People Share Stories About Their Most Ridiculous Roommate Situation
24. He Was The Problematic Roommate And Admits It
“This ‘happened’ from when I was 19 until I was 27. I’ve been diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome since I was 12. My mom went somewhere between “to hell and back” and “the ends of the universe” to find out about my condition and get me the kind of care and alternative teaching solutions, so I could function. This went so far as to land me on my province’s disability pension program to help cover costs.
(This was in the late 1990s so Asperger’s and autism awareness weren’t exactly mainstream.)
When I graduated high school at 18, I had absolutely no idea how to move out and live on my own. So my superhero of a mom went ahead and found a program in a neighboring city that had people move into a house supervised by professional support staff. These support staff basically became your mom/dad and taught you how to be mindful of bills, how to cook, clean, form habits, and even get a job.
I lived there for two years before I ‘graduated’ by moving out and getting an apartment with another ‘graduate’ of the program in the city. (Also, at this point in my life, I had attempted suicide 3 times from issues unrelated to this story. This does not in any way excuse my behavior. It just comes up later in the story.) This is all backstory. By the way, the hell begins here.
Pretty much right from the start, my monetary habits were bad.
I spent a lot on video games, junk food, and card games (mostly in that order). I almost never had cash on hand and my money was always dangerously close to running out. I was living paycheck to paycheck despite the fact that I still had a disability pension that covered my rent, most of my utilities, and a decent portion of a reasonable food budget. Of course, my ‘budgets’ (had they ever actually existed) would have been wildly unreasonable and it was only by pure luck (and the odd bailout from my dad who was by no means rich himself) did I get by.
I never missed a bill or borrowed money from my roommate, but I got extremely close a few times.
And then I was fired from my job.
Things spiraled out of control quickly. Despite losing a sizable portion of my income, my spending habits didn’t change at all. If anything they got worse. The stress of being fired (something I had never experienced before) coupled with my Asperger’s caused me to stress eat like there was no tomorrow.
Instead of a bailout from dad every 10 months, it became monthly or even weekly. My dad is a nice guy, and he’s always had a soft spot for me so he never once thought of saying no. (I would later learn he took out a SECOND F*CKING MORTGAGE ON HIS HOUSE just to keep a ‘son fund’ on hand so he could be there to cover for me.)
And then my mom died. The stress and despair of losing her pushed my bad habits into overdrive.
I started missing bills, buying more games, running out of food, and literally starving for days on end (I was never in any danger as I was pretty overweight, but it still sucked), stopped cleaning the apartment/doing dishes, and eventually even had to borrow money off my roommate. This continued right up until my landlord offered us a buyout for the remainder of our lease because they wanted to upgrade the building and charge a HUGE increase in rent for anyone who returned.
At this point, my roommate was sick of me.
I owed him something north of $500, my rent (which was supposed to be covered by a government disability pension, remember) was a month late and I was mooching his food every chance I got because I had none of my own to eat. I honestly hope he found better people afterward because I was a roommate from hell at the end.
I was terrified of being evicted and did not want to take the buyout. Where I live, if a buyout is not accepted and the tenants have no outstanding issues, that can lead to being evicted, the landlord has to honor the agreement until the renewal date.
By the same token, though, in order to receive the buyout, all tenants living in a unit have to agree with the buyout. If anyone whose name is on the lease says no, no one gets a dime. I told my roommate I wanted to stay. He was completely not impressed and replied. “I am so sick of living with you. You have two options. Option 1: agree to the buyout and leave with a bit of money in your pocket.
Option 2: Be stubborn until the buyout offer has expired and I’ll put in my notice the day after.” If he moved out, my landlord had made it perfectly clear that they would not let me find a new roommate and I would have to cover the entire rent for the two-bedroom by myself. I could never have afforded that even if I had good financial habits, let alone with the way I was at that point.
So I called up my dad, broke down, and cried my eyes out.
I was scared sh*tless, I couldn’t see a way out of my predicament and I knew deep down that it was all my fault. I told my dad that I didn’t see a way out except one: I lived on the 11th floor and the ‘express’ elevator was a cost-saving, efficient means of escaping this nightmare. It didn’t help that I was out on the balcony while saying this. He could hear the breeze through the phone.
This obviously freaked my dad out enough to contact the only person he could think of who would go on to save my life: my aunt.
Backstory on my aunt: She’s a 65-year-old woman (sister of my mother) who’s worked 35+ years at a rail yard. Physically demanding work that’s kept her in great shape and developed a no-nonsense attitude. She’s so tough, she’s mouthed off to guys three times her size and had THEM back down.
She is old-school strict and EXTREMELY good at handling money. She moved out of the house at 16 and, by the time she was 24, was PUTTING A DOWN PAYMENT ON A CONDO (that she still lives in 40+ years later). This woman’s favorite game was Monopoly and she kicked so much a** at it that no one wanted to play with her. She and my father have always been close, but she and I, despite having a great relationship when I was a little kid, had a deteriorating one at this point because our personalities clashed.
Every time we were in the same room together, it was like someone had put on Jerry Springer at max volume. She is exacting with language and hates being questioned on something she believes she’s explained adequately. I, on the other hand, will ask constant questions over and over until something is explained to me in a way that I understand, which isn’t always the easy or simple way that something is usually explained. You can probably see how bad a combination this was.
We hadn’t talked to each other in almost eight years apart from the odd ‘social call’ that inevitably ended up with shouting and tears.
Anyway, back to the story. My dad actually kept me on the phone because he was THAT worried that if he hung up, the next call would be from the local PD about his son’s death. Even so, his voice never betrayed an ounce of panic. He grabbed up his work phone with his other hand and called my aunt.
This was at THREE IN THE MORNING on a Monday before work. Despite the back-breaking work that she did every day, she woke up and picked up on the first ring. My dad, worried that me hearing my aunt’s voice would make me more depressed and possibly make me jump (because we always argued), muted himself, and explained to her (in a quick 10 second aside) that her nephew was standing on his balcony and seriously contemplating jumping the f*ck off of it.
He (my dad) had no idea what to do. He unmuted himself to reply to something I said before I launched into another batch of sobbing and incoherent mumbling. Then he remuted himself to beg her to help me. He didn’t even get past “could you” before she cut him off with “I’m on it.” She hung up and dialed my number.
I see the number on my phone and say “My…aunt?…is calling me???”
His reply. “It’s three in the morning.
You should probably answer it.”
I say. “Why bother? She’ll just yell at me again. I’m just a stupid f*ckup in her eyes. I know what she’s going to say to me. I’d rather just eat the pavement now if it’s all the same to you.”
For the first time, the panic edges into his voice. “If you’re seriously going to do this, the least you could do is pick up and say goodbye to her.”
I can’t refute his logic.
So I hang up on him and pick up her call. I can’t even get past a dejected “hi aunt” before she’s telling me that she’s on her way. Just go to sleep, you’ve got time; she’ll be by tomorrow and fix everything. I’m constantly trying to interject with “Don’t bother, I’ll just jump and you can be rid of me.” And she won’t have it. She tells me “That’s tomorrow. If I’m only getting one more day with my favorite nephew, I’m making it count.” She repeats this over and over until she hears me go back inside.
She makes me promise that if I decide to jump before she gets there, I’ll call her, so she can say goodbye. She texts my dad while still on the phone with me, telling him to call me back so she can make some arrangements. When I pick up my dad’s call, she goes to work.
First, she e-mailed her boss to say that a family emergency had come up and she was taking both vacation and PTO (she had NEVER taken PTO or vacation time in the 30+ years she worked there).
Then she woke up her common-law husband to tell him that she was leaving to go help her nephew. He could call her if he needed to talk to her. Then she got in her car at FOUR IN THE MORNING and drove for three hours to come to see me. As much as she saved my life that night/morning, that wasn’t the true saving. That was to come.
The next day, she showed up at my apartment at noon.
I welcomed her in only to see that she had three huge bags of groceries. She helped me get it stocked in the kitchen and then we sat down to chat. I started explaining how deep in the sh*t I was, taking full responsibility that everything was my fault, and that she really should’ve just let me jump last night. By the time I’d finished, she had tears in her eyes. Then her expression hardened and she just asked me for details on what I owed and to whom.
She proceeded to settle every debt I had, even the debt to my roommate, who had no way of enforcing it. Then she went to the landlord and haggled an additional three thousand dollars into the buyout. We signed the papers and she started hunting for a place to live. It took her all of ten days to find a room for rent at a reasonable price. She took me to sign the lease the next day.
Then she told me that I was closing all of my bank accounts and opening a joint account with her. Not asked me, TOLD ME. I was sort of on autopilot and just went with everything she said.
