Freshman life is like a box of chocolates - you never knew what you're going to get. Except instead of chocolates, the box is full of rude kleptomaniacs with bad hygiene and no manners. We asked college students to share the worst roommate stories they have from freshman year. All we can say is, we're glad those years are over.
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32. Dirty Secret
My roommate refused to take a shower. The smell made it impossible to live with her. One day, before our graduation, she came up to me saying "I need help but you have to keep it a secret" and her request literally shook me to the core. I agreed to help her as we had only one day left together. She went in the shower and after 5 minutes, she came back outside dry with a bathrobe on then asked me "Take a look!" What I saw made my blood curdle. No wonder why she stank. Turned out she didn't know how to clean herself. As an adopted kid, she was never been taught.
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31. Homicidal tendencies.
The first night I met my freshman roommate she introduced herself and said, completely seriously "have you seen that movie where one of the roommates kills himself and the other gets a free ride? Do you think that would really happen?" She was always good at ice breakers.
30. Wash those cares away.
I was the horrible freshman roommate because of one 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, and I happened to fall asleep with my butt right on top of the drain. It plugged the drain and caused the entire bathroom, dorm room, and the floor below us to flood.
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29. Don't be childish.
My roommate had a girlfriend that didn't attend our university that would stay the entire weekend in our room. They stayed in bed, lights out, ordered delivery, wouldn't leave. At one point I woke up and there was a baby in our room They were babysitting. A baby.
28. Good riddance to bad rubbish, literally.
My first roommate was disgusting and a total slob and wouldn't let me clean her side of the room. It was always super cluttered with crap 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, and cleaned everything. I found cups, like 5 or 6, of partially drank spoiled, rotten, curdled chocolate milk...plates of partially eaten moldy food...it was horrible. She got so ticked off that I cleaned it that she ended up moving in with another girl. I wasn't upset about it...
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27. Can't tell which of these is weirder.
My freshman year I was randomly matched with a girl who was convinced she was in a relationship with the lead singer of Tokyo Hotel, and had been for several years, but it was obviously some catfisher on the internet. They would skype 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/scary, several people I know tried to explain to her that she was being taken advantage of, but she could/would not listen, pretty sure she did stuff on camera for him and sent him money. She also brought multiple bags from home stuffed full of her cats hair, and knitted tiny clothes/figurines/whatever out of it. I am, of course, very allergic to cat hair.
26. Who wore it better?
One of my freshman roommates was a self-professed kleptomaniac. She got a huge thrill from stealing clothes from department stores. Usually Nordstrom. In the first week or so of school, she went through her closest and showed us all of the clothing she had stolen, plus she knew how much each item cost and how she'd swiped it. Thousands of dollars worth of nice clothing. She had so much that half of it still had tags on and she never wore it, but she took it because she knew she could. Usually this theft involved 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, and they'd all pick out clothes they liked and she'd go back on her own later and steal them for them. It was crazy. And to my knowledge, she's still doing this and hasn't been caught. She never seemed to steal from anywhere other than department stores, and none of my stuff ever went missing, so I guess she wasn't too bad of a roommate, really. Just a person of questionable morals.
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25. Narcissus, is that you?
The first roommate I had was sweet as a peach to your face, but honest to god couldn't stand NOT being the center of attention. Lied about insomnia to her teachers because she stayed up late playing video games and laughing super loud and calling her friends. Started "seeing things " the more time I spent with my boyfriend and not with her, and 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 since I was no longer paying her any attention.
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24. Big for a mouse.
Maybe this is not the typical story, as I did my undergraduate in Belgium and sharing rooms is not really a thing in northwestern Europe. Anyway, in my second year I lived together with 15 other students - sharing a huge kitchen and one (1!) shower.
Most of them were extremely cool. There was, however, one dude that was just plain trash. He informed us he'd have a party (one day in advance), and completely trashed the place. But! On top of that! He raided our fridge.
Me being a proper Dutch girl, I always kept Gouda cheese in the fridge. Just the piece, unsliced. He took a bite from the cheese. I came into our trashed kitchen in the morning, only to find my dear cheese with some bite marks in it.
