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[Bozack]

I was reading the thing about the JW roomate and I was wondering if anyone else had godawful roomate stories. I think I got off pretty good with my roomates (there are three of us, living stacking atop eachother in a room smaller than my bedroom at home), but maybe my standards are just low. Telling people about my room makes them cry. One of my roomates never figured out the concept of mildew, so one day we had to ask him, and it turned out he just wasn't using the dryers in the laundry, and was simply wadding his sopping wet clothes up in the bottom of his drawer. The stench was horrible. He also has not grasped the concepts of "stale" and "private showers," but I don't mind too much. Another roomate had his boyfriend spend every night with him for the two months or so they were together, but he has a curtain over his bed, and I never heard anything.
Who was the worst roomate you ever had?

[CortJstr]

When I was a second year I ended up with my roomate by lottery and he sucked so bad. Mainly just annoying shit but one time he and 2 of the other guys in our suite had a party and told two nasty lesbians they could use my bed while I was at work. I came home early enough that nothing had really happened yet.

And another time he came home late with a really butch girl and they started messing around in the room while I was asleep. From what I heard when I woke up he was going down on her and doing a very poor job of it. They eventually gave up.

Oh, and another guy in our suite threw a party at the end of the semester and made like 3 lasagnas &c and never washed the dishes. So we came back over a month later to find all the pots and shit still in the sink.

[Carlos del Vaca]

We had a roommate who, despite going to a good high school in Alexandria and to the University of Virginia, was quite possibly the most clueless and ill-informed person I've ever met.  One day she asked another of our roommates for a screwdriver.  Why do you need a screwdriver, Fluffy?  She was going to change a light bulb.  23 years old, never changed a light bulb in her life, thought you needed tools to do it.

She also had to have the concept of insurance explained to her, and asked me what the State Department did (did I mention she grew up in side the Beltway)?

The clincher was her relationships with stupid guys.  She had this habit of laughing insanely loudly at everything.  She'd be upstairs on the phone, and we could hear her laughing her fool head off.  "I don't know what that fucker said, but I guarantee you it wasn't that funny."

Maybe later I'll write about living in a fraternity house for three years.  That had its moments.

[andalucia]

Maybe later I'll write about living in a fraternity house for three years.  That had its moments.

Holy Jesus.  Please do.

I live in apartment-style residence, so I don't have a room mate per se, but I share a kitchen and living room with two other kids, and, um, actually, they're both swell.

One of them even busted me smoking pot in my room less than a week after we moved in.  She asked if I'd noticed a drug-type smell coming in the window.  I'm a terrible liar, so I just started laughing, but then we just ended up swapping comical bad-trip stories.

Applying for residence, we had to fill out little surveys about ourselves and what we wanted in a roommate, so I just said that I didn't want to live with anyone who didn't dig music.  So I ended up with the aforementioned girl, who's mostly into raves and beep-type music, and this other girl, who is painfully shy and majoring in organ, which I am pretty sure is the raddest goddamn thing I've ever heard.

[slink]

Never had a roommate, thank god, but I did share a flat with a techno DJ. That was... A lot of effort.
It wouldn't have been so bad, but he played techno lots, loud, and spent most of his time with either mood swings 'cause of ecstasy, or speed psychosis. Badly! And he whined about me doing hallucinogenics...

It was all compounded by the fact we lived upstairs from this old man who would complain, bang the ceiling, or call the police if we walked to the kitchen.

[jough]

I'm just laughing my head off at "beep type music."  That is all.

I've never had a roomate.  I value my privacy.

[miles]

I'll mention a bit more about that semester with those two nutty roomates.  I know there are better stories out there, but I often win worst roomate contests.  But you know, this being the internet and all, I probably won't here.

One roomate had all sorts of conditions.  He was this really skinny, smelly kid from...well...that's one thing.  He was either born in France or Colombia.  He claimed both.  He constantly lied.  He also, it turned out, had epilepsy, in addition to a number of emotional illnesses.

The other one was from California, his mom had died and he didn't talk to his dad.  Sad situation.  He wanted to go to flight school, but was so depressed he couldn't keep things together and ended up not being able to pay for it.  I kind of took him under my wing a bit and got him help from the state of Utah, which was hard, since he wasn't a resident, and stuff like that.