I was waiting for her to start berating me. She never did. Finally, she co-ordinated the move from my apartment to the room for rent, personally doing almost all the heavy lifting, both loading, and unloading. Finally, with me settled into a new home, she went home and back to work.
She started teaching me budgeting. She didn’t restrict my money, apart from the rent for my room. I got every dime of my disability pension after rent and could do what I wanted with it, but every Sunday, I had to go over the bank statement with her and explain and justify every cent. She never yelled at me when I f*cked up, but she made me add up all the transactions that weren’t in the budget and then showed me how much money I was wasting with my tendencies.
This lasted for two years. Finally, I ‘graduated’ from the program and, while I wasn’t the extreme money saver my aunt was, I’ve never run out of money since, even though I don’t always have a job. I’ve never had to borrow money from my dad again.
Last year, she finally retired from the rail yard. As a retirement present, I bought her an all-expenses-paid day trip to a spa in her city. When she received the pass in the mail, she tried to get me to refund it, stating that I didn’t have the money to be doing things like this.
The spa day cost $450. I e-mailed her copies of my bank statements showing that I could easily afford to spend that money out of the $2,500 I had saved up since graduation. I told her that I wasn’t taking no for an answer and if she loved me, she’d accept it and enjoy herself. She told me later that it was the best retirement gift she got from anyone. Not the spa, mind you, but the bank statements. (But she enjoyed the spa too.)”
23. Living That Apartment Life... For Free
“I lived with a roommate who was a complete and total narcissist. It was a $1,500/mo apartment (three bedrooms in a nice part of town) that should have been $500 a person, but he was a lazy person and maybe contributed ~$150 of that. His dumb girl wasn’t much better, contributing about the same amount per month, but she was at least more pleasant to talk to.
I lived with them for about six months and paid the $1,200 I was paying to cover the rent because I didn’t want my credit to take the hit that would result from an eviction.
The whole time, they were going out to eat at nice places all the time; meanwhile, I never could do anything because I was burning up all my cash just trying to cover the rent.
Of course, I would talk to the dude saying, ‘Man, this can’t continue, it’s stressing me out, I can’t afford to buy food most of the time,’ but since he was a narcissist, he would turn the argument around to somehow make it about how ungrateful a person I was.
The end finally came when I spoke with the leasing office and explained that, while I loved the apartment, I was the only one who was really giving the property managers any real money and the situation was untenable.
I also said I would love to continue doing business with them (possibly with a smaller apartment), but I was locked into my lease and couldn’t afford to pay an early termination fee because these jerks I lived with were sucking me dry.
They looked up the paperwork and said, ‘Well, it looks like only [narcissistic roommate] filled out lease paperwork, so you have no legal obligation to pay the rent.’
‘Is that so?’ I responded. I thought for a few moments and then said to the agent, ‘You should probably get eviction paperwork ready for next month.
I have no intention of continuing to fund their lavish lifestyle. What other units do you have?’ I went back to the apartment and began packing.
One day, they came home to see that my bedroom was empty and my car was gone. They started packing like crazy for the next three days, having to throw a lot of it away because they were going to get locked out before they could get it all. On the second day, the power was turned off, because it was in my name at the old apartment, and now that I had my own place, I wasn’t about to pay for the power in two different places. So they had to frantically pack, in the sweltering July heat, in total darkness.
Eff those people.”
22. The Not So Suite Life
“We were in suite-style dorms. 4 people per 2 bathrooms, a living area, and 4 bedrooms. They were tiny but separate. Thin walls, but we were all in our own locked rooms.
This happened during finals week. This particular night, I was up late, chatting with some friends on Teamspeak and going over some Calc 3 notes. It’s about 2 AM.
The roommate who shares a wall with me knocks on my door, asks if I could be quiet.
Now, I’m not a person who’s particularly loud on the mic, but hey, it’s finals week. I agree without a second thought, drop out of voice chat, and get back to my studying.
A few minutes later, he comes back, knocks on my door, asks if I could turn off my light (which was only coming out under the door. Keep in mind, there’s both my door and his). I’m a bit annoyed, but I was wrapping up so I figured I could finish up by the light of my monitors and lamp.
Ten minutes pass. I get another knock. I’m getting a bit annoyed, but then he’s just pleading with me to ‘stop making noise.’ He seems stressed out and whatnot, and I knew his exam was a lot earlier than mine was, in the morning. Since by this point I was just about done, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was having trouble sleeping?
It’s about 3 am by now, so I decided to get to sleep.
Ten minutes pass, oddly enough, I hear our dorm door open. I hear the roommate mentioned talking to somebody, and I hear a woman’s response. Shortly after, the sounds of rather loud sex start coming from his room.
On finals week, this d*uche begged me to stop studying, so he could bang some chick without the awkwardness of “my roommate is still awake.”
I felt a bit better, though, the next day. I ask him how the final he had gone, only for his response to be, “Oh, that’s tomorrow.” This was odd, of course, because a buddy of mine was in the same section as him and had it that morning. I couldn’t help but take pleasure in the fact that he soon discovered he had missed a final.”
21. She Threw Out Her Wedding Cake Out Of Jealousy
“The title pretty much sums it up. I had a roommate with whom I used to be close friends, until, that is, I got engaged. From that point on, she made it her mission to make my life in the house hell, all while making me seem like an a**hole any time I confronted her about it.
She would throw out my food. If I had a board game out on a bookshelf and she didn’t like it, I’d find it in the basement with her two cats that p*ssed and sh*t all over the place.
She would go out of her way to make a huge racket in the kitchen if my fiancé and I were sitting quietly in the dining room or in the living room watching a movie.
Well, lo and behold, I got married in October. I even invited her to the small reception we had at a brewery, but she was “too busy” to go and then had a meltdown when I brought a few people back to our house (which had been the clear plan from the start) to have pizza and eat the rest of the cake.
My husband and I had told her for months that we would be buying a house and I would be moving out.
I offered to find her and my other roommate a replacement since they could never get their sh*t together to actually pay the rent on time, despite it being about $450/person. (That’s a story for a whole other post.)
Well, one night after the reception, I was sitting downstairs eating a slice of leftover wedding cake and got a phone call from our realtor that our offer on a house was accepted. Low and behold, I come back downstairs, and not only was the slice of cake I was eating gone, but my entire wedding cake leftovers, including the top tier we were saving in the freezer, were in the trash. With old food dumped over them, I couldn’t even save any.”
20. The Clean Freak Who Never Cleans Up After Herself
“I had a clean freak roommate who was crazy. She’d literally FREAK OUT and scream and clean up after you while you were cooking. I’d cut vegetables and be putting the first part into a pan, and she’d walk over furious that I’d left the cutting board out and messy for her to clean up – I’m literally still using it! I’ll clean up when I’m done using the cutting board! She however only ate two things, chicken nuggets and popcorn.
WHICH SHE NEVER CLEANED UP AFTER.
She cooked the chicken nuggets on the same baking sheet every day. And when it was so caked in nugget residue it would burn in the oven, she’d put a layer of tin foil over it and cook on that. And then when that layer was gross, instead of removing the tin foil layer, she’d add more tin foil over the top!
When she moved out, she left the pan in the drawer under the stove covered in six layers of greasy burnt crumbled chicken nuggets.
She couldn’t stand me not cleaning a cutting board of vegetables halfway through cooking them, but apparently, a baking sheet covered in three months of chicken grease and crumbs can go back in the drawer?
She also made herself popcorn every night and then left the uncleaned pot on the stove all the time. That pot was never cleaned.
She did this before she’d go to bed at 7 pm. She’s had the same bedtime since she was a child.
She never went to bed after 8 pm. If you made it past 9 without waking her up though, she was a sound sleeper and the noise level wouldn’t wake her.
She would invite her nieces over with no warning. So I was working retail at the time and had just worked an inventory until 4 am. I got home and at 6 am she and her nieces aged 6 and 9 started playing games that involved shrieking.
We’d never have any idea children were even in the apartment until the morning activities and she would get furious at us for implying we’d like them to keep it down until 8 or 9 because ‘this is just as much her place as ours and she can do whatever she wants!’ However, if we had anyone stay for more than two hours, she’d ask us to pay a higher share of the rent because they now counted as an additional resident of the apartment and we needed to be responsible for the burden.
She’d watch TV in her room with the door open, and get mad if you made too much noise in the living room on the other end of the house while she was watching.
But she would never change the volume, or close the door. If she couldn’t hear, she’d lecture you about roommate respect and watching the volume instead of shutting the door and turning the volume up a small smidgen.