23. That's just bad manners.
Had a roommate come back to our dorm room from one of the many rush week frat parties he attended, wasted out of his mind. He stripped down to his stained white briefs and passed out on his bed.
In the middle of the night, I woke up to find him standing, totally nude, inches from my bed, his butt literally right in my face. He proceeded to fart in my face and then start peeing in the trash can next to my bed.
After he was done peeing in the trash can, and all over the floor, he promptly went back to his bed and passed out on his bed, face up, with no covers.
I got up, got a bottle of Febreeze, and sprayed my trash can and the rug. I then realized why he peed in my trash can. It's because he had puked in his. So, I sprayed his trash can too.
Then, for good measure and because I was ticked, I spent about 30 seconds spraying his naked body with Febreeze while he snored and drooled.
Yeah...I hated that guy.
22. No amateur chefs in the shared kitchen.
I lived in an apartment-style dorm with a kitchen, living room, and two double bedrooms. One of the guys in the other bedroom fancied himself a chef (in reality, I think he was a dishwasher at Outback) so he would cook all the time in the apartment. He had this habit of hanging a plastic shopping bag from the oven door handle and just tossing cut scraps, egg shells, etc. into that bag. The problem is, he never actually threw that bag away. I was never around while he was cooking so I didn't pay that bag much mind nor realize it was always the same bag.
After couple of weeks, we started to notice a foul smell and the presence of fruit flies in the apartment. I was deep cleaning the kitchen and I brushed up against that bag and no less than a hundred fruit flies burst up from inside it. Needless to say, I freaked out.
A visit from the RA and the maintenance team to spray and he was required to clean up after every meal and take the trash out twice a week, on penalty of being kicked out of the dorms.
21. College is not a senior home.
My sophomore year I lived in an apartment style dorm with three other roommates, one of which was 60. 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 to campus but Mary didn't want to live with her daughter because that would be "imposing." She would freak out and run to the RA for everything. We were playing video games after class? That's not normal college behavior, we must be high! We had a guy stay overnight? How dare our parents raise us like that! We would drink before we went out? We are in serious need of rehab! Doing laundry at 8pm? She actually took our clothes out 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 the police involved in a few occasions for 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 with a cross reciting scriptures at us and telling us we were all going to the bad place. After a year with her, that seems like a step up.
Cauldrons and Cupcakes
20. Sounds delicious, actually.
Mine was not terrible by any means, but he did have this quirk that confuses me to this day. Whenever he got something to eat, he would put it in the room's mini fridge to chill. burgers, fries, pizza... it all went in the fridge before he ate it.
After his food was properly chilled, he would take out a head of iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing and eat it as a side. 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 itself and eat the whole thing like an apple. Possibly the oddest eating habit I've ever seen.
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19. The stinky sleeper.
They actually crammed 3 of us into a dorm room. That was bad enough because it was cramped. One of the guys that was in there seemed totally fine when I first met him. Turns out 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 because he'd come back after we'd gone to sleep, and he would never even wake up until we were long gone attending 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. and it was awful. If I remember right, that went on until Thanksgiving break. When we came back from break, all his stuff was gone and we never saw him again.
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18. Like a bull in a china shop.
I didn't go to college but when I was 19 I lived in a small rental house with 3 other dudes, and there were shenanigans. The worst was Joe, he came home in a drinking blackout once and broke the bathroom. He broke a mirror, then fell onto the toilet, and then into the shower, which bent the rod in half, and somehow pushed the toilet off of the mount, causing a huge wave of water to spill in the basement. He literally broke the whole bathroom.
Plus that same day he cooked a pizza and a bunch of cheese and pepperoni fell to the bottom of the oven and burnt, and made the whole house smell like burnt pepperoni. Joe sucked as a roommate.
17. The unclean.
My roommate was 7'1 340 pounds. He was an ogre. The kid didn't understand personal hygiene and would shower maybe every 2-3 days. My room would smell like dirty diapers. 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 like garbage and to wear deodorant. To which he replied stunned, "All of you guys wear deodorant?"
