weekends and crash on the couch, but that was about it. Every bone in my body was saying that this was a bad idea, but I decided to give it a go. I lived to regret it BIG TIME. Upon moving in, I really don't see them much. I'm on the road nearly every week for work, so we hardly interact.
I would basically get back home late every Friday night, do my expense reports for work, check in on the bills for the apartment, and then leave town again Sunday afternoon. Jay asks that I let him know in advance any time there is a rare week when I'm not traveling, so he knows whether or not he and his girlfriend could be home alone.
I didn't think much of it and happily gave him a heads up when I knew I was going to be around. For the first few months, the bills were growing and I was paying a little more than I expected, but overall, things were fine. Until one weekend, it all changed. The girlfriend gives me a note with my share of the bills. I can't believe my eyes.
I see a $500 phone and TV bill with my name on it. Note that my two roommates, who live there all the time and don’t travel, claimed only a combined $80 of the bill as their own responsibility. The bill included a bunch of calls from the phone landline to California and a ton of On-Demand movie purchases. I knew I hadn’t been behind any of these purchases.
I confronted the others. Me: “These aren't my purchases, there is no way I'm paying for them”. The girlfriend: “This is simple math. They aren't mine, they aren't Jay’s, so they have to be yours”. Me, brandishing a folder with all my travel receipts that I keep in a file until I get my reimbursement: “I was in Boston and Baltimore for the periods that all of these bills are for".
As in, there is literally no physical way I could have made those calls. Girlfriend: “I don't care what your papers say, it wasn't me and it wasn't Jay”. This loop continues for about an hour or so, at which point I politely ask her to leave my room. Red in the face, she vows that I'm paying my share. Jay finally turns up late at night. All hope was crushed at that point.
Understandably, he takes his girlfriend’s side and is trying to appeal to me rationally to own up to my side of the deal. I'm showing him dozens of receipts placing me hundreds of miles away and the loop starts all over again; that it wasn't Jay or the girlfriend, so it had to be me. I lock my door, leave, and meet up with my boss for dinner.
Again, as I travel so much, we try to catch up over dinner and a drink when I'm back in town. I explain the situation and he thinks something else must be going on. He asks if I'm on the lease. This is when I begin to get a genius idea. I mention that I'm not, as it’s just Jay and the girlfriend who had signed their names to it.
He advises me to keep all my receipts showing where I was in case they try to go after me in small claims court. But also, as I'm not on the lease, he suggests that I should really consider moving out. He's telling me the situation is only going to get worse from here. He tells me to take a few days this week and see what I can find, as normally I'd be on my way to Boston Sunday night.
He also tells me to change the lock on my room. That Sunday morning, I change my door handle from the generic indoor lock to a keyed lock. The tensions in our apartment at this point are still thick between us, as the bill issue is still not resolved. I don't talk to Jay or the girlfriend for the rest of the day, as they are out and about.
Sunday night, I'm in my room, door locked in bed trying to figure out what the heck I'm going to do. Then the fun begins. Please note this extremely important detail of the story: They don't know I'm still home, as I'd normally be on the train to Boston by 5:00 pm. 8:00 pm rolls by and I suddenly hear my doorknob jiggle.
I then hear the girlfriend say, "That little jerk changed the lock, YOU JERK!!! YOU HUGE JERK!!!" She starts screaming hysterically at the top of her lungs. I'm trying to figure out A) Why is she so angry?, and B) Why is she trying to open my door in the first place? Now I hear Jay trying to open the door. The next words out of his mouth shocked me.
He calmly says to the girlfriend that they can just jimmy open the door with a butter knife. That is when I open the door and demand to know what the heck they are doing. Their faces both immediately go as pale as a ghost. I ask again, "What the heck are you doing trying to open my locked door?" They reply asking why I changed the lock.
I reply, "It doesn't matter, I'm paying rent, it's my room". They start with the mind games again, saying: "That is really messed up that you would change the locks, don’t you trust us?" They get really angry and are shouting all sorts of stuff at me for the next few minutes. The next moment changed everything. The lock to the main door of the apartment opens.
In walks their friend Lisa with a suitcase…and looking like she's also seen a ghost as soon as she spots me. It all comes together for me at that moment. Lisa has obviously been staying in my room when I'm traveling, and all the mysterious bills they were asking me to pay were hers. I was absolutely livid. She had been staying in my room with all my belongings without my knowledge.
I felt betrayed. When I voiced these complaints, the girlfriend just shrugged and uttered something about me not using the room that much anyway. I didn't say another word. I just locked the door, packed up my clothes and belongings, and walked out the door. I made a few calls and one of my cousins was more than accommodating until I was able to find a permanent new spot.
I left that night and never spoke to them again. Over the next week or so, Jay left a ton of voicemails for me, starting off with asking when I was coming back, then getting to when am I dropping off my share of the rent and bill payments. I never responded to any of these messages. I did see them pop up on my Facebook recently as suggested friends.
Turns out they are married now and living in New England somewhere. Screw the both of them!
4. Not Seeing The Connection
After weeks of struggling to get the internet functioning in our apartment when I needed it for work, I woke up this morning to a bizarre sight. It was a handwritten note from my roommate, who apparently isn’t aware that WiFi is just radio signals that are constantly around you in the air whether or not you turn your computer’s receiver on.
“Hey, I’ve been shutting off our WiFi because it turns out it’s really bad for your health! Sorry about the inconvenience. I was trying to only do it after you fell asleep. There’s info on the web about how it can cause cancer, infertility, headaches, and disruption of your cell repair while you sleep. If you’re interested, you can look it up for more information”.
I can’t look it up for more information, because somebody cut off my internet connection!
5. This One Doesn’t Sound Too Good…
I’m of Mexican descent, and as such I enjoy listening to a lot of Spanish-language music around the house. The other day, completely out of nowhere, I received a text message from my new roommate. When I read it, my blood ran cold with fury. “Hey dude, as your roommate, let me give you some advice: you should start listening to more English and American music if you want to fit in".
He then continued: "Leave your Mexican reggae garbage behind and embrace your new culture”. Aside from a number of other questions, I am baffled by what made him think this was an appropriate or good idea to send me…
6. Getting Down And Dirty, In The Worst Way Possible
A family member of mine has cancer, no immune system, and is largely bed-ridden. We sanitized her whole house a few days ago, to make sure that nothing could possibly get her newly sick or cause any complications for her condition. We came back to pick her up this morning and found a huge, disgusting mess in the kitchen.
Used pots and pans, cutlery, and garbage left all over the room, as if our intense cleanup had never even taken place. I hunted down her roommate and told her to move the heck out, immediately. I wasn’t polite about it, either.
7. Smoke And Mirrors
One of my housemates caught my bad roommate smoking in the house. When confronted about this behavior, this bad roommate decided to lie and claim I told him it was okay. Obviously, I called him out for lying when I heard about this. I can't believe his reply. I saved the text exchange to illustrate just how ridiculous this situation truly was.
The exchange went like this. Me: “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell people I said it was okay to smoke in the house when I never said that”. Him: “You said it in the group message a long time ago. I asked if cigs inside was cool and you said no, but only in your room”. Me: “Find the text and I’ll take it back”. Him: “I can’t because I delete my messages every so often to conserve storage”.
Me: “Darn, that sucks. Don’t smoke in the house”. And that was the end of that!
8. The Wicked Witch Of The Room Next Door
Last year, I had three roommates. They were two of my guy friends, and the wife of one of them, who was a complete witch from the beginning right through till the end. She really never bothered me directly. She kept to herself in her room for the most part, but I couldn't stand the fact that she was married to my best friend, to be honest.
They have been together for three years now, and have been officially married for a year’s worth of that time. Throughout their relationship, she has done nothing but give him trouble for absolutely nothing. My best friend would always come back to the apartment, and immediately get summoned into their room and wouldn't come out for about an hour.
Do you know what happened during that hour? It wasn't fun times, if that’s what you were thinking. No, far from it. It's an hour-long whining session, going exclusively from her to him. She just comes up with excuses to make him feel like complete garbage. Oh, and she hated my girlfriend because she knew my girlfriend was way better looking and more fun to hang around with.