Remember when I said she was a total neat freak and would walk around the kitchen cleaning up after you while you were still using items to cook? She made a big deal about how the cleanliness of the kitchen was of the utmost importance. I got off work two hours early one day and walked in and what did I find her doing? Cutting someone’s hair IN THE KITCHEN! There was hair all over the stove, counter, and floor. Vegetables are a kitchen abomination, but she cuts people’s hair in there twice a week and doesn’t think it’s a big deal at all.
I still hate her guts.”
19. Bad Roommate Thinks Her Roommate Is Actually The Bad Roommate
Sounds like a defense mechanism.
“Hi all,
I have moved into a new university residence a couple of months ago, and since then, the roommate situation is simply atrocious. The girl I am living with, K., never cleans after herself, ever. Here is a list of her most impressive achievements:
-
Naturally, she leaves splashes of liquids, chunks of food, and bread crumbs, as well as empty packages of juice or microwave food, all over the kitchen. One day, when she kicked her old rice bowl from the fridge and spilled it all over the floor, she left it lying there and went to her room…
In the bathroom, she wreaks havoc, too. Every day when I use the bathroom upstairs to shower, which she primarily uses, and I use the one downstairs, which is without a shower, I come upon scraps of toilet paper and female hygiene products on the floor of the bathroom and somehow even in the corridor and in an “empty” room adjacent to hers, which will figure in the story a bit later. She doesn’t clean at all, neither in the bathroom nor in the kitchen.
I usually do all the cleaning around the house. Interestingly, when I once forgot to replace the garbage bag with a new one and left her bin empty, she didn’t bother to put a new bag but simply started putting all garbage in the bin without a bag (and on the floor). Greater still, she leaves toilet paper scraps and bits of food on the staircase. She also takes days to clean her dishes. Because of her standards of cleanliness, I have struggled with the fruit fly problem, until I realized that the source of the infestation is the compost bag, which I didn’t even use and she didn’t care to replace.
I had to throw the bin away and buy a new one.
-
Relatedly, she leaves food lying around for days on end and doesn’t bother to throw it away even when it goes bad. I have recently thrown away two-month-old moldy strawberries and moldy bread, as well as some fast food that sat on the kitchen table for around a week.
-
It is a minor point, but she occupies an entire fridge and freezer, hardly leaving me any space to put my food there.
(I don’t eat much, but I think it is still incredibly rude.)
-
Her room smells so much that I can smell it from downstairs every time she opens the door. It is a very foul smell, and my friend who has been to the place says it is most likely her dirty laundry, which is likely as she has not done laundry for two months.
-
Finally, she uses a room adjacent to her, a room for which she does not pay and which can be occupied by any new roommate anytime, to do her art there and to pile her garbage, too.
A month ago, I have reached out to RA to detail my concerns.
He wanted us to have a meeting and talk, but as I have heard her complaining to her mother about me and my request to talk about it with an RA, saying that “her bathroom is as dirty as mine” (not true, and besides, I have never seen her cleaning my bathroom, and I clean her bathroom regularly), I decided to proceed in a more civil manner. I reached out to her, laid out my concerns politely, and suggested that in order to change the atmosphere in the house, we might want to get to know each other and perhaps we should get a coffee sometime and I could show her around campus, as she is new to it.
Well, she said that she will start throwing trash away regularly and clean her bathroom. As you might imagine, this didn’t happen. As for that coffee, while she agreed at first, she then complained to her mother that “nothing changed,” and I asked her again, how about that coffee. She didn’t reply.
A couple of days ago, she posted on her Instagram, and perhaps she posted some things before, first, of my tote bag, which I accidentally left in the bathroom.
I hardly ever leave anything there, but this time, as I was rather sleep-deprived, I accidentally left this tote bag with my, excuse me, dirty underwear in it. Not great, but that’s very rich of her to complain about it, given the smell coming from her room. More precisely, she posted this with a caption that, “a mysterious bag appeared in her bathroom,” and she thinks “there is a rat inside it.” Who on Earth does that? Posting this on Instagram in the first place is terribly vulgar, and suggesting such a preposterous thing is just stupid.
The next day, after I vacuum-cleaned the house at 9-10 am, she complained that I take loud showers at 5 am (it is true that I take a shower at 5 am, but it is no more loud than hers; besides, if it bothers her so very much, she could simply message me about that), and then TWO HOURS later, I vacuum-cleaned the house and the “empty” room. First, this is simply not true, I vacuumed cleaned it at 9, not at 7 (and according to the residence standards, I am allowed to make noise after 7 am anyways).
Secondly, the room isn’t exactly empty, is it? If there weren’t scraps of toilet paper lying here and there, I wouldn’t bother.
What baffles me the most about that Instagram story is that she referred to me as “our lovely ghost roommate” and that she wants to “throw hands.” Excellent, what a delightful girl. I find it quite funny that she refers to me as a “ghost” given that our lack of interaction is due to her unwillingness to make an effort and get to know each other, and that, well, I DO leave my room and the apartment every day and I socialize with people regularly.
She, on the other hand, never leaves the room.
Yesterday night, as I was quietly studying in my room or so I believe, she messaged me asking to be quieter as she is trying to sleep. I asked her to specify what precisely is bothering her, because if she doesn’t, I cannot eliminate the source of noise and to not hesitate to contact me if she has any other concerns. Being spineless as I am, I didn’t reiterate the list of my concerns. Guess what? She never bothered to reply.
I requested a room transfer, but I am not counting my chances that the residence managers will sympathize with me.”
18. Just Call Him Maggot Man
I’m sorry, but I’d lose it living with this guy!
“Guy moves into a room in a shared house with my friend. They begin to realize the guy is a not-so-functional alcoholic. Never leaves his room, they hear him groaning and stumbling around a lot.
One day, my friend goes to do laundry and the new guy has just finished a load in the washer. When my friend goes to put his clothes in the washer, he notices it’s full of rice.
Rice that moves.
Friend screams, take his clothes out of the washer, starts hot bleaching the inside of the machine trying to get all the maggots out. The housemates go to confront the new guy in his room about the laundry maggots and see he is living in absolute filth.
Piles of clothes next to vomit puddles that have now attracted flies and maggots, bottles of pee, and garbage strewed around, there is no mattress; he sleeps on the floor, the wood on the floor is WARPED from all the puke on it, there is vomit in the air vent…
They ask him if he is peeing in bottles where does he poop. Apparently, he was going to the nearby gas station to take dumps because he was worried the housemates would be judgmental.
They kick him out less than three weeks after he arrives and clean the room, discovering FURTHER maggot and puke piles. They leave all his furniture in the front yard to be collected whenever, while guy stumbles off to find new digs to ruin further.”
17. She Should Have Listened To Her Gut Feeling
“I decided to take on a roommate a few years ago in this duplex my husband and I were renting. We had a spare room, and an acquaintance had found out he needed a place to stay. We had him over for dinner to discuss details and get to know him. I felt kind of weird about him after the meetup and my husband said, “Oh, it’ll be fine. It’s going to be a huge help anyway.”
Months went by, and we didn’t hear from him, so I felt pretty relieved.
Then about 2.5 months later, I get a call from him. He’s ready to move in. Once again, I’m pretty hesitant, but my husband kept saying the same old, “It’s going to help us out a lot with the rent.” So, he moves in.
Huge boxes stayed in the living room for the majority of the time he lived there. He had his own bedroom and separate bathroom but still had stuff in the living room and in the storage space in the car port.
Every time he wanted to tell us about something, he’d drag it out into the living room and then just leave it. Eventually, I would just preemptively say, “That’s not staying out here.”
I’d have company over, and he would engage with them, which was ok at first, but then he’d get super combative or start bringing up politics which no one asked for. I wish this was the worst of it.
There were times when my husband was sick or I was asleep, and he’d come to our room.
I don’t feel comfortable sleeping with the door closed, and our dog wouldn’t have it any other way, but our room was also on the complete opposite side of the duplex.
He would start drinking beers from 4 am until 7:30, going out to the fridge every half hour. One night, he decided to start practicing music at 3 am, blasting the music. There were nights he was so drunk and/or stoned, he’d stumble through the living room to the kitchen mumbling to himself and didn’t even see me.
One time, he came out of his room (which led right into the living room), and his pants fell down. That was fun. He washed his clothes in his bathroom. I lost tons of silverware because he decided to combine all of our stuff when he moved in. He would eat in his room and then all would be lost to the abyss of whatever was in there. He smoked so much that the whole house smelled of it.
I don’t mind pot. Just don’t saturate my house with it. Husband suspected he was selling hard drugs out of our house.