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16. Lacking the generosity gene.
My roommate got the swine flu and was laid up in bed for days, during which she would ask me to get her food from the dining hall and I would. Obviously I would. She was sick and I'm not a jerk.
Inevitably, I caught it from her. It hit me hard after she had already recovered and had her boyfriend visiting. I asked her if she please could get me anything to eat because I was starving, and she told me to get it myself because "I really think you could use the fresh air."
She knew very well I couldn't get out of bed. She just didn't want to take five minutes out of her boyfriend time to help me live through the flu she gave me. I ended up having to get my parents to take me home until I recovered.
15. The multi-purpose room.
My roommate didn't bring any furniture except a mattress, so over time, he started building a chair, desk, nightstand etc. out of cases of the empty wine bottles. Okay. We're 19, it's not that crazy.
But after a while, his furniture really, really stunk. It had this awful musty moldy scent emanating from the boxes so, being adults, I ask him what's up. Turns out he didn't like to get up to go to the bathroom, so he was just pissing in all these empty bottles he had. Then, he'd put them back in the box, and when it was full, he built furniture.
That's how he lived for a year.
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14. Bunking with a psycho.
I had a slob of a female roommate. My room became "that" room because it smelled bad. I was so fed up with her leftover food rotting in the fridge which was overloaded all the time, I found rotten tomatoes and open bags of doritos between the sheets one time. In the middle of the night she'd open up new bags of chips to eat them then leave it on the sides of the bed frame for later. She's a bigger girl, and she probably felt like she didn't fit in on a floor full of average sized females so she used to lie about her relationship life and put socks on the door handle so I wouldn't enter the room. One night she kicked me out at 11 PM so I angrily entered the room thirty minutes later and she was just lying on the bed wrapped in her sheets like a manatee eating her bed doritos and watching reruns of The OC on her tablet. Oh and she also killed my goldfish first week of move in when she knocked the bowl over with her suitcases and didn't fill his tank back up with water and left him on the floor. Yup, that was definitely the worst.
Image by Narcis Ciocan from Pixabay
13. Vindicated at last.
I had one who was LOVELY at first, had a cute little sister, we hung out a lot. We didn't have a lot in common though, and had very clashing schedules, so I assumed she'd be like any normal person and accept that we could only really hand out on weekends. She was not a normal person.
Stuff went missing from the shared kitchen. Not just my stuff, mind you. She became super passive-aggressive, started binge drinking and blaming me for not being there to stop her. I dismissed it, more stuff vanished, this time from bedrooms. My lock was broken too. She tried to blame me and get me kicked out. Luckily, we had a fire drill during which she left the door open and a whole load of stolen goods were found - wallets, spoons, underwear. You name it, she stole it. She was there for less than two weeks and has to pay rent for the whole year for breaking the contract.
12. Someone needs medication.
My roommate got moved into my room a few weeks after the semester started because she had gotten into a fist fight with her previous roommate. Everyone felt bad for her because she was saying she was attacked and it was totally unprovoked, until she started getting crazy around Christmas break. Her dad was a pharmaceutical sales rep and he would just give her samples of all sorts of crazy pills. Can't sleep? Here's a pack of Ambien. Need to stay up and study? Here's a fistful of Ritalin. Feeling anxious about finals? Here's buttloads of Xanax.
We got back from Christmas break and it was just awful, leaving bowls of cereal milk out for weeks at a time while bringing over her loser boyfriend. She would come back to our room in the wee hours of the morning, see that I was sleeping and slam the door and throw all the lights on. Needless to say, we were not getting along AT ALL. I was home for Easter weekend and she started AIM messaging me (that's how long ago this was) saying all our suite mates hated me and I should just kill myself. I would block her and she would create a new screen name and start all over. I saved all the messages and submitted them to the RA when I went to move out that weekend. I lived about an hour away from campus so I commuted for the last 6 weeks of that year. I wish I had just held out because she ended up getting expelled because she was harassing me using the school's internet, and that was her third offense (2 fist fights prior).