For some reason, she gave him grief for that, too. One day, he was caught viewing a racy video on his cell phone. She went absolutely crazy over this. She beat the living daylights out of him and threatened to get a divorce. I wish they had gone through with it. Instead, they decided to stay together so she can remind him how he "broke her heart and ruined their trust" every day for the rest of his life.
Now they have their own place, which is at least good for me. It's not good for him. He's working two jobs and going to school full time to get a master's degree to pay for their expenses, while she sits on her butt watching the latest Twilight movies, which she forces him to watch with her from time to time. She single-handedly ruined my best friend's life.
9. Toying With Their Emotions
I once lived in a house with six other friends. We had cheap rent and good roommates. We had parties every weekend with more than 50 people in attendance. Life was good. There was just one problem. It started because a buddy of ours who lived in the house when we first moved in was unfortunately very anti-gay, and it was getting worse.
His parents said that they would disown him if he was gay, so he basically developed this irational fear of anything to do with gay people. In response to this, one of the guys in the house who knew him best bought a pink suction cup glow in the dark "toy", just to cause mischief for this buddy. The idea was to stick the toy to the front of his truck.
That way, he would either have to touch it to get it off, or leave it on when driving around town. At which point, in either scenario, we would all collectively laugh at him. We thought it was funny, but it never happened in the end, because he moved out a couple of days after the thing was bought. So, ultimately, the rest of us just had it around the house and would use it to mess with each other and play pranks.
Fall asleep on the couch? You get a picture taken with it in your mouth. Don’t worry, we sanitized it regularly. We stuck it to the wall and hung Christmas decorations on it. We hid it in the cupboards, placing it just right so that if you opened the cupboard door it would fall out at you. We all got pretty good at throwing it at a wall and getting it to stick.
Some kids had Elf On A Shelf. We had Pink Dink In The Sink. We had rotating roommates, as some people started moving out and starting their lives after college. Until, finally, I was the last one still living there and it was finally time for me to move out, leaving the house for the next group of tenants to move in. I had just the idea.
I decided to leave the toy in the shower on the day I moved out, with a note. The note said: “This is Pink Dink. He may be small, but he can bring so much joy to the world if you use him properly”. The landlord wouldn't answer any of my text messages anymore after that. I assume he was completely embarrassed by what the new tenants had found when they moved in.
Anyway, turns out it was me. I was the bad roommate.
10. Burning It All Down
One night, I noticed a burnt smell coming from the kitchen. I rant over to find that my roommate had been done cooking their food, and then just left the burnt pan on the still-running burner, to keep cooking with nothing in it. The pan was completely destroyed. It was too funny and insane a story not to share with the entire internet world.
11. Not Who You Thought He Was
About six years ago, I met a friend of my girlfriend's (at the time) who needed a place to stay for a while. He seemed legit, so I let him temporarily move in with me. After a couple of months, I learned that he never finished high school, and during the short few months we were living together, he managed to get fired from four different retail jobs for swiping company products on the job.
About four months into the lease, he just ups and disappears one day. He didn't have a cell phone, he never called, never left a note, nothing. Then, two weeks later, as I'm reading the newspaper, under the police activity section, I see his name. It was almost like it was highlighted. The kid got thrown behind bars for hurting his seven year old step-sister. He still owes me three months rent, too.
12. Man’s Best Friend Meets Man’s Worst Enemy
Today, I walked into my house to find my dog’s lifeless body. My dog is diabetic. He is also blind. But he was in good hands under my care, since I followed all of the doctor’s orders very precisely in order to help him with those issues. I gave him his insulin every morning when I got home from work, and before I left for work for his meals.
Today, despite knowing about all of this, my roommate decided to leave his door open with a basket blocking his door. Said roommate also left candy on his floor, as well as a bag of twizzlers. My diabetic dog ate all of it. My roommate sends me a Snapchat video of what happened and I politely asked him if he can give Randy (my dog) his insulin.
This seemed like a pretty simple and natural request, because… ya know…he just ate a ton of candy thanks to you!!! I also asked him if he could keep an eye on him for the next few hours, and he said yeah. I'm so, so angry at the outcome. Turns out he forgot to check on my dog even one single time within the two hours he was home between when he sent me the Snapchat video and when he had to leave for work.
Six hours later, I get home to my dog, who is lying motionless on the kitchen floor in a pool of his own pee, drool, and vomit everywhere. My roommate apparently walked past him before leaving for work, and assumed he was just sleeping. Like, what???? I live in a trailer, to preface this, and he's about 30 feet from the kitchen in his room. It doesn't end there.
When I gave him the news, he just casually went: “Oh, my bad”. He literally didn’t even act like it was a big deal at all or like he was sorry for what he did. The closest he came to showing remorse was casually stating “That sucks that I didn’t get home sooner so he didn't get into the candy”. Later on, he said: “So is it my turn to clean the house? And when do you want the $400 for this month’s rent"?
Completely changing the subject and acting like this whole thing was no big deal. I am in total shock. Today, I lost my dog of 11 years and my best friend. And it all sucks knowing he went out that way instead of in a peaceful manner. I had a terrible day at work and was ready for my cuddles with my dog since he really loved cuddling with me when I would sleep. I'll miss those dearly.
13. A Bag Of Tricks
I had a roommate who constantly chewed nicotine and filled up a six liter jug with chaw spit. Aaaand he left this disgusting, garbage-filled bottle lying around the living room. All day, every day. He refused to throw it out, or clean it up, and he would actively encourage guests to smell it whenever they came over. As if anyone in their right mind would enjoy that.
Yeah, I didn't leave my room too much while living with him…
14. Let’s Have Another Cup Of Coffee
Today, my roommate threw out an entire fresh brew of coffee that I had made, simply because she doesn’t like pumpkin. Call me THAT basic girl, but I love pumpkin things. One of those things is pumpkin coffee. Now, my roommate, Cheryl, on top of drinking all the regular coffee that she doesn’t even pay for, hates pumpkin coffee.
The other day, I just wanted some of my coffee. Keep in mind also that I own the coffee maker and all the bags of beans because Cheryl can’t buy anything for herself. So I brewed a pot and poured myself a cup before sitting on the couch to relax. Cheryl comes upstairs and sees the fresh brewed coffee, still hot and everything. I watched her do this next part with my own eyes.
She smells it, finds out that it’s pumpkin, walks over to the sink, and dumps out my whole fresh brew of coffee. I immediately jump up and ask just what the heck she thinks that she is doing. She looks at me and then the pot and then tells me that she thought it was old. I call her nonsense out and tell her it was still piping hot and fresh brewed.
She says “Well, I don’t like pumpkin coffee anyway”. She puts the pot back and starts reaching for a different bag to brew a type of coffee that she actually likes. And I immediately say “Nope, not happening”. I unplugged the coffee maker, took it into my room, and then locked the door behind me. She got extremely angry, followed me to my room, and started whining and demanding coffee.
I said that she lost her coffee privileges for being an entitled jerk. She tried to pull the “You can’t just take the coffee maker into your room!” card and I said “Yes I can, because I own it”. She stormed off to her room after that and we have not spoken again since. I’m so angry, I really wanted that pumpkin coffee. Seriously, the audacity of this woman!
15. Early To Bed, Early To Rise
I had a roommate in college who used to simulate intimate acts with his mattress each and every night, without exception, for the entire duration of the time that we spent living together. It was extremely loud and impossible to ignore or not notice. The worst part was that our beds were bunked. Which of us do you think had the bottom bunk?
16. Food Fight
My roommate justified eating my steaks by pointing out that he thought I wasn’t going to eat the food anytime soon. Plus, I got yelled at for touching my own food. My house has a detached garage, which has a chest freezer, that I bought. The garage for us is just for storage space since the garage doorways aren’t big enough for our vehicles.
Anyways, last year I bought freezer beef from the butcher shop, and of course stuffed it away in my chest freezer. My roommate also happens to use the chest freezer, and he tends to stuff his frozen foods into it. Space tends to get limited, but we’ve never really had an issue. Until this incident happened, that is. My steaks were in low supply, and I think I was down to just two of them.
I planned on having some for supper, so I decided to head home from the gym to start thawing the steaks. That didn’t exactly get to happen, because they were already on the counter thawing. I verified they were mine by checking the name on the seal, and yep, they belonged to me. I didn’t give it much thought at that point.
