They say “a man’s home is his castle". Well, whoever says that clearly hasn’t been to some people’s homes! Is there anything worse than agreeing to spend 24 hours a day living with someone, only to realize that everything they do is extremely annoying? Whether it’s blasting loud music, hosting unwanted guests, or simply failing to keep the place clean, there is a whole myriad of things a housemate can do to make the rest of us wish we were living anywhere else. Here are 50 wild stories about some of the worst roommates people have ever had to live with.
1. Bed and Breakfast
My old college roommate was always leaving dirty plates on his bed after meals and covering them up with his sheets. Think that’s weird? It gets worse. When it was time for him to go to sleep, he would just kick the plates onto the ground and never bothered to clean them up. As you can imagine, living with him was an absolute delight…
2. Music to His Ears
My old college roommate brought a keyboard with him when he moved into our dorm. Unfortunately, he only knew how to play the first 50 seconds or so of the Star Wars theme song, and nothing else. Nevertheless, he made sure to practice those same fifty seconds over and over again as loudly as humanly possible for hours at a time, almost every single day.
3. A Great First Impression
The first night that I ever met my freshman roommate, she introduced herself to me and immediately said, in a completely serious tone, "Have you seen that movie where one of the roommates executes the other one and then runs away? Do you think that could ever happen in real life?" As you can tell, she was always good at ice breakers!
4. Crossing Into Enemy Territory
My old roommate was disgusting and a total slob. She also wouldn't let me clean her side of the room. It was always super cluttered with garbage everywhere. Our room had a gross smell all the time because of her, so I finally broke down and decided to let her be mad at me. I cleaned everything when she wasn’t home. What I found was absolutely revolting.
There were at least five or six cups of spoiled, rotten, partially-consumed, curdled chocolate milk. I also found plates of moldy and partially eaten food. It was horrible. She got so mad when she discovered that I’d cleaned it that she ended up moving out and going to live with some other friend of hers. I wasn't upset about it.
5. A Parting Gift
My old college roommate got kicked out of school for failing all of her classes. The night before she moved out, she got super tipsy, threw up all over the floor, and left the mess behind for me to deal with and clean up. Thanks!
6. From Hero to Zero
I shared a small room with two other guys during my freshman year. Early on, my roommate was extremely studious and would accept nothing lower than pretty much an A on every assignment. He would beat himself up if any grade wasn't good enough, and we would always try to get him to relax a bit more. Turns out, that was a big mistake.
During the second half of freshman year, he buys a new computer and starts playing the game World of Warcraft. He starts refusing to go to class and just plays the game nonstop all night and then sleeps through the whole day. It was disruptive to me and my other roommate. He eventually ended up pretty much dropping out of school. I've never seen such a drastic change in a person.
7. No Regrets
Back in college, I once walked into my dorm room to find my roommate and her parents looking through my underwear drawer. They didn't even act apologetic about it when they realized I had caught them red-handed. Her mother just commented on how cute she thought my dinosaur underwear were. Such a weird experience…
8. A Whole Lotta Noise Going On
My old roommate had no sleep schedule. He also chewed his food loudly, played the bass all the time, and watched anime shows without headphones on. All at the same time. All at three in the morning…
9. Table Manners
The very first weekend of my freshman year in college, my roommate came back from a party at about two in the morning and proceeded to vomit right on my freakin’ desk. To make things worse, my laptop computer happened to have been sitting on that very desk at the time. Jay, if you're reading this, I hate you!
10. Hide and Seek Gone Wrong
The worst roommate I ever had was the one who I lived with during college. One time, while living with him, I grabbed my laundry basket, dumped it out on my bed, and a loaded weapon fell out along with my clothes. This dude was hiding it inside my dirty underwear! How did he think I wouldn’t find out??
11. A Match Made in Heck
I once lived with a girl who was absolutely convinced that she was in a relationship with the lead singer of the band Tokio Hotel, and that she had been for several years. To the rest of us, it was obviously some catfisher on the internet. Nevertheless, they would regularly Skype in ways where only he could see her.
His video would be blank for “security reasons” and he told her they could never meet in person because of the media. And since he was always “on tour,” she would Skype with him at all hours of the night to make up for the ‘time zone differences.’ It was actually kinda sad and scary. Several people I know tried to explain to her that she was being taken advantage of, but she would not listen. I’m pretty sure she sent him a bunch of money.