11. At least they're predictable.
I lived in a triple, and both of my roommates were outright weird. The whole floor knew about it and stayed away from our room for the most part. If I wanted to hang out with people, I had to go somewhere else.
One of the other roommates was a religious nut. She had a foot-tall statue of the virgin Mary that she slept with every night like a teddy bear. Again, this thing was a statue, not a plush or anything. I can't imagine this was comfortable in any capacity. She played the harp during the day and watched Korean soap operas all night. Slept in a super sheer, flowing nightgown that looked like it was out of the 1800's. Also strung up a bunch of lights that stayed on from the moment they were first plugged in until the day we moved out.
The other roommate was a fanatical anime nerd and cosplayer, which, whatever, do what you want, except that her costumes took up a good portion of the room most of the time. It wasn't uncommon that I'd get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and trip over a poofy skirt or plastic sword that had fallen out of her dresser or from under her bed. She also hung up anime posters everywhere, stuff like Free! and Ouran High School Host Club. And I mean everywhere, even on the ceiling and over into my bed area. I asked her to take them down from my bed and she said I didn't have any posters so she should be able to hang what she wanted, so I went out and bought a couple of prints just to get rid of the Fruits Basket faces above my bed. She also had intense fits of anger over ridiculous things. Once I didn't drink all my milk before the expiry date, and she threw a fit because I didn't remove it from the fridge on exactly that date. It hadn't started to smell or anything, it was just past the date on the carton. She got so mad about it and carried on so much that the other roommate started to cry.
We're entering our senior year of college. Last I heard of either of them, the first one was playing the harp for some youth church and the other one had become a furry. It's about what I expected.
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10. Where do they find these people?
Oh boy... Katelyn. Only lasted two months. I have plenty of stories about her, but here are a few that stand out. The second or third weekend of fall semester, I went home for the weekend. When I returned, ALL of my food had vanished (a full pack of Easy Mac, a pound of grapes, a bag of apples, a couple bags of chips, and some other standard college munchies). When I confronted her about it, she admitted to eating all of it in the 48 hours I was gone... she also confessed to immediately throwing it all up afterwards. That's how I found out about her eating disorder, which she talked about regularly over Skype with her mother, her father, and her tele-counselor every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday morning at 7 am sharp.
Then, about a month in, we had started meeting some of the guys that lived on the floor above us in the dorms. One night, she invited over a mutual friend. He was a nice guy, but tried way too hard to get action from the girls on our floor. As if his desperation wasn't enough, most of us were turned off by his constantly, visibly chapped lips... Not Katelyn. We were getting ready for bed and he decided to stick around so they could watch movies and whatnot. Fine. Ten minutes after lights out, the "movies" sounded more like... something else. I sat up to tell them to take it outside, only to find her head bobbing up and down underneath the sheets. I quietly left and spent the night in another room. When I returned the next morning, she spared no detail about the escapade (including her remorse for disobeying God). She also insisted that his new nickname was "Carrot," because his junk reminded her of a baby carrot.
One day we were in an argument because she lied to one of my friends that I didn't want to see him when he came to visit our room. The incident escalated to the point that she threatened to light my bed on fire while I was sleeping in it.
This one happened about a week before I moved out. We were having a normal, civil conversation about classes, which was rare for us. I was simultaneously doing homework, not paying any mind to what she was doing on her side of the room. I happened to look up for the briefest of moments, and there she was... in the middle of the room... changing her tampon. Mind you, our room was in the middle of the hallway, and the nearest bathroom was at least 6 doors down. Without saying a word, I closed my book, packed my bag and left for the rest of the afternoon.
Ironically, she wasn't the reason I moved out (although that's what I told my parents). She ended up dropping out and moving back home, so I guess I would have dodged the bullet either way. Good times.
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9. It's illegal to be this dumb.
My dorm roommate was obsessed with her hometown boyfriend, to the point where she would rarely make it through an entire Monday-Friday stretch without hopping on a train to go see him (and missing all of her classes for the week). This was okay (I had the room to myself lots), but by November she had literally spent every penny of her student loan and savings on train tickets. She spent several days BAWLING nonstop about how she wanted to see him and her friends from home. My birthday happened to be that weekend and my then-boyfriend was planning on coming to visit, and I couldn't stand her incessant whining and crying, so...