After all, I assumed my roommate was just being nice to me and getting them ready for me, but I can’t eat two ribeye steaks by myself. So, I tossed one in the fridge freezer. My roommate hears the commotion, and comes down the stairs. He sees that I’m looking over the steak, and just sharply asks me “What are you doing!?”
I look up and thank him for setting steaks out for me. He gives me a look like I had kicked his dog, and he replies with: “This isn’t a charity! I have a dinner guest coming over!” I was puzzled and asked why he’s eating my food, and then he says: “Because you weren’t going to!” I defended myself by mentioning that I ate through nearly 14 packages of steak from an entire cow in the span of one year, so I was definitely eating them.
That didn’t sway him, and so I decided I’d ignore him and I started to cut open the seal. He screams at me: “I hope you washed your hands before touching food that I’m going to eat!” I reply with: “Did ya buy it?” He goes: “Does that matter??” I gave a sinister grin, and said “Yeah, but just a little bit, though”. Anyways, he had to explain to his dinner guest why he had to grill his own burgers for them after having promised them a steak dinner.
It was pretty funny to listen to, to be honest. Overhearing their conversation, I learned that me repossessing my own food makes me a “tremendous jerk”.
17. Little By Little, And Bit By Bit
I once had a roommate who did the following. When the four of us won a "decorate your door for Christmas" prize, she demanded that the three of us hand her our cash prizes because "her work had caused our apartment to win". This was just the tip of the iceberg, though. She would never pay for groceries, but would then invite her friends over so that she could cook enormous meals for them using the stuff that everyone else had purchased.
She once drank an entire bottle of straight stuff in one sitting, vomited all over the couch, and then left for a week's vacation the next day, with all of the furniture still reeking of her mess. She also believed in some sort of backwards karma system where if she did something good for a stranger, that would allow her to take something from one of us.
For example, if she helped an associate move a heavy piece of furniture, that meant that she should be able to get away with not buying any groceries for a full month because "she earned it by helping her friend with moving furniture". She once agreed to give a mutual friend some of my extra clothing because she was headed to the building where that friend worked. What she really did was ridiculous.
She then gave that clothing to a stranger on the way instead. She would frequently borrow money and then never pay it back. She would turn the channel on the TV while other people were in the middle of watching stuff. Things escalated to the point where, by the end of the year, she could do something as minor as eat one of my bananas, and I'd be all, "SCREW YOU, WITCH!!!!" because of all that resentment.
She had good sides to her personality, too, but those parts were often overshadowed by the endless examples of her selfish short-sightedness and lack of consideration for anyone but herself.
18. Do You Know The Muffin Man?
Three short stories about my worst roommate of all time. We stayed in our college apartment over a summer. He got himself a membership to Costco. He then proceeds to stock up on massive amounts of junk food: hot pockets, pop tarts, various bulk candy, etc. He also bought two boxes of prepackaged muffins. He then comes home with all of this and tells me, “Hey man, if you're ever hungry, help yourself”.
Then, he hides EVERYTHING except the muffins. Being self-sufficient at the time, I declined his offer. Later that summer, I decided to take him up on his offer. Out of the two dozen or so muffins, I think I must have had three or four over the course of as many days. A few days later, I am awoken at 6:00 in the morning to him freaking out and shouting that I ate too many muffins!
I pay him $10 to shut him up. Two days later, in the pantry, I find a tupperware container FULL of muffins. This was no ordinary container, though. He drilled the hand-holds on each side and put two master lock devices on it. And he intentionally left it there for me to find. I called him "Muffins" to his face until the time I moved out.
The second story is that we had two girl roommates at one point. He, being the socially adept fellow that he is, continually left racy videos playing on his computer. Whether I was there or not, whether he was there or not, whether our female roommates were there or not, it was just always playing. And he didn't see what was so wrong about that.
Finally, I had to sit him down and explain why that wasn't acceptable social behavior, because we were living with girls and it was extremely creepy. Honestly, it was creepy even if it was just the two of us. He still would occasionally leave it playing loudly when he had to leave in a hurry to make it to a class on time. But then came the grossest part.
The third story is that, in our bathroom, the sink was located right when you walked in, then the toilet was next to it, and finally the shower took up the whole far wall end of the bathroom. I walked in around noon one day to find a half-eaten baguette sandwich on the sink next to the toilet. Obviously, he had felt the urge to snack while dropping a load.
I leave it. The girls refused to touch it. Muffins strolls back in around 5:00 or 6:00 PM, and we tell him he left something in the bathroom. He walks in, exclaims,"Oh, there it is!" and finishes eating the sandwich. I almost got physically ill upon seeing that…
19. The Scariest Story On Here?
I have personally had some bad roommates over the years, but nothing compares to my friend’s worst nightmare roomie. My friend had this real shifty roommate who was always in his room or not in the house at all. He was also really dirty all the time, and my friend was starting to think that he had some kind of serious mental problems.
One day, he came home and, figuring that his roommate was home, he called out his name, "Kevin! Kevin!" Hearing no response directly, he hears some noise in the unfinished basement. He goes down into the basement where there's cement floor, washer and dryer, and very little to no natural light coming in. He goes down the stairs and tries to turn on the lights, but nothing happens.
He then moves over to the light in the center of the room. He got real weird, real fast. He finds that there is broken glass on the floor from a smashed lightbulb in the fixture above him. All of a sudden, out comes my friend's roommate from the dark corner at the side of the room. He is brandishing a kitchen knife, and immediately stabs my friend in the stomach with it.
My friend wrestles the blade from the guy and makes it up the stairs and out of the house to safety. This is before cell phones, so he had to go to the neighbors’ house to call the authorities. Turns out that this bad roomie was going schizophrenic and having a psychotic break. I've got more stories, too, but this one will always take the cake.
20. Birthday Suit
My fat obnoxious jerk of a roommate completely ruined my birthday. It was Monday. I wasn't expecting a huge to-do, so I decided I wanted to go to three-dollar any pint night at the local pub. My roommate's parents were both doctors, so he was financially loaded. He says he'll take me to a fancy drink spot instead to celebrate.
We get there and he orders the baked brie and some other expensive appetizers. The drinks he selected for us were not cheap, of course. After our appetizers came and he had finished his glass of expensive liquid, he suddenly says: "Well, I have a lab project. Later! Hey man, can you cover the rest of the bill? I'm short right now”.
He then tosses a 20 dollar bill on the table, for a 65 dollar tab. And that wasn’t all. He then adds: “By the way, what do you think of this place? I like it, I'm glad I scouted it out tonight. I'm totally renting this out for my birthday". He then leaves before I can even process what had just happened. So yeah, my roommate tricked me into paying for a place that I didn't even want to go to on my birthday, just so that he could scope it out for his own birthday party.
21. The Odd Man Out
So in my second year of university, I lived in an apartment on the 15th floor of a building, with five other dudes as my roommates. One of them was named Kevin. Kevin did all of your standard lousy roommate things. He never washed a single dish. He piled dirty pans in the sink after cooking something horrid-smelling from whatever in his fridge shelf wasn't rotten.
He got tons of take-out meals with his excessively loud friends and then left the garbage piled on the coffee table. And for all that, he was barely ever around somehow, so we couldn't even hassle him about changing any of these habits. Although one time we did get on him enough to make him deal with two sinks’ worth of dirty dishes.
One time, when we were having a fairly large party at our place, Kevin looked at our kitchen garbage, which was close to overflowing. He yelled something about: "This is gross and it's gotta go now!" and picked up the trash can, which had me thinking "Wow, this is awfully responsible for him, especially while intoxicated".
Then, he started walking toward the balcony. I immediately knew what was up. However, while I was imagining he would shake the garbage from the can with a sort of side hand motion, instead he proceeds to throw the entire garbage can itself over the railing. Off the 15th floor of a tall building. If someone had been standing underneath, their life would have been over due to this idiot’s stupidity.
Luckily, he moved out halfway through the year, though he left bags of his stuff everywhere for a month or so. Oh, and remember those two sinks of dishes that he "dealt with" earlier in the year? Well, ever since then, we had the sense that we had less dishes than we did previously. Although it must be obvious now in this retelling, at the time we didn't make the connection.
He clearly had decided to start hiding dirty dishes so that he wouldn’t be asked to clean them again. One day, we were cleaning a pile of recycling off the balcony and found a black garbage bag. We opened it to discover a horror show. It was full of the most horrid, gross dishes you've ever seen in your life. Instead of doing the dishes, he had put two sinks’ worth of everyone's dishes into a garbage bag and left them on the balcony.