I’m sure I’m missing stuff. But combined with all this and … you can just feel dark energy around a person even if you don’t full-on subscribe to that, and something instinctual kicks in and you start feeling uneasy. I kept telling my husband that I didn’t feel safe with him in the house.
One day, I asked my roommate to receive a really important and expensive package, insisting that if he couldn’t or wasn’t going to be there, I’ll just reroute it.
He reassured me he would. A notification came that the package was missed. Whole ordeal, but basically, he was too drunk in the middle of the day to make this happen. He tried to call FedEx, but …yeah he was incoherent. I was furious, but I didn’t want to talk to him anymore about it. He followed me outside. I told him, “I don’t want to talk about it” and went inside to another bedroom that was designated as mine and shut the door.
He opens the door and keeps trying to talk to me! That totally freaked me out. Yet still… not creepy enough for my husband.
What was? The day roommate thought we weren’t home, went into our bedroom, and helped himself to our water dispenser. That. That was it.
I promptly wrote a formal letter of eviction, citing his invasion of our privacy, although he told everyone it was because me and my husband were getting separated. He was out in 30 days.
Roommate? Never again. Husband? Ex (though still friends).”
16. He May Not Be The Bread Winner Anymore, But Don't Call Him A Bum
“A few years ago (when I was in my early 20s), I moved in with a friend (we’ll call him Bob). Bob was a bit of a heavy drinker and partier but mainly did so outside the house, so it was really no inconvenience. It was me and my (long since ex) girl also living there.
I had lost my job and been out of work for a while (not for lack of trying) in a very small town with not much to do for work.
Bob worked 2 jobs (he loved money and alcohol so much, he didn’t mind if he hardly had a life to get to enjoy it), and my girl worked in a nursing home during the day.
I felt pretty worthless, since I was no longer the breadwinner anymore but did what I could to help out. I got food stamps to take on the food situation for the household, cleaned, cooked, and did whatever I could to keep anyone needing to do a thing once they were done working for the day.
It was literally the least I could do given the circumstances.
About a month or two into our living arrangements, Bob suggested his old high school buddy (we’ll call him D*ck) move in. Bob explained that he worked on the boats and he would be gone for a month at a time and back for 2 weeks. Dry, rinse, and repeat. My girl and I thought, shouldn’t be a problem right? WRONG.
From moment one, day one, D*ck was a major passive-aggressive a**hole.
Bob walked him over to introduce us and he shook my hand in a manner that he was obviously trying to crush my hand and intimidate me. I could tell from how he looked and acted like an entitled a**hole, but what he did and said immediately after confirmed it.
“So, you don’t work and live here rent-free? Must be why Bob asked me to move in. Sure is nice for you, huh?”
Before I could say anything, Bob spoke up and clarified that while I didn’t work, I kept the house clean, cooked, and kept the fridge stocked; I was not mooching and was doing my part.
D*ck proceeded to say, “But his girl works while he stays at home all day? That’s totally not cool. It should be you taking care of her, not the other way around.”
While I totally agreed that I’d rather be there for her than the other way around, I didn’t need this jacka** commenting and making assumptions that this is what I wanted or needed to hear.
“Look, I don’t enjoy being the one who stays at home while everyone else works.
I’d rather be out there working, contributing, and doing something worthwhile. This is not something I chose. If someone called me and offered me a job right now, I’d take it in a heartbeat. I’d prefer it if you stopped inferring that I’m just a lazy bum,” I said as politely as I could, despite how angry I was.
D*ck looked at me like I grew a second head or something and told me to calm down like he hadn’t said anything that was the least bit insulting, even though he clearly had.
He didn’t apologize of course and he eventually met my girl when she came home.
D*ck was very polite and proceeded to make passive passes at her. “We need to find you a working man,” or “You could use someone like me to treat you right.” My girl was less than enthused by this and told him it was none of his business and she was more than happy with me. So, from the get-go, neither of us liked D*ck at all.
We resolved to keep as much space between him and us as possible.
Unfortunately, D*ck had about as much social awareness, social cues, personal boundaries, and proper etiquette as a rock. He constantly came barging into our living area (oftentimes before, after, or during s*x), even after being told to either knock and be acknowledged to enter or not come in at all. Also, D*ck turned the upstairs half of the house into a 2-week long party central when he was home.
It was loud.
Between having over a dozen people all drunkenly stomping around and being loud, he was BLARING music so loud that the entire house was vibrating. His parties were also causing a huge mess in both the house and yard, as well as damage. D*ck and his buddies were also cleaning out the cupboards and fridge of all the food for the rest of us, effectively leaving the rest of us with nothing and having to rebuy the food out of pocket.
Bob was almost never home; he was either working or at a girl’s place.
Even when he was home, he came in so drunk that he would pass out so hard he couldn’t hear any of it. He also woke up hungover and rushing into work, so he hardly noticed all that was going on. My girl and I sat down with Bob and explained the situation to him.
We explained that we had tried talking to D*ck and telling him that he needed to quit coming into our living area all the time and to either politely keep it down so my girl could get some sleep for work or take it elsewhere.
We told him about the food, the major mess he was making, and the damage to the house. Bob was livid. He told us that he’d have a talk with D*ck and fix it. We hoped that would fix the issue. WRONG.
This clearly, like everything else, didn’t get through at all. And from there, it only got worse. The intrusions into our living area were more frequent, ruining our s*x life when D*ck was home and the parties got even bigger and more out of hand.
A couple of times, the neighbors actually called the cops on D*ck’s parties and he still wouldn’t calm down. It was a living hell.
We now knew that the situation would never improve and further complaints would only make it worse than before. We couldn’t move out given our financial situation, and between us and D*ck (being Bob’s oldest and best friend), we didn’t want to risk getting kicked out for causing issues. So I began finding ways to get back at D*ck silently and without a way to try to link it to us.
Firstly, he had to do his laundry downstairs since that’s where the washer and dryer were located, in our living area. So whenever he had to put his laundry in the dryer, I’d stop it and pee in it before starting it up again. All his clothes and bedding smelled like straight-up p*ss and he couldn’t figure out why (D*ck wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed).
Secondly, whenever D*ck was gone, I’d go upstairs and dump out 75% of the alcohol out and replaced it with water.
This reduced how loud and rambunctious he’d get, with the added bonus of having to go out and get more alcohol in the middle of the night. Effectively, we cut down the disruption by 50%, but it still persisted.
Thirdly, I would also, just for fun, put his toothbrush in the dirty toilet while he was out and put it back. D*ck started complaining that he constantly tasted sh*t every time he used his toothbrush and that he couldn’t understand why.
This was just icing for me, but he actually had a lot of trouble hooking up with anyone because of it.
Eventually, despite all this, it didn’t rid us of either his presence or behavior and it was still taking its toll on my girl. This had continued for a few months before I concocted a way to get him out of the house longer. D*ck always left on the last Sunday of his 2 weeks off in the morning to return to the boats.
He also had a big fancy truck with HUGE custom tires on it. These tires typically ran about $300 to $400 a tire and were special order tires, hard to find outside of ordering them online. So, I started putting nails under a couple of his tires before he left, so they’d puncture his tires when he left, but they wouldn’t go flat immediately. He’d get to the boats fine, but his tires would be flat.
D*ck would have to stay a week or even the whole 2 weeks special ordering or tracking down new tires while he was stuck in the town he was in at a hotel.
My girl and I would either have just one week of misery or the whole thing being peace and quiet. It was glorious. This continued for about 2 or 3 months before D*ck finally couldn’t take all his misfortune anymore. He told Bob he was moving out when he got back and that it was because everything was going wrong since he moved in. This was especially funny because Bob told us afterward that he was planning to ask D*ck to move out because he was trashing the house, driving up the utilities, eating all the food, and refusing to pay the difference.
D*ck finally showed up a week late from the boats because of the tire situation, so there was no time for him to relax between finding somewhere to put his stuff, somewhere to live, and move everything.
This took him all of his final off week to do. Finally, on his last day, D*ck came busting into our room and started being rude and saying he was leaving because everything had been going wrong and felt off since he moved in, clearly wanting sympathy or something. We just nodded and said that’s tough while going about our business. D*ck just kept going on and on about everything, despite the fact that we weren’t paying him any attention and you could clearly see that we didn’t care about anything he had to say.
Finally, we both got fed up and just looked him dead in the eye and told him he had been a terrible roommate who had no respect for anyone and that he deserved everything that was happening to him, plus some.
He stormed off and we never saw him again. Bob did tell us that he had been couch surfing since he moved out and that nobody would let him stay with them because of his behavior. It was glorious and it brought a smirk to my face every time I heard it.