These two shared a room in a two bedroom apartment, while I shared the other room with someone else.  They hated each other, and the French/Colombian kid was the biggest jerk ever, but probably couldn't help it.

The quintessential story:  Mark (I won't name the other kid for reasons you'll see below, but I'll call him G), the one from California, was sitting on the couch one day when I got home from work.  He said, "G is in the bathroom, he's been there for a couple hours.  I think something's wrong with him."  I asked why he thought it was just more than constipation, and he said "he's been passed out on the floor."  So I go to the bathroom, and the door's open, and, sure enough, G is on the floor, barely moving, barely conscious, and reaching up to me.  He is foaming at the mouth, people.  So I call 911, and they rush to the apartment, all sticking tubes down his throat, getting blood and other fluids on the carpet.  Turned out he intentionally overdosed on his epilepsy medication.  Mark had done NOTHING!  He had been sitting on the couch for possibly two hours while G was slowly dying in the bathroom.  Had I gone over to my girlfriend's house after work (which I usually did because the place was so smelly and messy so I lived there for the most part) he would have died.  It was nuts.

Oh yeah, Mark also ordered a flare gun from with which he constantly threatened to commit suicide, until I hid it.  So he also had his scares, and I took him to the emergency room on one really bad night.

About six months ago, I saw a mug shot of G on the televsion.  The news was reporting that he had been arrested for attempted sexual assault.  He would go into girls' bedrooms, naked, with a knife, and attempt to subdue them with a pillow or something.  He was really skinny and nervous, so they easily scared him off, but JESUS!  I lived with rapist!!

[St_Zartan]

I'm just laughing my head off at "beep type music."  That is all.

I was torn between "drug-type smell" and, of course, "majoring in organ".

[CortJstr]

painfully shy and majoring in organ, which I am pretty sure is the raddest goddamn thing I've ever heard.

You can major in Game Boy if you know how to bullshit. </obligatory Gen X pop culture reference>

But that does sound like a nice application process. Our housing forms just asked if we smoked and reminded us that lying in any way has the mandatory punishment of being asked to leave.

[andalucia]

I was torn between "drug-type smell" and, of course, "majoring in organ".

Well, I mean really.  It nearly killed me when she was talking about how when she did music-faculty frosh she was surprised not to meet a single other organ major.  The few, the proud, &c.

I dunno, I'm going to have to say that thus far Miles wins, because the worst kind of roommate is definitely a dying roommate.

[V-Adore]

Wow. There's some powerful power here; mad props to the story about the Roommate Who Almost Died. College has given me a few good ones -- maybe not as good as these, but a girl can dream.

The main offender my freshman year wasn't my roommate, but she lived in the double across from me. L had a roommate (S), but she just about took the cake for Most Oblivious To Roommate I've ever seen. About a month into the school year, L's boyfriend (a sophomore) basically moved in and was constantly around -- asleep in L's bed in mid-afternoon, using our bathroom at 4 in the morning, wandering around the suite in boxer shorts and a baseball cap, the whole deal. That said, first semester everyone managed to get by. Second semester, though, L and boyfriend's habits got even worse; as far as I could tell, all they were doing the entire semester was smoking lots of pot, leaving themselves sticky notes all over the room with pot-related epiphanies so they could remember later (imagine an entire desk covered with stickies with messages like "BEWARE THE PEPSI, IT IS PLOTTING AGAINST YOU"), and staying up until 4 AM playing Eminem very loudly. It was as if L was on some sort of weird extended vacation -- and, I learned around April of that year, she was. Apparently L had just never gone to classes second semester, but because she was a super-legacy (one of those "family has gone here for four generations, grandfather paid for the tennis courts" legacies), the deans talked with her and agreed to have her take a year off, starting spring semester, and let her stay in the dorms. Whee! Party all the time!

I never really talked to S about it, but she was an absolute saint. I envy her powers of tolerance.