Conclusion: Screw Kevin.
22. The Wrong Man
Years ago, what now seems like a lifetime ago, I moved into a friend's place when my parents moved out of state. I was 19 years old with a job, and paid them about $100 a month to sleep in a converted woodshed. Yup, a woodshed. I shared it with a friend of mine in a similar situation. So we were two 19-year0old guys living in a woodshed in the backyard of our friend's parents’ place.
We insulated the thing, it was heated, it had TV with cable and a PlayStation (yes that long ago), it wasn't that bad really. I'd been there almost a year, just stocking up cash so I could get a real place and go to college. I would have to pay for that myself. Anyway, I get a call at work that my grandma is on her last moments on this Earth.
I get a leave from work and jet off to another state. When I get back, my buddy (the one that I shared the little shed with) is there and tells me that he is angry that I took off like that without saying anything. Then he said a fateful sentence. He demanded that I had to move out, because of how offended he was about this.
He claimed it would be best if I just left now and didn't talk to anyone, because all of our mutual friends were allegedly soooo upset with me over not informing them that I had left town. Well, I call some friends he doesn’t know. One of them had offered me a place to stay before, and he said sure I could come on over until this got sorted out…
It later turned out that my “buddy” was lying. What actually happened is that he had swiped a bunch of money and things from the hosting parents’ house while I was out of town, and blamed the whole thing on me when they discovered the missing items. The real reason he wanted me to move out was so that I wouldn’t discover this and tell them the truth.
He told them he was going to kick me out as punishment for what I did, so that he would never be caught or suspected, and could also keep his living arrangement. But I only found this all out a few years later, when I showed up to visit our former landlords (the parents). They were utterly shocked to see me, and after some back and forth confusion I explained and cleared everything up between us. This has an even worse ending.
Turns out our “buddy” there later went on a binge and lost his life in a car accident, just a month or so after I moved out. They said they figured it wasn't me all along after that. Plus, they noticed that the dude suddenly came up with a lot of cash to spend on fancy new furnishings shortly after the incident. Not the way I would have wanted to be exonerated.
23. A Brainy Kind Of Story
One of my roommates during freshman year of college was a really sheltered kid, and I could tell that he was gonna have a hard time getting adjusted to life in the outside world. Me, my other roommate, and the rest of our suite were really accommodating and tried to talk to him, but he was kinda weird and extremely shy. For a while, it seemed that he was a nice kid, albeit a bit awkward and strange.
A few weeks into the semester, while I was in the room, he would start asking me really weird questions. He once asked me if I thought vampires existed, to which I responded that they didn't. He said: "Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure I saw one the other day". Then, this other time, he was looking at a list of students in his discussion section, and one of them had the same name as someone in our suite.
No big deal, right? Well, my roommate thought it was the funniest freaking thing in the entire world. He actually brought the other dude over and pointed it out to him while laughing his butt off. "You guys…have the same name!!!!" He kept on pointing at the screen and his face was turning red because of how hard he was laughing.
At that point, me and my other suitemates realized that he was definitely very strange, and not just a little awkward in a harmless kind of way. It began to get downright disturbing. He also asked me once about mind-reading and whether or not I could read his mind. I'm a pretty tolerant person, even of odd beliefs, so I just shrugged most of it off and I figured he was just a really weird kid.
Fast forward toward the end of the semester, about a week before final exams. I come into my suite and I see him, his mom, and the Dean of my college. I find out that he's moving out and he's going to take his final exams next quarter. I didn't want to pry, so I refrained from asking any questions. I just said goodbye and wished him the best.
He took most of his stuff, but a good portion of his things were still there, enough for me to think that he would eventually come back. A week later, after all of our finals are done, I walk into my room and all of his stuff is now gone. Apparently, he moved out for good. I didn't really know what to think of it, and since it was the last day of finals, I was going home that afternoon for Christmas break.
I kind of just shrugged it off since we could all tell that he wasn't really adjusted to college life and he was just way too sheltered to fit in. Then, on the way home later that afternoon, I suddenly get an unexpected call. It's from him. He had this weird habit of asking my name in the form of a question before he asked me anything, as if he had to make sure it was really me.
For context, James and Kevin are the names of the other people in my suite. Here is how the ensuing phone conversation went. Him: "[Insert my name here]?" Me: "Yeah?" Him: "Can you tell James to stop reading my mind? I know he's doing it, so can you please just tell him to stop?" Me: "................... uh.......... Alright."
Him: "And can you tell Kevin to stop too? I'm not sure if he's doing it also, but just tell him too. Alright, bye now". And then he hung up before I could even process this. He apparently moved out and left school altogether, all because he had convinced himself that our roommates were reading his mind and spying on his thoughts.
He ended up coming back a few quarters later. He looked really different because he had gained a bunch of weight, but we suspected that it might have to do with the medication he was put on. Whenever I saw him, I always said hi to him and asked him how he was doing. He's doing well now. I even had lunch with him and a few of my other suitemates.
He's still sort of weird, but he is genuinely a nice guy, so I don't have any problems with him. But man, those few months living with him were confusing as heck.
24. Jumping For Joy
I had a roommate that would just take off all his clothes constantly. I am a woman and he is a man, and we were never romantically involved, nor did we have a friendship before moving in together. This was more of a desperate measure/strangers come together because of mutual, practical needs type of situation. He loved to do free-wheeling jumping jacks, even in front of my boyfriend…
25. Watch Out For This One
My worst roommate wasn't a bad guy until Halloween. We were both freshmen, living on campus in the dorms, trying to make friends and do well in school. We hung out a decent amount of time ,as we had some things in common. I actually played high school baseball against him. Well, Halloween rolls around and he asks me how small they can make cameras.
I think it's a normal question, nothing too suspicious at that point to be honest. Since I'm a computer engineering major, he figures it's something I'd have some knowledge of. Naturally, I tell him how small they can make cameras, noting that they make some spy ones that can fit on the button of a shirt or in the eyes of a teddy bear.
He thanks me for this information, and then a little bit later he starts complaining about being able to hear our neighbors. It's 2:00 in the morning and it's completely silent. I had just gone to bed and he's sitting at his desk browsing the internet. I tell him I don't hear anything, but he insists that he has better ears than I do.
So I tell him to just put his headphones on so he won’t be able to hear them anymore. He refuses to do so, and informs me that he wants to hear what they are talking about. So I get our other roommate. The other roommate comes in and says there is nothing but silence that he can perceive. Of course, this isn't good enough for my roommate.
Whatever, I still don’t think that much of it. I'm going to bed. And for the time being, that was the end of that. I had no idea what I was in for. I come home from class the next day and this kid is pacing back and forth across our room. He's kind of sweaty, and he's holding his hands and rubbing them against each other weirdly.
I'm no genius when it comes to reading body language, but I can clearly see that something is awry. I ask him what’s up; did he fail a test or miss a big assignment or something? No, of course it can’t be something innocent. He informs me that the roommates next to us (not the ones from last night, but the other four guys that share a bathroom next to us) have footage of him walking around the dorm room undressed.
I ask him if he’s walked around the dorm room undressed and he says: “No… but I probably must have at some point!” He tells me that there are cameras in the room and that the kids next door are trying to railroad him with the footage, for money. I ask him what they want and he says they haven’t told him. He suggests they might be doing this just to torment him, perhaps.
I offer to help him look for the cameras, knowing that there aren’t any. But he declines, saying that he’s searched everywhere already. Whatever, I’m home from class and I’ve got some video games to play. But it was far from over. This odd behavior starts escalating over the next few days. He’s repeatedly talking about what he’s going to do to the guys who are behind this alleged scheme.
He's trying to figure out how he can get the tape from them, stop the cameras, and all that nonsense. It gets worse. I’m a deep sleeper, but this kid woke me up one day with incessant yelling at 9:00 in the morning. This time, he’s yelling for this girl Amanda. Mind you, this kid has not had a girlfriend the entire semester, so I have no idea who Amanda is.
Our building was co-ed, with guys on one side of the floor and ladies on the other half. Maybe she was someone on our floor? He’s pacing up and down the room again, whispering about how he’s sorry. He’s not sure what she’s mad at him about, but he’s sorry for whatever it is. He decides that he’s going to go out into the hallway and yell for Amanda at the top of his lungs.