I’ve long since moved out and no longer with that girl and my life is in a much better place. I lament to myself that maybe I was being too underhanded and vindictive, but this guy was toxic, and in all honesty, he got what he deserved.
I just hope no one else gets stuck rooming with this guy.
Edit: I would like to clarify, that in this situation, I was not the leaseholder or on the lease. Bob was both the leaseholder and on the lease, naturally. D*ck was also Bob’s oldest friend (from like age 9 or whatnot) and my girl and I was recent friends. Maybe a couple of years tops.
Trying to voice the problems only made the situation worse. Escalating the situation would do the same and could potentially find us without a place to stay period.
Our financial situation was NOT such that moving out was even an option. I’m not proud of what unfolded, and if there were a better solution to the problem, I’d have taken it. Unfortunately, there was little to be done about it in a legal and face to face scenario.
Also, D*ck did massive damage to the house. The front porch guard rails had been all but ripped off and thrown in the yard. The upstairs carpet, which was originally an off white color, was now brown/borderline black from spilled drinks, food, vomit, and whatever else you can imagine.
You couldn’t walk on the carpet with your feet sticking to it.
D*ck also completely ruined Bob’s furniture too. His couch was originally a light tan color and it was similarly stained and pocked full of cigarette burns. The end tables and coffee table were chipped, cracked, and so unstable that they literally fell apart if you bumped them hard enough.
The upstairs was a literal cesspit. It smelled absolutely horrid and trash, food, and dirty everything was strewn everywhere.
It took an entire day or 2 to clean up after he went off. And that was my job. So, I’m not saying it justifies everything we ended up putting him through, but the crime justified the punishment.
And for all the flack I get for the toothbrush thing, my dad had this saying he had for people who liked to talk or stir up sh*t. It goes, “Do you taste all that sh*t coming out of your mouth or are you just comfortable with the taste now?” I felt that considering all that D*ck said about me and my girl (none too quietly behind our backs and directly to our faces), it was time he actually tasted it for himself.
As for the outcome, D*ck realized his fast, loose, and loud lifestyle only afforded him conditional friends.
Sure, they’d party where he had somewhere to do it, but they had the decency and common sense not to do it in their homes. Hence, D*ck was lucky enough to get a couch to crash on from time to time. Unfortunately for him, his party drive took hold and whenever he was alone in their places, D*ck foolishly tried throwing a party. He was promptly thrown out the door.
D*ck burned down all his friend bridges and shortly thereafter started going to stay in hotels and motels in the area.
He quickly got blacklisted for trashing the rooms and partying loudly throughout the night.
Bob was as much D*ck’s best friend as D*ck was Bob’s, but D*ck absolutely ruined their relationship beyond repair and he no longer had any true friends left. Last I heard, D*ck was sleeping in his truck because he refused to get his own place because, “I don’t see the point in getting my own place when I’m hardly ever there,” like an idiot.”
15. They Refuse To Take Care Of Their Cat Yet Want To Keep It
What’s the point of taking in an animal if you aren’t going to help meet their basic needs?
“My roommate has a cat. One roommate left for about 2 months and the other was doing the absolute bare minimum to take care of the cat. Me and my man have been feeding the cat, playing with him, bought him some things we thought he needed, and the biggest thing is, we brought lilies in the house (had no idea they were toxic to cats), and he threw up a lot, so we had to rush him to the vet and we paid for that (he is fine now; wasn’t poisoned, or was and they got it all out).
So here is the update.
The other owner came back and the talk could not have gone worse. Not only did he not want to give up the cat, but he progressively got more defensive as we tried to calmly and nicely advocate for the cat’s well-being. Instead of acknowledging our concerns, he mostly denied them or found excuses for them. To make matters worse, the other owner chimed in and they both blamed us for the expensive vet visit and fought for us to pay an equal share of it.
The owner that wasn’t here was angry that we didn’t inform him, but we informed the other owner, who in the past has adamantly claimed the cat was also his (it was an emergency that we thought required quick action so we informed the owner that was closest and that was also held responsible for the cat when the other owner up and left). The owner that was here denied completely that the cat was his.
He also did not inform the owner who was gone about the emergency vet visit, which we got blamed for. Another important note, the owner that was here during the fight blurted out that “he is just a cat,” implying that he wasn’t worth the price of the emergency vet visit. He tried to rescind it, but I know he meant it.
We were not asked to care for this cat and we were given no instruction on how to care for him; we just did our best.
Now that the owner that was gone is back, the cat still follows us around and I have not seen them hang out at all, even though he said he “missed the cat a lot and is excited to get back to him.”
What I am most bothered with is our failure to advocate for this cat. We tried so hard to explain what was concerning us and said twice that “it’s not personal; we are just trying to advocate for [cat’s name],” but the owner just got angry saying we are calling him a bad owner.
He did say that the cat would get even better care now that we have talked. It has only been 2 days, but so far, I see no changes. We are taking a step back to see how it goes because it might be too early to judge. However, I cannot stop thinking about our failure and I have been crying a lot and worrying about him. I know he will be fine, but it’s disgusting and unbelievable how our roommates acted.
Luckily we stood our ground and they agreed to pay the whole thing (but they are very angry and still believe it’s only fair that we pay a portion which I will never understand that logic), but it bothers me much more that this cat is probably not going to get the love and care he deserves.
I would have easily taken full financial responsibility if it meant we could give him a better home.
We still have to live with these people and these people are in the same field as me and it is a small field and they have more experience and connections than I do. I am concerned that they can make it difficult for me in my career (especially seeing how they are during this, I do not trust them).
Trust me, I want what is best for this cat probably more than anyone else, but I do not know what I can legally, reasonably, or safely do at this point.”
Another User Comments:
“Honestly – and I’m not saying this is good advice – I’d get petty and annoying. Every time the cat’s water bowl is empty or dirty? Take a picture of it. Every time the litter box goes unscooped? Take a picture. Text them to your roommates every day with messages like, “Cat box is dirty.
Gonna scoop it?” “Water bowl needs filling.” “Have you fed the cat today? (No?) Are you going to?” These are the most basic things that go into caring for a cat. If they can’t do that or are annoyed by your urging them to do so, they can’t have a cat. And if they find you annoying enough, they might eventually say, “If you care so much, YOU do it,” and you can say, “I’d be happy to! Why don’t we make it official, and I’ll just take him?”
AGAIN, I’m not saying this is good advice. It would likely backfire and just p*ss them off more, so you probably shouldn’t do that. But it’s what I would do in your situation.” meganm03
14. Verbally Aggressive For No Reason
“Let me preface this by saying I’ve had more bad roommate experiences than the average person, but this was the WORST.
My second year of college, I got assigned a random roommate. Our schedules really clashed — I was on a competitive collegiate dance team and our practices would start at 8 p.m. and go until 3-4 a.m. I tried to be considerate, and would always tiptoe into the room after practice and use my flashlight to get around the room, but I could tell she was annoyed.
To this day, I’m honestly not sure what went wrong, but my roommate started to leave passive-aggressive notes and ultimately created a toxic environment.
I asked one of my best friends to help confront my roommate. A few days after the confrontation, my friend caught my roommate giving him dirty looks at the school dining hall, so he decided to go talk to her. The talk quickly developed into a yelling fight, and my friend was escorted out of the dining hall.
Then, my friend and I were confronted by the POLICE. My roommate had called the campus police and claimed a case of harassment. Luckily, my friend and I were able to explain our situation and were let off the hook. After harassing housing services for months, my roommate was finally relocated to a new dorm room.
The day she moved out, I was taking a nap in our room when I heard her walk in to pack her stuff. Not wanting to face her, I hid under my covers and tried to go to sleep. My roommate started making insulting comments about me while packing, clearly knowing that I was in the room. She was literally leaning over my bed, talking sh*t about me. To this day, I still don’t know what pushed her over the edge.”
13. He Constantly F*cks Things Up And Doesn't Give A F*ck
“He’d just throw things away that didn’t belong to him. Sometimes it’d be little things like a potato peeler or a baking tray, which isn’t a huge loss, but it’s a pain in the arse when you’re in the middle of cooking something and realize you don’t have it anymore. Other times, it’d be a tumble dryer or the cushions from the back of the sofa.
We had a Henry vacuum cleaner. When it needed emptying he just got rid of the old bag without bothering to replace it, so the next time I opened it, several months’ worth of dust flew everywhere.
Another time he tried to rewire its plug, connecting neutral to live and earth to neutral, because it had stopped working, and he naturally assumed this must be because someone else goes around screwing with the electrical wiring.
We get a brand new washing machine and he puts so much powder in it that foam starts spurting through the seal. Doesn’t give a solitary f*ck.