12. Room for One More?
My freshman roommate brought her much older, very creepy, unemployed "musician" boyfriend to move in with us without my permission. This guy basically lived with us for an entire semester. I had to always change my clothes in the dark, because a strange creepy old dude was always lying there right across from me.
13. May I Have Your Attention Please?
My old roommate was sweet as a peach to your face, but beneath that veneer she had a terrifying dark side. She secretly couldn't stand not being the center of attention at all times. She lied to her teachers about having insomnia because she stayed up late playing video games, laughing super loudly, and calling her friends. She claimed to have started “hallucinating” and “needing my help” as soon as I started to spend more time with my boyfriend than I did with her.
She also tried to, against campus policy, rewrite our “roommate contract” with our sketchy RA so that she could claim I was breaking our agreement and get me kicked out. This was all just because she wanted me to pay more attention to her.
14. Two for the Price of One
My old college roommate had a girlfriend who didn't attend our university. She would come to stay with him in our room for the entire weekend very often. This always meant that I would have no privacy. They stayed in bed all the time with the lights out, ordered delivery, and wouldn't leave the room. At one point, I woke up and there was a baby in our room. Turns out they were babysitting. That was the kind of stuff I had to put up with.
15. Out to Lunch
My roommate was not terrible by any means, but he did have this one really bizarre quirk that still confuses me to this day. Whenever he got something to eat, no matter what it was, he would put it into the room's mini fridge to chill before he would eat it. Hamburgers, fries, pizza, you name it. It all went into the fridge before he ate it.
After his food was sufficiently chilled to his liking, he would take out a head of iceberg lettuce and some ranch dressing to eat as a side dish. Sometimes, he would rip off a leaf and dip it in a ranch bowl, but more often than not he would drizzle the ranch on the head of lettuce itself and just eat the whole thing like an apple. This was possibly the oddest eating habit I've ever seen in my life.
16. The Golden Girl
During my sophomore year, I lived in an apartment style-dorm with three other roommates, one of whom was more than 60 years old. Let's call her Mary. Mary apparently couldn't live on her own because she suffered from PTSD from a car accident. Her daughter lived near our campus, but Mary didn't want to live with her daughter because that would be "imposing".
Mary freaked out over every single thing you can possibly imagine. She would freak out and run to the RA any time some minor thing caught her attention. We were playing video games after class? That's not normal college behavior! We must be using dangerous substances! We had a guy stay overnight? How dare our parents raise us like that!
We would have a drink before we went out? We are in serious need of rehab! Doing laundry at 8 in the evening? When that happened she actually took our clothes out of the machine and threw them on the ground. Our RA and hall association were all completely fed up with her, but refused to do anything about it because of her age.
We got law enforcement involved on a few occasions because of harassment issues, but they basically told us to suck it up and respect our elders. On our last night in the dorms, she walked around the halls with a wooden cross reciting scriptures at us and telling us that our souls were all doomed. After a year living with her, that sounds like a step up!
17. What Goes Around Comes Around, or Not...
My old college roommate got the swine flu and was laid up in bed for days, during which time she would constantly ask me to get her food from the dining hall. Obviously, I would always say yes. After all, she was sick and I'm not some heartless jerk! The last thing on my mind was the possible spreading of germs...
Inevitably, I caught the virus from her and had my turn as the bed-ridden one. It hit me hard after she had already recovered and had her boyfriend visiting. I asked her if she could please get me anything to eat, because I was starving. She told me to go get it myself, because "I really think you could use the fresh air".
Forget you, Hilary! You knew darn well that I couldn't get out of bed. You just didn't want to take five minutes away from your time with your boyfriend to help me live through the flu that you yourself gave me! I ended up having to get my parents to take me home until I recovered. I definitely do not miss living with that girl!
18. Making an Entrance
I once had a roommate who came back to our dorm room late one night after a frat party, took off all his clothes, and cut the cheese with his butt less than two inches away from my face. He then proceeded to pee in the trash can right beside my bed. When he was finished with that, he collapsed onto his bed and was out cold for the next day or so.