I agreed to lend her some money (bad idea, I now know). I knew her parents would eventually cave and replenish her bank account, and the amount I was giving her wasn't a big deal to me at the time because I was fairly good with my money. So we went to the ATM, and I gave her $140 for her train ticket. She was incredibly grateful, thanked me about 100 times, and left a few hours later.
I had a great birthday weekend... until I got a call from my bank. Suspicious activity on my account. I assured them that the $140 withdrawal was made by me. Nope, they meant the $800 that was withdrawn the following day. Turns out that she had peeked at my pin WHILE I WAS LENDING HER MY MONEY and took my bank card out of my wallet while I was showering, then proceeded to take out $800 and blow it all on drinks for her boyfriend and friends. She was instantly caught and charged because she was dumb enough to use the card at the train station in her hometown.
I got the $800 back, but never got back the money I lended her or the several books, movies, articles of clothing she had of mine. My dorm kicked her out and the one upside was that I got to stay in the double room as a single for the rest of the year.
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8. What a waste.
My roommate was just precious. On the very first day of moving in she had arrived first and set up her belongings which ended up taking over half the already tiny dorm room. She would constantly shave her legs in our shared sink and not clean it up and on too many occasions would have loud phone calls with her boyfriend who was still in high school. But the moment that just made every fiber of my being loathe her was the easy mac incident. For the sake of this story let's call her Kiki.
It is a Sunday afternoon and I was in my bed reading and she was at her desk. She gets up and goes to her cabinet to get out a thing of easy mac. She proceeds to put it in the microwave and sits back at her desk. Within seconds I start to smell something burning and I look down and see the microwave is billowing with what looked like a miniature mushroom cloud of Black smoke filling up the inside. Kiki is oblivious so I have to yell for her to stop the microwave. She gets up and immediately just opens the microwave door and the black smoke escapes filling our entire dorm with this putrid black smoke sending the fire alarms off and bringing about 15 people banging on the door.
After the smoke clears and the situation settles I start getting fans out and opening windows to start clearing out the smell of burnt noodles and plastic. I turn to Kiki and I asked what happened and how she made it burn so fast and she states that she has no clue. So I asked well did you put water in it and she turns to me and starts doing a heinous cackle like laughter and says "Oh my god I forgot! That is so funny."
Maybe not truly horrifying but it was awful and she was the worst.
7. What a monster.
I lived in Halls of Residence (UK) which were four separate single bedrooms and a shared kitchen on each floor with several floors. In the kitchen there was an oven/hob and a microwave, it was easy to heat cold food.
Late one night a girl on my floor ordered pizza and paid with her debit card. The delivery guy came shortly after 11 and the flatmate got very angry that the pizza was cold. She demanded he take it back and bring her another. He tried to phone them but told her that the kitchen was closed and he couldn't get another pizza.
She demanded a refund and he said he could do this but as she paid by card it had to be refunded to her card and could take a couple of days. At this point she lost it.
She positioned herself in front of the entrance to the building, feet apart, one arm on each side of the door, dressed in nothing but a bright pink dressing gown, fluffy pink slippers and a towel on her head. She said he wasn't allowed to leave until he gave her money back. He tried to walk past her but there was no way out and she starts screaming "just try and push me, go on, touch me, just try and touch me, I dare you."
This goes on for about five minutes before the poor guy manages to duck under her arm and run for it. Now, this whole time I was sitting in another room with some other flatmates and we ventured out into the hallway. She says it was about morals and that could have been her last few pounds and that it wasn't but he didn't know that.
She then starts gloating about how he left the pizza and, in his effort to get away, had accidentally dropped the money he'd been given for the night so, in her mind, she won free pizza.
A few minutes later the police came but they went upstairs by mistake and, as she was still in the hallway, we didn't dare tell them where she was.