This kid screams ridiculously loud! He actually started waking people up and they’re all instant messaging me asking what the heck my crazy roommate is yelling about. After a good 30 minutes or so and many laughs by our classmates, he comes back into the room. Now he’s mad because he has no voice from yelling and "Amanda" won’t come out after 30 minutes of him pleading.
Cue time for me to leave the room and do something besides be around this kid. I come back later in the early morning hours, maybe 2:00 or 3:00 am. When I walk in the door, a shiver goes down my spine. He’s still in the room, still awake. I’ve got my wallet and phone in my front pockets. I’m exhausted and climb into my bed ready to sleep.
Now, Captain Crazy wants to question me on what’s in my pockets. Knowing that I’m dealing with a crazy person, I show him that it’s just my phone and wallet. Little does he know that I have my baseball bat and metal cleats already on the side of my bed, in case that steak knife he has comes anywhere near me while I’m sleeping.
As aforementioned, I’m a deep sleeper and Captain Crazy is yelling again, so loud this time that he wakes me up in the middle of the night. And this time, he’s sitting on the edge of his bed, facing mine and looking at the wall that is shared by our neighbors. Now, seeing as I have just been awakened by someone crazy yelling and facing me, I assume he’s yelling at me.
So, I book it out of the room with my cellphone. I go to the RA (Residency Assistant) and am pounding on her door at 4:00 in the morning, begging her to open the darn door and let me the heck in. I tell her what happened and what has been going on. She calls her boss, who calls his boss, who informs the RA to call the campus authorities.
Since we are a large university, our officers are real officers, not just security guards. The officers come, question him, and tell me that it’s my word against his and that nothing can be done. If he is harmful to himself or anyone else, then I can call them again, and they will “Baker Act” him. My response: “Great, I’ll give you a call when he attacks me in my sleep”.
One of the officers fetches my pillow and I spend the night sleeping on the couch in the study room for our floor with the door locked (around a wall so he can’t see me). He is supposed to have a class when I wake up, but he hasn’t been going. I chance it since I have nothing on me but my phone, pajamas, and a pillow. I called my parents after the officers came and my mom freaked about this whole story.
When I returned to the room, Captain Crazy was still there, and still wide awake. He informs me to just tell him to stop yelling next time and he’ll stop. His next explanation makes me feel even more unsafe. He explains that he was yelling at our neighbors. Later, he tells me, the guy we share the bathroom with, and a friend of his about this awesome movie he was watching.
However, he was never watching a movie. He was just sitting on his bed with the remote, facing the TV, but the darn TV wasn’t even turned on! So I’m starting the process of moving out of the dorm room, because I don’t want to get in the middle of something bad at some point. Except then Captain Crazy started banging on every single floormate's door.
He would then force his way into the room as soon as they opened the door. If you didn’t open the door, he’d stand out there yelling for "Amanda" for 30 minutes. According to my floormates, he was checking in the weirdest of places: garbage cans, the cracks between the cabinets and the floor, etc. Well, he’s now forced entry into over 40 rooms.
The guys he thinks have been spying on him refuse to open the door. That starts fight number two, because Captain Crazy wants to find Amanda and he wants to find that footage. The officers come and finally Baker Act this guy, meaning lock him up against his will due to the clear fact that he was a danger to those around him.
I ended up getting a massive dorm room all to myself for the rest of the semester and the spring semester too. The guy I had shared the bathroom with hadn’t had a roommate the entire semester and moved out because of the crazy guy, so when the university filled the room, it was only with one person! So the two of us had massive rooms all to ourselves and I pushed the beds together for a king-size bed.
It worked out pretty well for me in the end, but Captain Crazy was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which I feel bad for him about. Crazy how it all went down.
26. Looking Out For Number One
I had a roommate who I consider to have been a complete, probably diagnosable sociopath. He was a great guy when he needed something from you, but the second you weren't somehow of immediate use to him, he put effort into causing trouble for you. When we first moved in, we got along great. Then, as he started dating a neighbor, his priorities suddenly shifted.
He'd put a CD into the machine and start playing it on repeat once I had gone to bed, and then leave for his girlfriend's place with the music still blasting. No regard or concern for my needs whatsoever, even though I was clearly in bed and trying to go to sleep. He pulled that garbage twice, and permanently ruined the band Smashing Pumpkins for me.
As he moved most of his stuff to his new girlfriend's place, he told a friend and a guy he had never met that they could move in. This was without consulting or even informing me that he had done so. He had a pet iguana that he lost interest in, so I am saddled with a lizard and two roommates that aren't paying bills. There was only one thing I could do.
I gave away the iguana and had the manager force out the unwanted new roommates. He responded back by returning to the apartment, turning up the heat, closing the windows, and spreading chocolate chips all over the apartment, just to annoy me as punishment for standing up to his nonsense. That guy was by far the worst and most unpleasant person I’ve ever had to spend time with, let alone had to actually live with for a period of time.
27. Just A Little Game Of Broken Telephone
Our dorm had a phone system where you had to dial a personal code to dial out, so they could split up the monthly phone bill correctly between all of us at the end of every month. This one dude somehow saw me dialing my code, memorized it, and then racked up $1,100 worth of calls to Colombia (for the record, he's not Colombian) on my code before the phone company contacted me to ask what the heck was going on.
I told them simply that I didn't make the calls, and then a couple days later he was thrown behind bars. Ladies and gentlemen, here was a sketchy mastermind.
28. An Expert At What She Does
I once had a roommate that swiped and pawned my Texas Instruments graphing calculator, which in addition to being super expensive was also priceless to me since it had four years’ worth of notes and formulas on it. She also took a camera with a bunch of vacation photos on it and 100 bucks of cash from my girlfriend's wallet.
She also used our toothbrushes and ate all our food. She smelled awful. She used our towels, took my girlfriend's jewelry, and had a Tupperware container of urine constantly sitting in the middle of the floor of her room. One time, our neighbor dropped her credit card, and the roommate swiped it right in front of her, then ran away with it and went on a shopping spree.
She swiped books from the library, and she also paid for her first month's rent but then stopped paying for the rest of the semester. We went on to evict her, and realized the process takes up to two months, which she seemed to know well in advance, and made herself quite comfortable. It turns out, the law is very much on her side and we would get into trouble with the law if we had just tossed her things out.
When we looked up her record, it turned out that she had been evicted five times before, and is a deadbeat mom. Yeah. I don't miss her, to say the least…
29. A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
This roommate was pretty awful. I lived with a friend after moving out for the first time and things were pretty great. Granted, she never cleaned and borrowed my clothes without asking all the time, but it was awesome living away from home for the first time and we had some good times during our initial time together. Then, it started to go downhill fast.
I started to get fed up with her behavior and how she never cleaned up after herself, among other things. Anyways, I had my laptop permanently on a desk in the living room, so she quite frequently would use it. One day, I'm on it and I go to search for a picture to send to a friend, and I stumble upon an unfamiliar folder in my pictures.
Curious as to why the heck this random folder is on my computer, I click on it. Turns out it was a bunch of my roommate’s photos, complete with full-on, spread eagle photos of her in various positions. What. The. Heck. Needless to say, that was the end of our shared computer time. For the record, though, I never told her about finding her photos.
30. Just A Lovely Person All-Around
During my freshman year of college, I had a roommate. I'm lactose intolerant and bought soy milk to put in our pitifully tiny dorm fridge. Despite never giving me money for groceries, she would call me while I was at the grocery store and ask me not to get soy milk because she didn't like it. She also whined about the low sodium soup I would buy.
She did buy a case of ramen once in the nine months we lived together, which she graciously let us eat. She walked around our shared room in her underwear, and left dirty underwear and bras laying out in the open all over the place. She walked up to me while I was watching a DVD on the television that I had brought with me, and demanded that I give her the remote so she could watch her soap operas.
Her justification was that I'd "already seen this movie too many times". She would also stay up late watching reruns of her soap operas with the volume blasting while I was trying to get to sleep for an 8:00 am class. When I sleep on my back, I snore. This usually isn't a problem, because I've trained myself to sleep on my side.