The next morning, I woke up, grabbed a bottle of Febreze, and sprayed the heck out of my trash can and rug. I then realized why he had peed in my trash can. It's because he had already thrown up into his own! So, just because I’m such a nice guy, I sprayed his trash can too. Then, for good measure and because I was angry, I spent about 30 seconds spraying his bare body with Febreze while he obliviously snored and drooled. Yeah, I hated that guy...
19. A Stranger Among Us
At my old school, three of us had to live together in a small dorm room. That was bad enough as it was, because it was really cramped. But it got so much worse. One of the guys who shared the room with me seemed totally fine when I first met him. But I quickly realized that all he did was stay out partying really late every night. Then he'd sleep in. Every. Single. Day.
We never even got a chance to talk to this guy or get to know him at all, because he'd come back every night after we had all gone to sleep and he would never wake up until we were long gone attending our classes for the day. Even then, I wouldn't have cared much, except I don't think the kid ever took a shower! He made our whole dorm room smell like some kind of sour, tangy B.O. It was awful.
If I remember right, this situation continued until Thanksgiving break. When we came back from break, all of his things were gone. We never saw or heard from him again.
20. He Wakes Up, He Wakes Up Not
My old roommate wasn't too bad on the whole, except for his annoying habit of starting each and every morning out with the following very loud and irritating routine: alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze-alarm-snooze. Why do people do this??
21. Drained
I think that in my case I was the horrible freshman roommate, all because of one specific event. I was super tired all the time, so I would often sit on the floor in the shower and just let the water wash my sorrows away. Well, I accidentally fell asleep in that position one time, and it just so happened that my butt was seated right on top of the drain. It completely plugged the drain and caused the entire bathroom, dorm room, and the floor below us to flood. Whoops.
22. Can I Pick Something Up for You?
One of my freshman roommates was a self-professed kleptomaniac. She got a huge thrill out of shoplifting clothes from department stores. Usually Nordstrom. In the first week or so of school, she went through her closet and showed us all of the clothing she had swiped. Plus, she knew how much each item cost and how she had swiped it.
There was thousands of dollars worth of nice clothing in there. She had so much that half of it still had tags on. She knew full well that she was never going to wear some of it, but she still took it anyway just because she knew she could. Usually, she did it by carrying a really big purse, taking way too many items into a dressing room, and then emerging with one item in the purse, one to buy, and the rest to put back.
Then, if an alarm went off, they would assume it was just the item she had purchased and let her leave. Half the time, she returned the item she paid for soon after too. It got to the point where girls in the dorm would go to the mall with her, pick out clothes they liked, and have her swipe them on their behalf. It was crazy.
And, to my knowledge, she's still doing this and has never been caught. She never seemed to swipe from any place other than department stores. Also, in case you were worried, none of my stuff ever went missing in all the time I was living with her. I guess she wasn't too bad as a roommate, really. Just a person of questionable morals.
23. For Sale
My college roommate sold our TV and VCR to buy illegal substances without telling me. This was within the first two weeks of us living together. He stopped going to class about the same time and also got a girlfriend, so they were in the room sleeping together all the time. He decided two months into the semester to buy some more substances to try and sell. He ended up quitting that venture and just consuming them all himself.
Luckily for me, he and every single one of his friends that he hung out with failed out of school after the first semester.
24. Guilty by Association
I met my nightmare roommate on the internet. Since my school didn't have dorms and her very religious dad did not want her to be partying in some college dorm, we both ended up on this roommate-finding website. This was back in 2001. Our parents spoke to each other on the phone before I flew out, to make sure everything seemed legit. I had just turned 18, and she was 17.
By early 2002, she had begun to use our apartment to sleep with a whole string of random guys that she had met on various dating sites. Most of them were complete strangers. Frequently, I'd leave for a short shift at work and, by the time I came back, there was some new person hanging out in our room and planning to spend the night.
I never really got time to relax as a result of this, but whatever. I figured it was college and she was probably just acting this way because she had grown up in a very conservative environment and wanted to rebel a little bit. The last guy she brought back had two kids from a previous relationship. He got her into dangerous substances and basically took over our apartment. He was there all the time, just doing whatever sketchy stuff he felt like doing.
At this point, I was becoming very uncomfortable and began to stay away from the apartment as often as I could. Meanwhile, the guy just kept getting weirder and weirder. He once duct-taped himself to a chair in his parents’ home and then tried to blame it on some random other guy who wasn’t even there.