Numerous smoke alarm activations due to putting things directly on the bottom of the oven on maximum heat, or letting pots overflow while he’s nowhere around.
Once melted half a plastic spatula by leaving it on top of the cooker. My room was directly above the kitchen so it’d stink of smoke after each of these incidents.
He’d leave the toilet seat covered with p*ss or the toilet stuffed full of TP or kitchen towel. Once left his daughter’s dirty nappy right in front of the toilet in such a way that you couldn’t just step around it. Again, not a f*ck was given.
No idea what he’s up to now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he’s either died in a house fire or electrocuted himself due to his own incompetence.”
Another User Comments:
“I’ve always wondered how people don’t know how to do laundry. These days, you just need a working machine and one Tide Pod per load. Done, end of story.” The68Guns
12. The Not-So-Secretive Dealer
“I had two roomies, Eric and Andy. I did not know Eric was a drug dealer. At first, I just thought he had a lot of friends. But I put two and two together after a while and I suddenly came to the realization that I was living in a drug den. Sure, it was “just” the special green plant, but those users are f*cking ANNOYING.
With Andy’s supplier living with him, Andy was pretty much intoxicated 24/7, as was Eric.
They were wake and bakers, and after Andy got laid off, they spent all day smoking and playing video games. Then there was the week that Eric bought two pellet guns, which inspired all kinds of awful jacka**-inspired a**ery.
But apparently, Eric wasn’t a very good, or secretive, drug dealer. On 4/20, he and I were in his room watching Day of the Dead when three dudes walked in. I was used to dudes walking in without knocking by this point, so I didn’t think much of it.
But when Eric asked who the dudes were I got a little concerned.
I got up to show some muscle, I’m a big guy, and about 6’6”, so I look pretty imposing. Not imposing enough, however.
I don’t remember the first hit. I just remember falling to the ground and covering my head as they asked “where the sh*t was.” Eric, being a bad drug dealer, smoked all his sh*t. He didn’t have any drugs, nor did he have any money.
This p*ssed the dudes off, and they proceeded to beat the holy hell out of us.
One of them even pulled a gun and decided that the back of my head would be a good target for the butt of it. I still have a pretty nasty scar.
They left. I got 15 stitches, a scratched cornea, and a busted lip.
I moved out the following week, saved up some money, and then left the state altogether. As for Eric and Andy, I couldn’t care less about what happened to them. They both liked to brag about all the pot they kept in the house, so no doubt their big mouths caused the sh*t in the first place.”
11. Living With The Ex Was A Bad Idea
I couldn’t imagine…
“Up until this past April, my guy and I shared a two-bedroom apartment with his brother and his brother’s EX-girl.
Originally, it was myself, my guy, and his brother, but we let the ex in because she had lost her job as a live-in home health aide and was on the verge of being homeless.
We were all friendly at first; I drove her stuff from the next state over to our apartment.
Not too long after that, she started berating my guy’s brother over stuff that was beyond his control, and it wasn’t long before that anger shifted to me and my guy as well.
She also had a hard time paying rent, and when I say ‘had a hard time,’ I mean ‘spending her money from both jobs on useless crap from eBay.’ Her rent was the same as mine: $160 a month, cheap as both my guy and his brother drive school buses and make a decent amount and could really support the apartment themselves. I had to bust my tail working in a grocery store to make rent while the ex barely paid a dime.
It got to the point where she complained about every little thing, whether it was our fault or not.
Our friend literally had to move in and basically keep us from killing each other; I swung at her for calling me fat, even though she looks like Humpty-Dumpty.
In the meantime, she started bringing random guys in and out of the house. One guy, in particular, only visited whenever my guy and his brother were out of the house; turns out the guy was a registered offender and had been busted for kiddie stuff and she ‘forgot’ to tell us.
It was a long year before we finally went our separate ways and cleansed ourselves of the apartment.
My guy and I moved into our own place, his brother moved in with his parents, and the ex wound up living out of her car after getting kicked out of the offender’s house AND her grandparents’ house. We made it clear that after the way she treated us, we would have no part in getting her on her feet again.”
10. She Was All Kinds Of Crazy
“Like Max Black from the sitcom 2 Broke Girls, I had been nervously itching to make a few life changes, particularly after my roommate ditched me to move from NYC to Queens to marry her man. I met Angelique, an exotic, well-traveled blonde through an ad she’d placed in the New York Times advertising her apartment. Minus starting a cupcake business, I thought we’d do well together.
The night before I moved into the pre-war, two-bedroom, beautifully furnished doorman apartment on East 57th Street to be Angelique’s roommate for the astounding price of $500 a month, I had a bad dream.
In my nightmare, a wicked witch flying around on her broomstick was chasing me cackling at my fear and frustration.
On closer look, I saw that the terrifying witch was Angelique, the German-born, fifty-something-year-old former beauty queen, who owned the apartment. I woke up shaking. My gut told me to call her and cancel the agreement, but I told my gut to shut-up.
Angelique was a fading Heather Locklear. Though she was clearly once a looker, now her face was puffy, with slight frown lines. White-blonde hair framed her high cheekbones and too-tanned, weathered skin.
She kept the lights dim. I thought at the time, it was to save money.
In her prime, she told me, in her heavy accent, with an ever-present drink in her hand, she was a model and she even managed to unearth old magazine clippings from foreign publications as proof. Her hangouts were NYC perennials like Elaine’s and Michaels. She was so beautiful, she said, her former husband actually ran across the street to first meet her when the light was green.
I was in awe of her and her history with the other sex (I hadn’t exactly ever cut a swathe through men myself), and didn’t mind chatting with her when I got back from my lowly administrative job at MGM.
(My only access to glamour was that I came in early once to find Ted Turner sitting at the reception desk, taking calls).
After the first week, she started complaining, wine glass in hand, about how unsatisfied she felt with her life, how there were no men to date, how her father never loved her. I tried to participate in the conversation, but I hardly had any relevant answers to her drunken questions, and had no idea how to advise her on men.
I made up excuses to leave these “chat sessions” by pleading exhaustion and saying I had to get up early the next morning, while repeating, “I’m sorry, I have to go now.” Even after I closed the door, she kept talking to me.
Weekends I’d get a breather because she’d head off to the Hamptons to work on her “art.” My parents would visit me every Sunday; my mom brought roasted chicken that I would eat for dinner during the week.
One weeknight my dad brought an air conditioner to my room he installed on the windowsill. Suddenly, Angelique appeared on the periphery of my room, dressed in a negligee, shamelessly stretching in front of my father (she practiced yoga), to better display her body. He acted as politely removed as Don Draper would when faced with an undesirable paramour. “Daddy,” she said, in what she thought was a provocative manner, “you are so nice to your daughter.
I wish my daddy had been as nice and handsome as you.”
Soon afterward, I started noticing items had been moved on my night table and had changed place in my closet. I told my father, and he suggested I put a tiny slip of paper in between the doorframe where it met the ceiling. Sure enough, the piece of paper was on the floor when I got back from work. I felt so much stress that I had trouble sleeping through the night.
This did not help my appearance at the office, where I was bleary-eyed and jumpy.
I figured that I could look for a new pad in the fall, in a month when it would be easier, and could tough it out till then.
One day Angelique met me at the door when I got home, berating me for not giving her phone messages (I didn’t even have access to her answering machine). Then, my mother’s roast chicken started disappearing from the refrigerator.
First, it was one piece, then it was two; then the entire chicken disappeared. I asked Angelique if she had eaten my chicken, and she started screaming that I ate her food and that I was stealing from her. “You only keep liquor in the refrigerator, I told her. There isn’t any food to steal even if I wanted to take it.”
“If you think I’m stealing from you, why don’t you call the police?” she said. So I did.
A burly NYC police officer came to our door looking for the perp.
“What did she steal?” he asked wearily, poising with pen on his paperwork.
“She stole my roast chicken.”
“What?” he asked.
“She stole my chicken.
“Well, officer, I didn’t know the cops around here were so sexy, or I’d try to get arrested all the time,” Angelique said, making direct eye contact. Then she announced she would be in her bedroom if he wanted to interrogate her further, and flounced out of the room.
The officer put his pen down, looked kindly at me and said, “Listen, I can’t file a charge because of chicken.
But I’d watch out for her, can’t you smell the liquor on her breath? She’s probably an alcoholic. Do you have family in the area?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’d find another place to live if I were you,” he told me. “These situations never get better, and you seem like a sweet kid.”
I called my parents and my mother drove over and we loaded up all the clothing and jewelry I could carry. I slept fitfully that weekend in my parent’s two-bedroom co-op.
Dad rented a moving truck and Monday we drove up to my street to collect the rest of my belongings.