Last year, I finally had a roommate of my own. C and I didn't exactly get off on the right foot; during move-in, my mom and I arrived before C's family, and so we waited for them to arrive so we could organize things. We went out for lunch on the second day, we came back -- and everything I brought was piled on one of the beds, a bed I couldn't get to because rearranged furniture and boxes entirely walled off my side of the room. C and her folks had arrived in force and had chosen fairly arbitrarily which set of furniture was the "best" and thus who got which side. It shadowed the rest of the experience. (The rest of the C story is fairly elaborate, drama-laden, and unpleasant; suffice to say everything was fine until February, when apparently everything abruptly became Not Fine and C moved out, unloaded months' worth of anger over issues she never told me about, and managed to make me a dorm pariah. Yay fun.)

This year, I have a single, and I'm on a floor with two friends of mine. We are all ridiculously considerate of one another -- "is my alarm set too early? I hate to wake you up" / "I hope my music isn't too loud" considerate. It's a nice experience.

[Ben-San]

"Jamie, where are my spare light bulbs?"
"I threw one of mine out the window to see what it would do and it exploded. It was pretty awesome so I threw the rest of mine, and when I ran out I started throwing yours."

"Jamie, why are there holes in my sports bottle?"
"I built a blowgun!"

"Jamie, what was that noise and what just whizzed past my ear?"
"I'm dropping Tic-Tacs into an electric fan!"

He seemed 100% sincere and genuinely well-meaning but he was completely insane. He stuck around for a month and a half.

[Golfhaus]

When I was 18, figuring I was a Damned Adult Now and not willing to live by my mother's house rules, I rented a two-bedroom with Rob, a friend of mine from high school. He was about the nerdiest person I knew, but we got along okay. It was especially great when he got a job as a night-shift manager at a grocery store - I was gone during the day, he was gone during the night, so it really was like having our own apartments - they just happened to be the same one.

Then Rob decided to bring in a third roommate, Donnie, to cut down on costs a little bit. Donnie was a serious pothead, and a wannabe dealer. He promised to never bring "any of that crap" into the apartment. It lasted two weeks. He promised to pay 1/3 of all the bills. That lasted two months. The remaining 8 was spent rent-free. He slept on the living room couch, where my TV was, so it got coopted more often than not. It got to the point where I started doing things to annoy him purposely. I worked at Busch Gardens, and "appropriated" a couple of CDs of Scottish bagpipe music, which I played often to his dismay.

The two standout moments of this era were thus:

1) I went to the grocery store one morning and really stocked up for myself. We had pretty strict you-only-eat-the-food-you-buy rules, so $90 later, I figured I was set for at least a week and half. I went to work. His friends came over, lit up, and ate ALL of my food. I came back from work to find an empty refrigerator, empty cupboards, and six STILL-HIGH jackoffs listening to some of MY CDs. I had to literally store my food in my closet so they wouldn't find it.

2) Donnie had a cousin who was even more drugged out than he was. Donnie was a pothead, his cousin did the serious shit. I came home from work one day and Rob told me, "Eric, go through EVERYTHING you have, make sure nothing's missing. I think Donnie's cousin went through our stuff stealing money." Sure enough, the little bank I kept all of my change in (which was about $40 worth) was gone. His cousin denied everything, but Rob got into his car, opened the glove compartment, and all of my rolled change came falling out. He ended up leaving, and I fell asleep. I woke up about 2 am to see a million emergency vehicles in the parking lot, and thinking, "Man, whoever got all THAT out here is seriously messed up." Then I heard a commotion in the living room, and that was all I needed to hear. Apparently, his cousin had also stolen (and taken) all of Rob's prescription medication, come back to the apartment, passed out on the floor, and wouldn't wake up. Once they revived him, he was bragging to the police and EMTs that "I'm tough, man, I can take all the drugs I want and not die."

I started moving stuff back to my mother's house the next day.

[slink]

Jesus man. What is with all these people who tried to die?

At least in my time in that flat the only person who threatened to die was my girlfriend. Oh wait, not that sucked worse. Especially considering the DJ refused to call a fuck*ng ambulance because of the drugs he kept around the place! She was fine in the end at least. She had been spiked by something... God knows what! I never forgave him for that though, considering just how fuck*ng terrified I was as she started convulsing after I managed to get her to bed.
Moral: Techno is the devil's music!

[Golfhaus]

she started convulsing after I managed to get her to bed.

Isn't that what USUALLY happens, though?

sorry, but one shouldn't open the door if they don't want someone to walk through it...