Apparently, he even tried setting the room on fire. The truth came out within days of his accusations. It turned out he staged the whole thing because he felt threatened due to some past shady dealings with Russian mobsters. He thought that law enforcement would protect him if they felt that someone was out to get him.
At this point, I had my mom call my roommate’s dad and he agreed to take over the lease. I went to sign the paperwork and found out that she was refusing to move into the one-bedroom place that her dad had arranged for her and was insisting on staying in our previous place. When I last looked her up, she had apparently cleaned herself up quite a bit after having a kid. She moved home, got married, and even had another kid since then.
25. Smell Ya Later
My old roommate looked and smelled like a real-life ogre. The kid didn't understand personal hygiene and would shower maybe once every week if we were lucky. My room would smell like dirty diapers all the time. It got so bad to the point where I couldn't have company over anymore. One day at basketball practice, he was being roasted for always smelling awful and someone told him to start wearing deodorant.
He was stunned, and replied, "All of you guys wear deodorant?"
26. Without a Cure
This is actually really sad. My roommate had epilepsy, and her mom was part of a religious sect that doesn’t believe in medicine. Therefore, she was un-medicated and had seizures all the time. They would happen in the room, on the street, even in class. She was always in danger and had serious brain damage because of this. I would have to stand there and watch while she seized and peed herself, because I had no idea how to help her.
27. A Fiery Exchange
Back in college, I was randomly assigned to be roommates with this kid who seemed kind of weird. Basically, he'd do a whole bunch of weird little things but I didn’t really care. I just thought whatever. People all have their own unique quirks and qualities, right? No big deal. Or at least so I thought. Everything changed one fateful morning…
I was fast asleep after a long night of studying, when I suddenly woke up to the sensation of my leg burning. Turns out this freakin’ weirdo lit my leg hair on fire! Yes, you read that right. He really did that to me. Now, I like to think of myself as a generally calm person, but if you light my leg hair on fire, I'm gonna throw punches.
We duked it out for about five to 10 minutes. There was a lot of name calling, and even some blood. I decided that it would be best to change rooms, but I wasn’t allowed to until the end of the semester. So, from late September until early December, I had to sit ten feet away from this super weird kid who lit my leg on fire. I also never got an explanation as to why he did it.
28. Paper Trail
I had a roommate who absolutely refused to buy toilet paper. After weeks of her stealing ours, the other three of us started hiding it so she would be forced to buy her own. Instead, she started taking heaps of napkins from restaurants and stealing rolls of our paper towels. One night, we all went out to dinner, came home, and discovered that the entire basement was flooded.
Apparently, she had left several weeks’ worth of poop backed up in the toilet and then tried to flush it all down at once. As if this wasn’t bad enough, she also used to keep piles of old food lying around in her room for weeks at a time. Oh, and she also never did laundry! She was definitely the most disgusting human being that I’ve ever met.
Wikimedia Commons, Santeri Viinamäki
29. Wake Up, Sleepyhead!
One of my roommates regularly took sleeping pills and passed completely out. There was absolutely no waking him. He was literally always asleep. At one point, I tried to wake him up by physically lifting the back end of his bed and shaking it back and forth. He still continued to snore! I then screamed in his face.
Like literally less than six inches away from his face, I was shouting "WAKE THE HECK UP, YOU IDIOT!!!" Snoresville. At one point, his alarm played non-stop for three hours. The same song over again. THREE. FREAKING. HOURS. It had absolutely no effect on him whatsoever. I really hate that song now every time I hear it!
30. Marking His Territory
My old roommate put up a curtain in the middle of our dorm room. He barely ever came out from behind it. It was a bit creepy. When I left at the end of the school year, the curtain was still up, and it looked like he hadn't even begun packing. A part of me thinks that he’s probably still there. This was about 14 years ago.
31. Be His Guest
My old roommate constantly kicked me out of the house so that he could sleep with people. One time, I changed into my shower clothes, grabbed my towel, and left the room for about 15 minutes. When I came back, the chain lock was up and I was stuck outside in the hall with wet hair and little to no clothing for the next several hours.
32. Tell Us What You Really Think
While living with my former roommate, I once accidentally stumbled upon his blog on the internet. What I found made my blood run cold. It was full of posts about how every time he sees me, he wants to smack me in the face. There was also a post claiming that my best friend was made of antimatter, whatever that is supposed to mean.