6. Watch out for mean girls.
I had two roommates: one was new, we'll call her Angie and one I had been rooming with for a while, we'll call her Barb.
One night, I went to a party with my boyfriend, spent the night at his place and came back the next day. Barb asked me if I'd seen her "gold necklace". Nope. Barb slams her closet closed, uses the lock (which she never did), and walks outside the room to make a call. I can hear her saying, "We're not friends, I wouldn't let her borrow anything."
When she comes back in, I confront her. She says she "found" the necklace in her drawer but she knows she didn't put it there and she knows I'm lying about "borrowing" it. What? She expounds upon this further by stating she has a "witness" who saw me wearing her necklace at the party last night.
I go to my closet, pull out MY gold necklace, show it to her. No way is she believing me though. Her belief is that I'm a thief, or at the very least a liar, and although what she's saying makes no sense in light of the new evidence, she's gonna stick to it. So she requests to move out. I'm sure she spread bad rumors about me with the housing people in the process, and among our mutual acquaintances since she couldn't keep her big mouth shut.
However, before she moved out, she and I had to go on a school-sponsored, overnight trip with a few dozen other people. About a week after we got back, we were at the same party and I hear her tell this story:
"When we got back from the trip my socks were missing! I asked Angie about them but she said she hadn't seen them. I turn around and there they are, in the bottom of her closet!" So it turns out it was Angie who'd been taking her stuff all along.
Barb never apologized to me - even though she now knew who had taken her stuff, and moved out shortly thereafter. I have no idea why she assumed I, the roommate she'd had since day 1 with no problems, had taken her stuff when Angie was the new person, except that she truly was a mean girl.
5. Time to write that Dear John letter.
I was unfortunate to have lived with TWO nightmares during my freshman year.
#1 was Eddie. Eddie was my original roommate. After the typical freshman E-Mail exchanges (who's getting the fridge, microwave, rug, etc.) we had the opportunity to meet on move in day. At first, Eddie was a great roommate -- fun to hang out with, good to grab a bite with, etc. But then Eddie found out how hard engineering is. You see, he was a mechanical engineering major and found that it was just too difficult.
Instead of switching majors, he decided to just give up. He stopped going to class...didn't go out on the weekend...He. Just. Stayed. There. All the time. Day and night. I kid you not, he only left to eat -- at the cafe on the first floor. Lucky for me, Eddie failed all of his classes and didn't come back, leaving me with a room all to myself!!
I started my second semester with my own room/bachelor pad. I moved the beds together to set up a nice queen bed, to host the nonexistent ladies I'd be bringing home. The room was huge without a second person!
...enter #2, halfway through the semester...John. John and his roommate had a "disagreement", so they moved him to my room. John was weird. I have no other words to describe him, other than a total weirdo. This coming from a self-proclaimed fantasy geek computer scientist. I have a really high tolerance for weird, and John exceeded them all.
He loved Hillary Duff. So much so, he watched her movies on repeat. All the time. Whenever he was home. Which was all the time, because he didn't have any friends. HE USED MY TOOTHBRUSH! I had no idea at the time, until I walked out one day, to see him with my toothbrush dangling out of his mouth, like it's totally normal. He showered every 2-3 days. Not horrible, but definitely not often enough. He would stand over my shoulder and watch what I was doing on my computer. As in, he would read every word. When I would confront him about it, he acted like it was totally normal.
He wasn't unsafe or unstable, he was just really friggin weird. Thankfully I only had to deal with him for like 7 weeks or so, before the year came to a close.
4. A crafty eviction scheme.
When I first moved in, I was sharing the apartment with 3 other people, we will call them Bob, Steve, and Doug. We each had our own rooms, with a bathroom on each side of the apartment for two rooms to share. Bob and Steve were really cool. I still keep in touch with them, but Doug was the stereotypical horrible roommate.
He would walk in at 3am when we all had class the next morning, turn on his stereo, pull out his guitar and play the same song.... Over...and over.... And over, restarting every time he messed up in any way.