But every tiny fraction of a percentage of the time, I accidentally roll onto my back in the middle of the night. I warned her about this and told her to throw a pillow at me whenever it happens. This would wake me up so that I’ll instinctively roll onto my side. Her solution was much more terrifying. I was woken up one night by her shaking my shoulder with one hand, and shaking my throat with her other hand.
She says she thought it was my other shoulder. I still don't believe her. Thankfully, I have since gotten into a new apartment with an amazing roommate for the next year, while my other former suitemates (whom I would have liked to live with) decided to live with the crazy girl, even against my better advice. It took them a month before they were telling me I was right and that they wanted to run the heck away.
31. The Emperor's New Clothes
It’s been many years, so I don't recall my awful former roommate’s name. Andy, I think it might have been? Either way, I would frequently see him in the college cafeteria wearing my clothes. He had no issue whatsoever with just assuming all my stuff was available to him at will, even though we had never even remotely discussed that, nor would I have said I was okay with it.
32. Music To Her Ears
I once had a female roommate who was just an incredibly annoying person to be around. She would always be an incredible jerk to everybody, for no reason. If I said "I love this song", she'd snort derisively and say, "I don't think you can really love a song, that's a stupid thing to say". And then literally ten minutes later, she would say exactly the same thing about some other thing.
God, I hated that irredeemable cow and her equally loathsome excuses for friends.
33. No Way Out
I had a randomly-assigned roommate in my college dorm. The RA put cute little artsy name tags on the front of everyone's door before we moved in, so we would know which room we were in and we could learn other students’ names. I moved in the week before classes started. A few days later, at 2:00 in the morning, I hear a bunch of banging and the door suddenly swings open.
A girl yells "What the heck is this ugly garbage on my door, and why did you leave it up"? as she crumpled up the name tag. Three guys filed in behind her. They all lived on our floor for the first week because they had driven with her from her hometown 10 hours away and had no means of getting back. It was a bad start to a bad relationship.
34. The Paper Girl
I had a roommate who absolutely refused to buy toilet paper. After weeks of her swiping ours, the other three of us started hiding it so that she would be forced to buy her own. We could have never predicted the way it backfired. Instead, she started taking heaps of napkins from restaurants and swiping rolls of our paper towels to use in the bathroom.
One night, we all went out to dinner, came home, and found the entire basement flooded because she had plugged up the toilet with who knows how thick paper and other stuff that shouldn't ever be flushed. That, and she would keep piles of old food laying around her room…and also never did laundry. She was literally the most disgusting human being that I've ever met.
35. Love Letters
I had a roommate who would (attempt to) leave unjustified scathing, passive-aggressive notes for just about everyone: our apartment neighbors, cars parked outside, and even our landlady. The kind of notes with overly-polite language, underlines, and randomly capitalized words. Always written in red marker. Always rude enough to get the daylights beaten out of her.
Always signed from BOTH of us, even though I had nothing to do with it. I spent that year following her around and removing the notes as quickly and quietly as possible.
36. Promises Made, Promises Broken
Alright, it was the first apartment that I’d ever had and I was super pumped. I meet this girl through a mutual friend. She's nice, not my type though, but says she needs a roommate. I find the apartment, get the place, and she moves in. Here's the first problem. She brings a boyfriend and freaking cat, all without telling me. I'm pretty passive though.
It's whatever as long, as he pays rent and the cat doesn't poop on my bed. I make that pretty clear. Other than that, we don't have any problem. I have my own bedroom, bathroom, and even my own door to the apartment. So I'm working at a pizza place, in a college town, where we don't get done til 2:00 in the morning.
I get home after work, walk in, get ready to just plop down…Aaaaaaand the cat had pooped on my bed. I'm still pretty collected at this point. I walk in, I say: “Hey, your cat pooped on my bed, do you mind cleaning it up?” Her reply was mind-blowing. This chick tells me: “Well, you left your door open, you should've closed it, so you can take care of it”. I let that sink it real well.
I attempt to wrap my head around her logic. I try to see it from her perspective. SCREW THAT. This is the logic of a crazy person. I tell her she needs to clean it up or I'm chucking the cat out of the window. For the record, I'd never toss a cat out of a window. The boyfriend stands up and is like: “Hey, don't yell”. I'm not yelling, but you know, the tension is getting higher.
I state, not yelling, this is just unacceptable. He tells me to get bent. Clearly, they don't understand the situation, so I tell her that I am going out and that she had better freaking clean it up, or I will be dealing with this in an aggressive fashion. I come home at 4:00. The cat poop is gone. Thank the Lord. I still change my sheets, but I'm happy.
The next morning, the boyfriend comes down and apologizes to me. No problem, bro. We play Xbox together. She comes home from "work" and starts flipping out that neither of us did anything. Alright, understandable that you want your boyfriend to be somebody. But one day of video games and bonding with your roommate isn't a big deal.
But then, why the heck is she yelling at me? Here's the best development. I later find out she didn't actually have a job, and she was just out spending time with this other guy whenever she was claiming to be at work. In any case, a few months go by, it's Halloween, and I come home tipsy but happy. I quietly walk into my room, lay down, and start to go to sleep.
All of a sudden, she comes bursting through the door screaming. It's 3:00 am. Why didn't I call, who do I think I am? But a well-placed grunt and growl chases her away. The next night, I bring my current girlfriend home. The freedom of adulthood and intimacy in one’s own apartment is in view. Until the roommate again comes storming in.
Her: "Who's this witch? We didn't talk about you having guests over!" AS IF WE TALKED ABOUT YOU BRINGING A LIVE-IN BOYFRIEND???! OH, AND SINCE WHEN IS THIS ANY OF YOUR BUSINESS!? So clearly, I state all of this. She leaves. My girlfriend feels awkward, so we go to her place. I spend a week there. Every night I was gone, I get a phone call, voicemail, and text message.
A month goes by, and I finally decide to return. I walk home early from work, and as soon as I enter the apartment I want to scream. I hear the two of them getting it on. Still, I go about my business. A few minutes later, some unknown guy walks out of her bedroom. Wait a minute, who the heck is this? Not her boyfriend.
Well, I keep my mouth shut. If he moves out, then I lose rent, an Xbox, and a friend, right? But turns out I didn’t even have to tell anyone about what I had witnessed, because my roommate was dumb enough to call the boyfriend’s sister and tell her about how she had just slept with some guy. WHAT?! He finds out. Within the next few weeks, he moves out, in an emotional departure.
I'm crushed. He was cool. We drank together, played video games, made hand puppets, and lots of other silly stuff like that. Two months go by, and now the final battle occurs. The girl comes walking in, stares me in the face, and says: “You haven't paid your half of the rent”. I say: “Excuse me?” To make a long story short, she expected me to now cover the part of her rent that her boyfriend had been paying.
Whoa. What? When was this established? I tell her that she will be paying not only his full amount, but mine too. I packed my things, got the heck out of there for the last time, and never looked back. But just for good measure, she damaged a bunch of my property during a temper tantrum she threw while I was packing up my stuff and making my way out.
She even tried to drag part of my bed through the streets before I could get a mover to pick it up. Almost a year later, I walk into a peeler club. GUESS WHO IS DANCING NEXT! You got it—her! I beelined it the heck outta there. She continues to occasionally show up in the worst places to this day. I see her around the campus from time to time.
She doesn't actually go to school, just lives off of one of the guys who is totally wrapped around her weird, deformed, little finger. This idiot was the Joker of roommates. Total nightmare.
37. Watering Things Down
I once got a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue for my birthday from a friend. I went out of town for a few days. My roommate proceeds to drink half the bottle and then fill it up with water, as if I wouldn't notice. And then, he had the audacity to lie about it, and continues to do so to this very day. I do believe he doesn't remember, though.
He got laid off after getting charged with a driving infraction. He proceeded to drink himself stupid for eight months and was eventually taking our rent money to pay his car bill. I didn't realize until we had an eviction notice posted on our door. This forced him to get his parents to pay for our three months of rent that he didn't pay, but I still have an eviction on my record now.
I have a copy of the notice that says I was not the one evicted, so wherever I go I have to show that to future landlords or when I buy a house so we don't get denied.
38. She Saw The Light
I had to work abroad for three months. I came home to discover the bathroom light bulb had blown just after I left. My roomie felt she couldn't change it herself, so she had called in an electrician. The electrician laughed at her and told her she could save a fortune and do it herself. She still hadn't done it by the time I got back. Needless to say, I fixed it in about five minutes.