I didn't report him or anything, because I knew he was just venting and was too much of a wuss to actually try and hit me. I like to live dangerously.
33. Thanks, But No Thanks
On our first day of college, my roommate announced that he had cooked a spaghetti bolognese dish for everyone on our floor to enjoy. After serving it to a whole bunch of people, he then showed me that he had used a can of dog food as one of the ingredients. I could tell right then and there that I was in for one heck of a year living with this guy…
34. Hail Mary
My old roommate was a 6'7” tall mountain man offensive lineman. All of the other football players refused to room with him, and I got stuck with him because I was one of the last to enroll for housing. As soon as we moved in, he immediately plastered his half of the room, floor to ceiling, with inappropriate photos of women…pregnant women.
He also blasted country music every night in order to make himself fall asleep. He did this despite our numerous fights about it, and me always getting up to turn it off if I were awake enough. Even in spite of all that, though, he still wasn't a bad guy. He just wasn’t someone that I, nor anyone else, wanted to share a tiny freshman dorm room with.
35. Water, Water Everywhere
My former roommate was super religious, and decided one day that she was concerned about the fate of my soul. So, one night, without my knowledge or consent, she tried to baptize me with a water bottle while I was sleeping. I totally respect her beliefs, but come on. Why on earth would someone think that that’s an appropriate thing to do?
36. In Good Company
I was in the honors dorm at a big state school. My roommate was dating a very, very non-honors guy. He was in some sort of gang, and my roommate let him run all kinds of illicit operations out of our room. In the short time that I was living with that girl, this guy tried to sell me illegal substances, a car stereo, and a bunch of stolen vehicle inspection stickers.
37. A Comedy of Errors
When I was 19 years old, I lived in a small rental house with three other dudes, and there were lots of shenanigans. The worst of the three roommates was Joe. He once came home from a party plastered out of his mind and proceeded to break the bathroom. He broke a mirror. Then fell onto the toilet. And then into the shower, bending the rod in half and somehow pushing the toilet off of the mount. Causing a huge wave of water to spill in the basement.
Yes, he literally broke the entire bathroom.
38. Odd Man Out
When I first moved in, I was sharing the apartment with three other people. We will call them Bob, Steve, and Slagathor. We each had our own rooms, complete with a bathroom on each side of the apartment for every two rooms to share. Bob and Steve were really cool. I still keep in touch with both of them. Slagathor, however, was the most stereotypical horrible roommate that you can possibly imagine.
He would nonchalantly walk in at three in the morning when we all had classes early the next day. He would then turn on his stereo, pull out his guitar, and start playing along with the bass line to this one very specific and random song that he liked. And he would play it over and over again. Literally hundreds of times. He would restart the song every single time he messed up a single note or any other little detail.
Aside from his lousy guitar playing abilities and terrible practice schedule, he would also never buy food. Instead, he would just eat whatever the rest of us had brought in for ourselves. At one point, Bob, Steve, and I went grocery shopping together and filled our entire kitchen up with food right before we went on a weekend trip. When we got back, the entire kitchen was empty. Close to $300 worth of food had disappeared without a trace. And any time someone tried to call the guy out on his bad behavior, he would just respond with a "Huh? Oh no, that wasn't me".
On top of all that, he was incredibly disgusting. The guy would take a shower like once a week and, when he did, he would brush his hair, pull the hair out of the brush, and slap it on the shower wall. Bob and I started letting Steve use our bathroom since the one he had to share was so horrible. Slagathor took this as a hint that it was okay for him to start using that one, too.
This happened like twice before all three of us sat him down and told him that if he ever stepped foot in that bathroom again, we would collectively kick the heck out of him. I could go on for hours and hours about how awful Slagathor was, but eventually Bob, Steve, and I came up with a devious plan. We went on an aggressive campaign of subtly messing with him so much that he finally moved out.
We would do all kinds of little things to get under his skin, like take a button off of one of his shirts, or loosen his shoelaces so that he couldn’t just slip his shoes on when he was leaving, or make a bicycle chain mysteriously start rusting over in just a few days. When he finally moved out, we threw a party to celebrate—a party that he actually showed up to. He was not very happy when he found out the reason why we were having the party...