Aside from his guitar playing abilities, he would never buy food but eat literally everything the rest of us brought in. At one point Bob, Steve, and I went grocery shopping together and filled out kitchen up with food right before we went on a weekend trip. When we got back the entire kitchen was empty. Close to $300 in food gone. Anytime he was called out on it he would do that "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. Doug took this as a hint that it was okay if he started using it too. This happened like twice before all three of us sat him down and told him of he ever stepped in the bathroom again we would collectively kick the daylight out of him.
I could go on for hours about how awful he was, but eventually Bob, Steve, and I went on an aggressive campaign of subtly messing with him so much that he moved out. All little things like a missing button on a shirt, or shoelaces being extremely loose or tight so he couldn't just slip his shoes on, a bicycle chain mysteriously rusting over in just a few days.
When he finally moved out we threw a party which he showed up to. He was not very happy when he found out why we were having the party.
3. Who's the bad roommate here?
My roommate freshman year was a Chinese exchange student straight outta Shanghai. His name was Zihil, or something, but if you're anything past one semester into college, you know they have their own 'english' names. For whatever reason he chose the name José. He didn't speak much english, too. He definitely understood more than he could speak, but we got along marvelously. One night, I was out showing him the American past time of drinking games. I ask him, Yo José, You have had alcohol before, right? 'Cause you know, I didn't want to get in trouble if he died of alcohol poisoning. He says yes, but looking back, it was definitely a no.
So about two hours pass and this kid is slugging beers. Of course, everyone wants to teach the chinese kid everything americans do. By this two hour mark, he must have beer bonged three beers, shot gunned two, casually drank another two. He starts feeling sick, I can see it in his eyes.
He grabs his stuff and we take off back to our dorm room. Half way there, he starts stumbling and falling. In the hallway of our dorm, heads over to the trashcan, and just starts puking his brains out. I get him into the room, get him some water and make sure he don't choke on his puke.
In the morning, he starts freaking out because he can't find his phone. He turns on the find my iphone thing, and the trash can he puked in the night before starts pinging. We had to search through this filled trashcan of puke and garbage to find his phone about halfway down.
Liquorsky
2. The mysterious noodle man.
I had this flatmate - let's call him Alan - who was from Hong Kong and was very reclusive and quiet. Now, this in itself isn't that odd as from my experience lots of international students tend to stick to themselves and don't necessarily mix with gen pop, but whatever. So the one unique characteristic of Alan is that he used to ALWAYS order Chinese takeaway. He would order it frequently, and he would order a LOT of it, like boxes stacked on boxes. It was a ton of food for one person, but Alan was skinny, so I did wonder what was going on. This was pretty much the only time you would 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. No more takeaway, nothing. Now this didn't raise much suspicion as he was always an enigma, but coming 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 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's pretty awkward to say, "Hey Alan, your room stinks, clean up," but honestly 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, and they came with us to open up his door and see what was going on.
Now, some of you might be thinking poor Alan had topped himself 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 a trip. There were BOXES AND BOXES of takeaway stacked up in the room. That explains the smell. However, there were also a load of WOMEN'S TIGHTS STUFFED WITH NOODLES on the floor, rotting away with flies all over them. And the worst thing of all... there were holes cut between the legs of the tights. So, it turns out Alan was using his takeaway to stuff women's tights with noodles, and then have his way with them.
So, where did Alan go? The university searched for him on their student database (we only knew his first name so couldn't help much) but they couldn't find him. They then searched for him by his flat room number and it transpired that room should not have been occupied AT ALL. Apparently some student was meant to come but turned down their offer last minute. So in the end we had no idea who Alan was. After this complete nightmare the university moved all of my flat out to a hotel for a week whilst they got some people in to cleanse the whole place.
Image by Lindsey White from Pixabay
1. It doesn't get worse than attempted murder.
My freshman year roommate attempted to murder me. She was awful for many reasons, but that was the last straw.
The administration and her parents failed to tell me she had an anger and impulse control issues she took medicine for. To make matters even worse, she had freedom, terrible freedom, so she either skipped taking her medicine, or combined it with enough alcohol to tranquilize a Budweiser Clydesdale.