It would have been sooner, but I couldn't stop chuckling at the thought of her pooping in the dark for months.
39. Bringing Your Work Life Home
This was circa 2001. It was my first apartment and I wasn't a good judge of roommate character back then. I paid a high price for my naivety. I was working at a welding shop and had befriended this big Mexican guy after driving him home from work. It was enough to start hanging out at his house after work for a few drinks and his mom's excellent biscuits and gravy she'd make for us.
Naturally, we thought it would be a good idea to become roommates at my place, to cut down on our expenses. Little did I know, he was one of those drinkers who blacks out and destroys everything. Each day after work it was him with a case of drinks and getting into arguments with kids in Yahoo chat rooms over a mic until he would pass out. It escalated from quickly.
He quit going to work completely, and I'd just come home with him passed out, vomit all over the floors, pee in the corners, half-eaten pizza face down on the couch, the works. I started telling him that he needed to leave, but he wasn't hearing it. Eventually, he got thrown behind bars for something or other. I was free. For a while.
He got out and I woke to a banging on my door one morning. I didn't let him in. His mom had collected all his things when he got locked up, so I’m not even sure why he was trying to return when he knew I didn’t want him there anymore. Fast forward to recently. I'd been overseas for six years and moved back to my home state afterward.
I recently stumbled across his Facebook page after not having seen or heard from him in 13 years. And there’s a happy ending at last. We talked. He's doing really well now and is training to be an addiction counselor to help others in situations similar to the one he was in way back then. And I'm very happy for him.
40. Boot Camp
My worst roommate was probably the girl who dated the homeless dealer. He ended up moving in with us, without my permission, and started selling his stuff out of our apartment, definitely without my permission. He also had the rankest smelling boots I've ever smelled in my entire life. And he would constantly leave them in the living room.
41. This One Is Legitimately Terrifying…
About two years ago, I used to live with two girls named Susan and Geo. Geo was dating Susan's brother Chris, who was a gigantic dirtbag and Susan knew it, but Geo was hooked. He was physically and verbally bad towards Geo, and oftentimes I would wake up to them screaming at one another. Unfortunately, it would always end with Chris hitting her, and Geo crying as he stormed away from our house.
This never made much sense to me, because Chris was a skinny little runt and Geo was a pretty big, tough girl who could easily knock the daylights out of him. One day, I woke up to the two of them fighting over something in a jar, which Geo had in her hand. Chris decided to squeeze her hand until the jar broke, cutting her hand pretty badly on the glass.
Blood was everywhere. She dropped the jar. He shoved her over, called her awful names, and proceeded to pick up the largest chunk of the broken jar and throw it as hard as he could at her face, cutting her face pretty badly as well. He left, and we comforted Geo. Both Susan and I told her that he was no longer allowed in our house, for everyone's safety. This didn't go how we planned at all.
Geo flipped out about this and left as well. The next few weeks were horrific. Chris continued to come over, insulting and threatening both Susan and myself. There were many times when we all got into fist fights. Geo never threw punches, but it always ended in one of us kicking Chris' butt, and Geo would rush to his aid and talk all kinds of smack to Susan and me, threatening us as well.
Geo and Chris ate ALL of our food when we were gone and left snarky notes to us, taunting us about it. They broke into my room several times and trashed it, and "tried" to swipe my movies and video games. I say “try” because they would just take them and put them in her room. We only had a few weeks of the lease left, so I just put locks on everything and decided to stick it out.
By the end of it, Geo had stopped paying her bills and owed Susan and me over $600 due to damages, bills, food, last month's rent, etc. When Susan and I moved out, we just took all of their movies and video games and called it even. Susan still had to deal with Chris at times, seeing as how they were related, so she knew all the disturbing things he was up to.
Their mom told Susan that, after we had moved out together, Chris was asking her for our new address so he could slash our tires, wreck our cars, and break into our house to do who knows what. Susan and I eventually had a falling out, and Geo and her have since made amends. I still can't stand any of them now and am so glad to finally have a normal roommate.
42. Leaving A Trail
My first roommate in college was a nightmare. She'd party all night and then wake me up at 4:00 in the morning when she got in to see if she got any phone calls. This was before cell phones were common, but our college phones had voicemail. It was a dry campus, and she would drink all the time in the dorm and leave bottles and cans all over the place.
I drank too, but I at least had the common sense to hide the bottles after! She'd come back from sorority parties gone out of her mind and expected me to take care of her. It came to a head when I went back home for the weekend, and when I got back she had put a leaky McDonald's cup on my brand new laptop. Who knows how long it had been sitting there.
I told her I was going down to the student life office to see about getting my own dorm. It was worth the extra fee to live alone. Luckily, there was an empty dorm on the same floor I had been on and I was able to move there. I went back to my dorm to start packing up, and the jerk had already moved all of my stuff out into the hallway.
I hadn't even told her I was able to move out yet. Turns out she wasn't cut out for college, anyway. She dropped out after one year.
43. You Made Them Disappear
I once lived with a magician. Of the many moments that stand out in my memory, the odd one that I remember most vividly was when he was about to leave the country for about two months. Before he left, just hours before going to the airport, he filled the freezer with whole chickens. Then he got really upset when we ate them to free up space.
44. Jumping To Conclusions
One of my roommates called an ambulance on our other roommate in the middle of the night because she thought our roommate was harming herself. Her evidence was outrageous. She thought so because there were red spots on a towel. What actually happened: our roommate had dyed her hair red. Which she had shown off to everyone the day before.
The roommate didn't even tell anyone what she found. She just assumed the worst and called the authorities.
45. Can You Feel The Annoyance Tonight?
I had a roommate in college who could only fall asleep if he watched Disney movies at night. In his room. On full blast. With no way for me to turn them off at any point. He would always fall asleep partway through the movie, and the movie would continue playing for hours. So I had to listen to them every night for hours while trying to sleep.
And I now hate The Lion King with the passion of a thousand burning suns.
46. One Track Mind
I used to live with some guy who would never do the dishes. He would just sit around undressed all day, consuming highly intoxicating substances. In case you couldn’t predict it, I have lived happily ever after alone ever since…
47. Lyin’ Eyes
I wish I was making this up, but it’s 100% true. My roommate just lays around the house 24/7, never pays rent, always begs me for free food, expects me to clean up after her, and just literally runs into a corner and hides any time that I try to confront her about any of this. I really don’t know how a grown adult can behave like that, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
48. Leaving Some Souvenirs
Last year, I left my apartment for about a month because of the lockdown situation. I came back to find it a complete and utter mess. There was clothing, garbage, broken glass, and a smashed-in half guitar lying all over the floor. The air conditioner was set to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The sink was running. The back door was wide open. And the roommate had moved out without even bothering to tell me.
49. Garbage In, Garbage Out
Wanna hear a story about a whole new level of being a terrible roommate? The other day, I asked my roommate to take the trash out, as I had been gone for a week and a half and was unable to do it myself. She then proceeded to pick through the trash and only throw away the things that she had thrown into the bin! Umm, what???
50. Leaving His Mark On The Scene
My roommate had been pooping in his room for several years before anyone found out. Yes, you read that right. And yes, it is truly that gross. This story requires some context, so let me start from the beginning. I packed up and moved into a student house for my first year of university. It was exciting, as I got to live with six other people and they were all super cool.
But this one dude, who I’ll call Jack, had a really bad odor all of the time. None of us said anything because, first of all, it would have been extremely awkward, and second of all, maybe he had some medical issues or something that we didn’t know about. We didn’t want to make an issue out of it, but all of us were aware of the problem.
So, it eventually comes to the end of the year and, since we all get along really well, we decide to move to a new place together. We move in to start the second year of univeristy. Then the awful truth hits us. This guy's smell is getting dramatically worse as time goes on. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like a mixture of mold, old cheese, and BO.
It got so bad that none of us could eat in the same room as him anymore, let alone sit next to him and actually have a conversation. What was also weird was that he used to wear THREE pairs of trousers at one time, like some jogging bottoms, some jeans, and then ANOTHER pair of jeans on top. We ignored the smell for another year, until it finally became too much for us to handle.