39. The Woman in the Mirror
My old college roommate hardly ever showered, only left the room for food, never went to class, always left messes of empty food trays lying around, and never cleaned her area up unless there was an inspection. On top of that, not a day went by where she didn’t eat all of my food. Oh, and she also cut her own hair, and then just left it all lying on the floor in front of the bathroom mirror.
40. Guilty on Multiple Counts
My freshman roommate was guilty of a lot of sins. They included never washing sheets or clothes, routinely sleeping with strangers in the room while I was trying to sleep, vomiting into his own bed following one of these sessions, attempting to heat up illicit substances in his microwave, and subsequently setting the microwave on fire, losing our room keys, and setting a poster on fire. A poster!
I requested multiple times to be transferred to a new room, but was repeatedly informed that there were no other options available. I routinely slept in the common areas or lecture halls, returning to my room only to change clothes and ensure that nothing had been stolen. Yea, freshman year was an awesome time…
41. Musical Interludes
Meet Dave. Dave was your typical annoying college roommate. The dude had waaaaay too many hair products for a guy who had less than an inch of hair on his head. He seemed really nice and chill during the first month that we were living together. Then the 3 AM techno music sessions began. Needless to say, Dave enjoyed his music without headphones and with the volume up to 100%. He also kept his speakers right by my bed.
After being thrown out of the house over and over again so that he could sleep with people, I came home one night to witness him sleeping with three of his classmates at once. Right beside where I slept. I’m honestly not sure which of those scenarios was worse! After another month of the 3 AM techno sessions, I was finally at my wit’s end.
Around this same time, I was regularly hanging out with my new best friend for life who lived down the hall. We were becoming closer and closer, and his roommate had moved out just three weeks into the semester, so he had a vacant bed. We bonded over the usual stuff. Video games, movies, TV shows, etc. I already moved my computer into his room since we would play games a lot together, so it made sense just to do that.
One day, or rather at 3 AM on a Wednesday night, I woke up to a deranged Dave rummaging through my snack drawer and binging on my chips and chocolate bars. I immediately grabbed my pillow and blanket, walked over to my friend’s apartment, and passed out on his spare bed. The next day, I took all of my stuff and moved there permanently.
So screw you, Dave, for being an absolute jerk of a roommate and person. But, at the same time, thank you for allowing me to bond with my new best friend. 12 years later, that guy is still my neighbor and we get along great.
42. You Had One Job!
After asking my roommate to babysit my cat, I came home and made a heartbreaking discovery. It was near death. I rushed it to the emergency vet. It had suffered severe brain, ear, and eye trauma. It almost lost its life, but thankfully they managed to save it. It cost me several thousand dollars, though, which is a lot when you’re living on a college student’s budget.
43. To Each Their Own
I had a roommate who never left the room. He microwaved fried shrimp every morning and it stunk up the room. He also left two trash bags full of trash in and around his trash can all the time because he was terrified of going down to the dumpster. Honestly, he was the most uncomfortable person to be around that I have ever met.
44. Hair, There, and Everywhere
My old roommate was awful. He was incredibly large and hairy, he infrequently showered, and we lived in the oldest dorm room on campus with no ventilation room, so there was no way of ever escaping his stench. He also preferred to always sleep with the window closed. On top of that, he was constantly gassy, constantly used my comb without permission, and never provided notice when he “needed the room” to himself to entertain a female guest.
Also, I moved in second, so I was stuck with the top bunk. I ended up sleeping outside my room more often than inside it that year, for a whole multitude of reasons.
45. Hitting Below the Belt
My old college roommate decided that it would be funny to pants me during a fire drill at four in the morning. In front of the entire dorm, mind you, which was co-ed. The worst part? I don't wear underwear to sleep. She failed to see how this wasn't hilarious. There were a million other ridiculous things that she did, but that one really sticks out the most in my memory.
46. Crocodile Shock
I awoke one fine spring morning to find my roommate, whose bed couldn't have been more than six feet away from mine, blasting "Crocodile Rock" by Elton John on his iPod and dancing around the room with no clothes on. I repeat, he was aggressively dancing, in his birthday suit, to the most annoying song of all time. To this day, I literally cannot hear "laaaaaaa la la la la la..". without thinking about this incident. He was a nice guy overall, though!