I tried to make the best of it, but I inspired her to psychotic new heights for several reasons: her parents loved me from the start even though I was country hick to their Greenwich; I was in the geeky School of Foreign Diplomacy honors program, which they fervently hoped their daughter would transfer into (their favorite, her older brother was a diplomat); I did her a good intentioned favor which ultimately put her over the edge.
That favor was completely overhauling her way of dressing so she could get into a sorority during what many of you have heard, better known as Rush. This girl really wanted, more than anything, to be in a sorority. She came back from her first social event to sign up for Rush, a bit depressed. Her Number One and Two choices were visibly disinterested in her. It didn't take a genius to see why: her cotton elastic waistline pants were pulled up to her bra line, which was only slightly less disastrous than her Laura Ashley ruffle blouse with huge flowers on it.
So I did what any roommate desperate to get along would do: I revamped her wardrobe with mine. We played up her best assets, her figure and her eyes, tossing the blue eyeshadow, and my advice was to act shy and say as little as possible. When she left for her first mixer, I discretely called my older sister, who was in the same sorority, but different college than mine, and asked for her to try to help my roommate. (Yes for those who know the jargon, this made me an easier "in" as a "Legacy" to that sorority, but that's another adventure.)
Long story short, this girl got into her second chance. She was ecstatic and put her passive aggressive hate on hold. Her parents were thrilled. All was well. I was down to dealing with merely annoying typical behavior: her nearly drowning in her own vomit after parties, then leaving the stale stench of it to linger until I washed her bedding; her wearing all my clothes and taking over my makeup. (Her parents ended up buying Both of us new wardrobes when they discovered to their chagrin, during a visit that their daughter was wearing my clothes).
That actually was the beginning of the end. Putting it together, her mother made a snarky comment that she would never had gotten in without me dressing her, and thank goodness that finally somebody had given her a little polish. (Thanks mom). That triggered new, serious hate.
While all this happened, she alienated the entire floor of our co-Ed dorm by hiring a popular well liked guy to construct a loft for our room, (which I paid half of), and then never paid him. Mortified, I dug up the rest of the money, and stammered an apology in freshman angst. He refused to take it and eventually she paid him, but only half of her half, claiming his work was shoddy. He set the entire floor against her. To compound matters she began dating a creepy dude nobody liked, and her grades went into the toilet. Still, I was happier with a vomiting, socially messed up slob, then dealing with hate.
Unfortunately, my roommate unraveled during hazing and her entire sorority hated her. A guy on my floor who was dating a girl from that sorority told me my roommate was scaring the other recruits and behaving strangely. I shrugged it off. She blamed me for being hazed. I told her they all hazed (this was the 90s).
To retaliate, she destroyed my computer, threw all my shoes out the window, made any snack or drink disappear, and was just awful. I complained to the RA. The RA was in a rival sorority, so the problems got gossiped about not only in that sorority, but got back to my roommates sorority. This resulted into a gleefully malicious campaign of unprecedented inter-sorority cooperation: not only did they force her to clean our room, but they forced her to clean both sorority's meeting rooms as "punishment" for making her sorority look bad. Soon after, she quit and didn't get out of bed for a week. I felt terrible.
I had an early class that day, and out of habit grabbed my water bottle. I drank some on the way to class. It tasted a little off, but I ignored it. Five minutes into class I collapsed and had a seizure.
When I woke up, the ER doctors said I was poisoned. Campus Security had been given my bottled water which had tipped and spilled some contents onto the floor. A nerdy Encyclopedia Brown saw an iridescent sheen on the surface of the spill, so he basically set the wheels in motion and within days my roommate was arrested for trying to do my in with cleaning product.
As a result, I found out from her parents that my roommate had anger and impulse problems she took medicine for. This wasn't the first time she had been in trouble. While I was angry, I wasn't permanently affected, and the promise of a paid room for the following two semesters, without a troubled roommate, led to me not cooperating with the prosecutors, who dropped the case.
Looking back, I should have demanded a lot more, but there you have it. To my knowledge she still lives with her parents.
And that's the most awful freshman roommate, ever.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