The traffic was slow for a Monday. I’d had a feeling that she might not let me in, or might have even changed the locks, and this time I trusted my gut.
When we got up to the floor, Angelique was taking her usual cigarette break in the hall, with the door wide open. The minute she saw us she ran to the door to close it. My dad stuck his foot in the doorframe to prevent her from shutting it, but she kept pushing, trying to get his foot out of the way.
They struggled like that, until my dad managed to thrust open the door. Angelique backed away and started to cry as we entered. “Why, why are you doing this to me?” she asked him.
“Angelique, you have been behaving badly, drinking and stealing from my daughter,” my dad said. As he moved the clothing out, I kept glancing at the huge, antique decorative knife on the table, wondering if she would be crazy enough, or drunk enough to make a grab for it.
My intuition said she would, so I kept my body right between her and the knife, and stayed that way the entire time.
She turned her attention back to my father. “Daddy,” she plaintively mewled, fueled by the scotch she was consuming rapidly. “Talk to me.” My dad ignored her.
As I was leaving, she spoke to me for the first time that day.
“Why are you being like this?” she said. “I thought you were so sweet.”
As I left the building, I told the doorman, “I’m moving out.
She’s crazy, and an alcoholic.” The doorman looked compassionately at me and said, “I’m not surprised. You were her 10th roommate this year, and most of them weren’t from the United States.
“By the way,” he said, ” she changed the locks last Friday.”
As I exited the building safe once again in the bosom of my family, I realized that this time my parents and the home life I couldn’t wait to escape was my salvation.
And I learned to never look an apartment gift horse in the mouth. If it’s too good to be true, it is.”
9. The Personal Space-Invader
“My roommate moved his girl of 1 month in after her mother apparently kicked her out, and it’s been a month so far and it’s been horrible. I protested in the beginning, so he said that she would only be here a few days a week and at her friend’s for the rest of the week. This was a lie. She brought about 10 pounds of laundry and some bedroom items into his room and she’s been here ever since every night.
They also have loud s*x at random hours of the day, which feels really invasive.
A few weeks in, she apparently needs to house sit a cat for her aunt. I also protested this, because cats make my allergies act up, but I got the text that they were pet sitting when the cat was here. Even though they said they were only pet sitting for a few days, the cat was here for 2 weeks. There was hair everywhere, and I was super itchy and stressed.
They also put a litter box in the kitchen (ew?).
The cat eventually did return to its owner, which is the only good thing that has really happened. She has complained that she is anemic, so she puts the heat on at 85 degrees and complains if I ever turn it down. It’s stiflingly hot inside, so now I just keep my bedroom window open 24/7.
She constantly leaves the oven and sometimes the stove on after using it, like I’ll go to the kitchen and find something on while both of them aren’t even in the apartment.
She also has no problem leaving appliances unplugged for her to use the outlet as a charger. She also unplugged the wifi for some reason one night because according to my roommate she was “feeling depressed”?
Just recently she confronted me about leaving lights on when I’m in my bedroom. This one really confused me, because she doesn’t pay a single cent to live here. My roommate is always there to back her up or come up with excuses for her toxic behavior.
Before she moved in, me and my roommate would go to the grocery store to get groceries on a regular basis, but she would wait in the car and complain that we took too long, like in a weirdly clingy way.
She also rearranges my furniture in the living room all the time, which feels like a huge invasion of personal space.
She also smokes the special green plant literally every day in their room, which eventually makes the whole apartment smell like it which I have no input on.
She also plays super loud music in the morning which wakes me up every time.
You’re probably thinking why don’t I stand up for myself for literally any of these instances, but this girl is genuinely unhinged, as in she will not hesitate to yell at the drive-thru girl because she thought they were flirting with her man. Just imagine the trashiest and most toxic person you can think of, and that’s her.
Something smaller, but she also used up all of my shampoo.
I’m not really looking for any advice or disagreeing views, I just wanted to put this somewhere and get it off my chest.”
8. Careless Is Her Middle Name
“Moved in with my acquaintance/friend over the summer and had to move out after a couple of months for reasons unrelated to her.
She was…..mediocre at best as a roommate. For example, she was there a week and a half before I moved in and the kitchen had sh*t from the previous tenants that were so gross, I couldn’t go into a corner without literally gagging. She would dump dirty mop water into my shower and not rinse it (figured this out when the skin on my feet got f*cky).
She tried to convince me that we didn’t need to get the walls repainted when we found out there might be lead in the chipping paint and that her plan was to “just deal with it” for a year.
I moved out in early September and I asked her explicitly to tell me if I forgot anything and she told me she’ll keep an eye out. I moved into a new place in early October and realized I didn’t have my bathroom supplies, that my soap, shampoo, and loofah were still with her.
She told me she forgot to tell me about it, even though she noticed almost immediately. I asked her to mail it. She procrastinated (I get it, she doesn’t have a lot of time in her busy schedule between drinking, getting high, TV, video games, and her part-time job) until she said she was coming to my city and that she’d drop it off.
She forgot to bring it with her.
She then said she was going to come visit another week, so she’d bring it then.
I practically begged her to just mail it. She did. Yay! It came yesterday (yes, that’s right, mid-November – it’s been MONTHS) and my loofah was missing. I asked her what was up with that. She told me she threw it out and that she thought she told me but she might have forgotten (she definitely forgot) “Why?” I asked, trying to give the benefit of the doubt, “Was it moldy?” Nope. She just felt weird about using someone else’s sponge. (??????????? then?? don’t use it???)
Whatever. I told her it was a gift from a loved one because it was. She apologized in her empty-headed, careless way.
I’m just glad to be done. What a pain. I just wanted to take a nice damn shower.
RIP ice cream loofah. Gone but not forgotten.”
7. She's Controlling With A Capital 'C'
“I live in Iowa. I’m 23 and in graduate school for chemistry at a university. I live in an apartment with three other girls. Two of them are my best friends and I love them, ride or die type!! One of them, though, is honestly really horrible. I’ve been living with these girls since March…. I’m losing my mind.
She won’t let us watch TV in the living room with my two other roommates without making nasty faces, causing a fuss, and just being downright uncooperative and rude.
She won’t let me play my classes for Zoom out loud, but she can whenever she chooses.
She constantly complains about the smells of cooking. My two other roommates and I have one of those Hello Fresh subscriptions, so we cook almost every night, and she always has something to say. “It smells,” basically making us feel bad about eating. And we always spray the kitchen, clean it, and light a candle.
She told one of my roommates the other day, “I don’t really care about anyone, but I expect them to care about me,” but gets really p*ssed with I go out with my other two roommates and hang out without her.
Sometimes we will wake up and use the bathroom or do something in the house at like 9 or 10 am, and she will get mad about us waking her up and sometimes groan or almost yell loudly from her room.
Throw things, slam doors.
She tries to get me to do everything for her. Even work for classes I’m not in. I’m a chem major, and she is getting her graduate degree in literature. Like I don’t know anything about a class for a focus that isn’t mine. And she gets p*ssed and calls me rude if I don’t help her.
I know she has been violent with roommates and others in the past, so sometimes I feel like I have to let her control my life for my safety.
I’m afraid to live in my own house sometimes, set boundaries, and she CONSTANTLY emotional dumps on me.
Making everything about her, making me feel bad about everything I do. She has had a rough past from what I can gather, but her behavior is honesty really horrible.
There is so much more I can say in terms of her behavior, but I’ve literally never met someone in my 23 years of life that is so narcissistic and downright selfish. I’m afraid to confront her because she knows private things about my life and we are both from the same small town.
She will make my life a living hell. What do I even say?? She scares the sh*t out of me. She thinks I’m her f*cking assistant, she plays me like a violin, and I don’t even know what to say. I think the biggest problem is she thinks we’re friends. I would like to be her friend if she wasn’t so batsh*t insane. She gets mad about me going out without her, so I can’t escape.”
Another User Comments:
“I’ve dealt with someone similar.
Her goal was clearly trying to manipulate and push other renters out (it was three rooms rented, so she’d be paying super cheap the price of a room for an entire apartment if she got people to leave).
My method tends to be to stay quiet, observe, never give someone any ammo. So I was somewhat of a pushover, but I at least had that under my belt. I fed her cats when she be gone for the day even though she’d be p*ssed.
Anyway, it all eventually escalated when she basically attacked me with a garbage can after she was unofficially evicted and didn’t get out. I went to my landlady, and I got a temporary restraining order. B*tch was out.
Like, yea, it’s valid that things can escalate but…like it’s going to either way. She’s either going to become this girl’s servant until she moves out, or she learns how to settle boundaries with someone who doesn’t respect them while setting down protections that authorities can enforce.