47. Shipwreck
My hallmate bought a boat alarm, which I had never heard of, but apparently sailors use it. It is the most ungodly loud sound I've ever heard inside of a building. I swear, it somehow had what sounded like a subwoofer jammed inside of it, and to make matters worse, it legitimately sounded like a boat horn when it went off.
He bought it because he was on a sports team and had to wake up at five in the morning every day. Nevertheless, at five in the morning, every single day, he snoozed until 5:30. That meant I always had to hear the darn alarm a second time. Soon, he was kicked off of the crew team for always being late. Our entire hall sighed in collective relief, until we learned that he still wanted to "wake up" at five anyway to get his day started early.
I'll never forget that boat alarm for as long as I live.
48. When One Isn’t Enough
My old roommate started out as just an ordinary messy person. Then, I came to find out that she not only did not ever change her underpants, but she also liked to take them off and air dry them in the middle of the room from time to time. I tried to look away.
49. The Adventures of Alan
I once had this roommate who I’ll call Alan. Alan was very reclusive and quiet. Now, this in and of itself isn't that odd, as in my experience lots of students tend to keep to themselves and don't necessarily mix with the general population as much as others. The one unique characteristic of Alan is that he used to always order Chinese takeaway…for every single meal.
He would order it frequently, and he would order a lot of it each time. Like boxes stacked on boxes. It was a truckload of food for one person to be eating alone, and Alan was extremely skinny. This made me start to wonder what the heck was going on. This was pretty much the only time you would ever see him, and he would take his food straight back to his room and that was that.
Now, this pattern continued for the first couple of months, but then we stopped seeing Alan altogether. No more takeaway, nothing. This didn't raise much suspicion, as he was always an enigma. But coming up to the end of the semester, a really rancid smell started to engulf the flat hallway. Like this putrid, overwhelming smell. The kind that made you gag just getting a whiff of it.
It was really unbearable. And, surprise surprise, the smell was coming from Alan's room. We hoped that the smell would eventually clear up, but it just got worse. At first, me and my buddies were hesitant to knock on his door as it would be pretty awkward to say, "Hey Alan, you room stinks, please stop whatever you’re doing".
But after a while, it got to the point when it was unbearable to even walk into our flat. So, we tried knocking a number of times, but never got any reply. Eventually, we called campus security and complained. They came with us to open up his door and see what the heck was going on. Now, some of you might be thinking poor Alan had taken his own life and his body was rotting away right next to us all this time.
But the reality was far more messed up than that. Campus security opened his door, and Alan was nowhere to be found. No belongings, laptop, or anything. However, the room was not exactly empty either. There were boxes and boxes of old, rotting Chinese takeaway stacked up in the room. That explained the smell.
However, in addition to these boxes, there were also multiple pairs of women’s tights lying on the ground, every pair completely stuffed with noodles for some reason. They were rotting away with flies all over them. Why on earth was Alan stuffing his leftovers into pairs of women’s tights? But believe it or not, that still isn’t the craziest part…
We were still trying to find out where Alan had disappeared to. The university searched for him on their student database, but they couldn’t find any record of him. We only knew his first name, so we couldn't help much. They then searched for him by his flat room number, and they realized that his room should not have been occupied at all!
Apparently, some other student had been assigned that room, but they turned it down at the last minute and the room was now listed as vacant for the present semester. In other words, Alan was never actually supposed to be living there and we have no idea who the heck he was, how he had ended up moving into our vacant room, or where he had disappeared to.
After this complete disaster, the university moved all of my flatmates and myself out to a hotel for a week whilst they got some people in to cleanse the whole place.
50. Bottled Up Rage
I once had a roommate who didn't have any furniture except a mattress. Over time, he realized that he needed a chair, desk, nightstand, etc. So what did this guy do? He decided to try and build those items himself. He started with trying to build a chair, and he used old cases of empty bottles in order to do that. Not the sturdiest structure in the world, but for a 19-year-old, it wasn’t that bad.
After a while, his chair really, really started to stink. It had this awful, musty, moldy scent emanating from the boxes it was made of. So, us both being adults, I asked him what the deal was. When he told me the truth, I was absolutely disgusted. It turned out that he didn't like to get up to go to the bathroom, so he had just been peeing inside all the empty bottles that the chair was made of. That's how he lived for a year.
Sources: Reddit,