We all discussed the very obvious issue and, after weeks of dropping hints, we decided that the guy he was closest to should tell him directly. So he did. I still don't understand his response. He got ignored completely. But then another issue arises. We not only get mice, but a bed bug infestation throughout the entire house. It was horrific.
Our landlord called out an exterminator who had to go into all of our rooms to fumigate. While this was taking place, “Jack” got pulled aside and spoken to individually by the landlord. At first, we thought maybe he was talking about bills or something like that, and didn’t think to even ask what the conversation had been about.
Everything seemed okay and they said they’d be back in 10 days to make sure their efforts had worked. Jack still smelled really bad, but that seemed like the least of our troubles at this point. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Jack disappeared, saying he had gone home for a break or whatever, even though we were in the middle of the academic year.
Anyway, the fumigators came back, and me and two other girls were in the living room letting them do their thing when the men come downstairs. I will never forget this conversation for as long as I live. Fumigator Guy: “Have you noticed a strange smell around the guy in Room Three?” Me: “Yes, ever since we’ve known him, he’s had a foul smell. Why?”
Fumigator Guy: “And how exactly would you describe that smell?” Girl: “It basically smells like poop”. Fumigator Guy: “Yep”. We all went white and stared at each other in disbelief, thinking that he was trying to wind us up for some kind of joke. But no. Not only was his room crawling with bugs and all sorts of other unwanted creatures, but there was years’ worth of poop hidden throughout every single part of his room.
He had just been pooping in his room for the entire time that he’d been living with us. He pooped in seven different suitcases, and had been using his window curtains as toilet paper. Even though the bathroom was literally right next door to him all that time. The men proceeded to bring down all the evidence and go through every item in the garden.
They were clearly also in shock, because they kept nervously laughing and gagging each time they found a new huge lump of poop, or a really badly stained pair of jeans covered in poop. That wasn't the worst part. Since it’s definitely not their job to dispose of all that, they left it all for us in bin bags in our garden. The landlord tried to help us, but he was so disturbed and angry about the whole thing that he wasn’t much help.
As you probably could have already guessed, it’s safe to say that the guy never returned to the house, and had to pay us thousands of dollars to cover all the damage. They put in a new carpet, bed, curtains, painted the walls, you name it. It was all destroyed by the poop. His mom eventually caught wind of the situation and turned up to clean on his behalf, though.
It was quite an upsetting scene to witness. She literally cried when she saw his room. Maybe he had some mental health problems that caused him to act this way. I don’t even know, but still thinking about it to this day makes me cringe. So, to make a long story short, my worst roommate of all time was the guy who secretly filled his room and seven suitcases with poop for two entire years, then disappeared.
51. You Used To Have A Friend In Me
My crazy ex-roommate and I got along so horribly during the time when we were living together. She'd let strangers sleep in my bed when I wasn't there, swipe my makeup, and whine that I wasn't home often enough, even though I still fully paid my half of rent and bills while working full time and going to school. Plus, It was none of her business where I chose to spend my own personal time.
It got so bad between us that I very reasonably asked if I could find someone to replace me in the lease, with the landlord's permission. We had been best friends before living together, and so when she said that she "didn't want to live with anyone else but me", and that she "couldn't afford the place without me" I trusted her and didn't press the issue.
I decided to just grit my teeth and make it through the remaining six months of the one year lease. This was a huge mistake. A month or so had passed, and I suddenly get a phone call from her, saying that her mom "got us out of the lease" (umm, excuse me?) and that I have to have my stuff out of the apartment by that coming Monday.
It was Friday night, and I had to work full shifts on Saturday and Sunday. So, I cashed in my favors with all my friends and got my stuff out somehow in record time. The best part? When I was getting my stuff out, I found a receipt (right on the counter, mind you) stating that she had spent over $1,000 on EYELASH IMPLANTS. Yes, I kid you not.
The whole time she'd been telling me she couldn't afford to float the place on her own, she was spending money on freaking eyelashes! The amount she had spent was more than enough to have paid our rent for a full three months, seeing as it was a cheap rathole. It's now four, nearly five years later, and we still haven't spoken again a single time after I called her out on the eyelash thing.
This, after having been best friends for years before living together. Living together taught me that she was a rude, vain thief who let strangers sleep in my bed, lied, and tricked me into spending a bunch of my own time and money on trying to help her when she was only trying to take advantage of me all along. I should have broken that lease after the first serious infraction on her part and never let it get to this point.
Friends, take a warning from me. Don’t overlook things you know are wrong. It won’t pay off in the long term.
52. Beware The Waffle Stomper
My girlfriend and I were renting a house with a female friend who liked to play fast and loose with the term "hygiene." From this point on, she'll be known as "the Barista." We were fairly accustomed to the less-than-ideal odors that would waft gently around the Barista. The house we were sharing was built in the 1960s, and we had separate bathrooms.
So, the Barista's bathroom was generally heinous in both smell and appearance, with used tampons and other feminine detritus scattered around. As a result, it took us a while to realize that the smell of raw sewage belching forth from her side of the house was not, in fact, her fault. Which surprised us because she was so completely unhygienic.
You see, one day, my girlfriend and I were watching TV while the Barista was at work, and we heard an ominous gurgling noise from her bathroom. Shortly thereafter, we were overwhelmed by the smell of raw sewage that was so strong it caused my girlfriend (who was an autopsy technician at the time) to literally dry heave.
Clearly, an investigation had to be mounted, so we made the perilous journey into the Barista's bathroom, stepping cautiously to avoid the many disgusting keepsakes in her biohazard collection. When we arrived in her bathroom, we were horrified to discover that raw, chunky sewage was liberally bubbling up from the drain in the Barista's shower.
The shower itself was so coated in hair, mold, and stains it looked like a modern art masterpiece. Of course, the smell was horrific, and so got out of there as fast as we could. The next thing we did was to immediately call the landlady. This wasn’t just a problem of a messy roommate. There was clearly something bigger going on here.
When the Barista returned home from her shift, she was horrified that the lawn had been torn up to expose the Orangeburg sewer pipes that had been nearly entirely blocked by tree roots. Since the Barista's bathroom was the closest to the sewer main, the backups had been bubbling up in her bathroom for months without the rest of the house being aware.
We asked her if she had noticed the issue, and she mentioned that sewage regularly bubbled up from the drain while she was showering (biweekly). Her response was so absolutely repulsive, that I'll never be able to forget it. She just said, like it was as normal as could be, "I just squish it back down with my feet." That was when she got a new nickname: Waffle Stomp.
53. It’s Payback Time
My roommate in college had only child syndrome and taped a piece of paper over her clock because she didn’t want to “share it with me". Never mind that she couldn’t see the clock herself, but she would rather no one see the clock than share the clock with my eyes. So, from then on, I would take one sock from a set once a week.
It was slow enough that she didn’t realize it was me sabotaging her socks, but fast enough for her to be really annoyed and wondering that the heck was happening to all of her matching socks.
54. Cam Girl
Prior to moving in, she called me to ask if she could draw pictures of bunnies on our wall. I said no. But alas, I moved into a room with bunnies drawn on the wall. After a few weeks of living together, I discovered she was doing a webcam show while I was in the background doing my chemistry homework! I ended up moving out shortly after because she was up all night on her webcam, and I couldn't sleep. But that wasn't even the worst of it.
I also once came home to her playing Twister—with no clothes on—in the living room with strangers. She also left used tampons around the apartment. That was the final straw for me.
55. Leaving A Memorable Impression
I once walked in on my roommate getting spanked on his bare butt by his parents. Yes folks, you read that right. I walked in on my college-age roommate getting spanked on his bare butt by his parents for not having his stuff packed up on move-out day. Here’s the full story: It was move-out day and my roommate was working on a paper last minute.
I was packing my stuff. His parents walked in and were absolutely enraged that he wasn't packed yet. They immediately started scolding him while I was still in the room, but thankfully I had a final to go to and figured I'd dodge the storm. I said my goodbyes, assuming they'd be gone by the time I got back from my two-hour final and went on my way.
As it happened, my final only took 20 minutes, so I got back much sooner than they'd have expected. I opened the door and saw my roommate bent over his bed with his bare butt showing, just as his mom wound up for a smack. I slammed the door shut as quickly as I possibly could. I went over to a friend's dorm and helped her pack for a while until I felt safe enough to return. I never brought it up to him after that.
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