Learn how to physically protect yourself, take videos, SS text messages, lock your bedroom door when you leave and when you sleep.
Make your secrets no longer true or out yourself. Or if she outs you, have that recorded evidence of how much of a POS she is to post online for the social circles to see. And you have two friends/former roommates to back you up that this is genuinely how she is.
It’s not gonna be a comfortable experience. You aren’t going to feel at ease in the other living areas the entire time you live with her no matter what you do. I very much know what a difference I felt in that apartment once my thorn was removed. But it’s worth it not to always feel like you are walking on eggshells around her or sacrificing your own mental health and time to this energy vampire.” PoiLethe
6. The Biggest Bully She's Ever Met
“I was put in a random triple my freshman year of college, and one girl in particular was a nightmare to live with. She was incredibly mean to me.
After a rocky first semester of spreading rumors and backhanded comments, we ended up pledging the same sorority together the second semester. Throughout the entire pledge process, she was determined to make my life difficult, bullying me every chance she got. She would quickly throw me under the bus every time something bad happened and would often spread lies about me to the other girls.
But to everyone else, she was a dear who would shower you with compliments and buy your friendship.
But the most messed up thing she did was tell my guy at the time that I cheated on him (which was false). That night, that rumor was spread among our sorority sisters and was shut down fast, exposing her true colors. I reported her to the RA and made her move out two weeks before the semester ended.
Sadly, I still had to see her face throughout sorority events.”
5. What's Hers Was Hers And Only Hers
“When our roommate Jackie demanded that we ask for her permission to turn on the ’90s-era TV in our living room, the other girls and I realized what we’d gotten ourselves into. The TV belongs to her old roommate, she said, and God forbid we jam the buttons with our grubby fingers. We were locked into a contract, and for the sake of keeping peace, we humored her and her demands. We were, after all, three against one.
Jackie had one year of college left, but she would not be leaving our apartment without a fight. Her weapons of choice were passive aggressiveness and the fact that she worked for the campus housing department, which allowed her to throw sometimes non-existent rules in our faces. Electricity out in your room? Well, only she’s allowed to touch the fuse box, and too bad, she’s out with her friends right now. Entertaining friends? Oh look, she just got a noise complaint from our neighbors.
And is that my toaster you’re using, she’d quip as we made breakfast.
She often invited her man over, which was fine until the overwhelming smell of garlic permeated the air at 2 a.m., waking us up to the drunken cries of Jersey Shore’s Snooki blasting from the TV—you know, the one we’re not allowed to touch. Jackie taunted us with the idea of staying in school for an extra year, making it impossible for one of our friends to take her spot in the apartment.
Relief eventually came in the form of summer vacation, but once the countdown to the new school year began, we braced ourselves. What we came back to was a shock. The kitchen cabinets were all empty, as were the living room and Jackie’s bedroom. Like a thief in the night, she’d packed up her things and left. For good. Without a final goodbye or a note.
She did leave one thing behind—that d*mn TV, free for us to turn on whenever our hearts desired.”
4. What's That Stench?
“Around October, I started noticing a faint odor that vaguely resembled sour milk or cheese. It wasn’t overpowering, just barely noticeable in certain areas. I chalked it up to some of Karl’s dirty clothes or lost chicken tenders. Or maybe it was his cigarettes. I was just a dumb teen, so I thought enough Febreze or a Glade air freshener would mask it.
At the end of the fall semester, we were both packing up to go back home for Christmas when we got to cleaning thoroughly for probably the first time.
There was a small sill under the window, which had been mostly covered in loose clothes, papers, books, or whatnot. We cleaned up all this and discovered for the first time the source of the smell: ladybugs. Hundreds of dead ladybugs, which had apparently swarmed through the window A/C unit to fester and die and stink in our dorm room. I had never smelled them before, but in great enough quantity they are revolting. We had to borrow a vacuum cleaner from the RA to get them all up, which had to be emptied several times.
I actually apologized to Karl for blaming him for the smell, which I don’t know if he ever noticed.
During the spring semester, he continued being generally gross and even took to sleeping on the floor on his disgusting sheepskin rug when he was too drunk to reach his lofted bed, but he snored less on the floor. For the rest of the year, the room just smelled like stale chicken tenders and $9 handles of vodka instead of dead ladybugs, which was an improvement.
He would move to an off-campus house next year where he kept a ferret in his bedroom, the olfactory results of which were predictably nauseating.
We stayed friends and did drugs together periodically. I was in his wedding a few years ago.”
3. Mr. Pity Party
And guess who he blamed? Not himself, of course.
“I rented a house with three friends, and one of them only put down 150 of the initial 600 dollars we would each need for the deposit with promises he would pay us back. We were desperate for a place so we agreed to help him out.
I was there roughly a month, he paid bills on time and was starting to pay us back. All was good. Then one weekend, my man and I were out of town for the night.
The day we got back, his room was completely empty. We were like, what the… and tried to call and text to no avail. None of his friends knew, our other roommate didn’t know, everyone was in shock.
Eventually, we got a response from him. It was this huge wall of text in an attempt to get pity from us since he couldn’t handle adult responsibility and couldn’t afford rent and bills (he worked full time, I was working about 25 hours a week and was fine, plus he ate out every meal) and also said he couldn’t handle the allergies from my cat, which he knew about for many months prior to moving in.
So he just decided to up and move out without telling anyone and expected us to be okay with it.
Um, no. Handling extra expenses out of the blue like that is not going to happen. We argued for about a week after that, got the landlord involved, and at the end, we knew it wasn’t worth it to fight anymore, so we asked if he could simply pay the rent for that month since he was there well over half of it.
Instead of doing the responsible thing and keeping this matter between who it concerned, he went on Facebook and delivered a huge sob story painting us to be the bad guys and in turn got many of my friends upset with me, for some reason.
In the end, we didn’t get that last rent payment and I lost quite a few friends. Last I heard, he is living with his abusive mother he constantly badmouthed and complained about which makes perfect sense.”
2. Making One Too Many Phone Calls
“I was on a sports team freshman year and rooming with another guy on the team. Random meetup as I moved from out of town to go to school.
On the weekends I was gone a lot visiting my girl during a particular month. At the end of the month, the roommate is suspiciously not around much but I don’t pay too much attention. His parents lived nearby, so he would often go stay there for the free food.
The phone bill comes (yes, this is before cell phones were super common) and it turns out on the weekends I would leave he would call up phone s*x lines and ran up a bill equal to a month’s rent. Not his half of the rent but the entire rent. From the call logs, it looked like he would be on the phone most of the weekend!
He had “moved out” without telling me when he knew the bill was coming soon, so that was why I hadn’t seen him.
He refused to admit to doing it, just completely flat out refused. I was on him for a long time about the money and he eventually quit the team, and dropped out of school.”
1. Looks Can Be Deceiving, Especially When You're The Devil
“There’s a back story. So I have a roommate that I met 4 years ago. He is the definition of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Looks super meek and small and innocent but really the devil himself. At the time, we were friends, but he was really obsessed with me, harassed me, etc. But I didn’t wanna be with him, so we kinda stopped talking.
Fast forward a couple of years, we randomly start talking and I find out he goes to the university I’m about to go to.
I’m looking for a place, he’s looking for a roommate, so we move in together. At this point, there was no bad blood between us, we just hadn’t talked much.
I kinda knew that he was a finesser. He stole from big corporations, and honestly, I don’t give a f*ck; the morality of it made sense. F*CK corporations, right? That only works when someone knows where to draw the line. And I didn’t know at the time how far gone he was.
And throughout the year, I make a variety of discoveries.
Starting from the day I moved in. He lied to my face about so many things. Rent, utilities, what room I’d get, he made me pay for so many things while saying he didn’t have any money (and then he bought a BMW all cash a couple of months later), and lied to me about so much. He “finessed” me too I guess, financially.
We start going out in quarantine. Our relationship was great. But I notice he’s not the most faithful.
Never been the jealous type, so I didn’t catch on right away.
Then we have to travel. At first, he wanted to go a week earlier to spend time alone with his family, but I have trauma from traveling alone from past experiences, so I convinced him to go with me. We book our flights. Unexpectedly two weeks before our flight, I need to get a minor but, still, a surgery. I beg him to change the flights because the flight would’ve been a day after my surgery.
He says absolutely not. While I was in pain, a day after my surgery, I hopped on a plane and we went. On the plane ride, he tells me, “Hey, by the way, I’m not coming back with you. I’m coming back 2 weeks later than you to spend time with family.” I start panicking, but we’re now in the air, so nothing I can do. We make up at our layover.
First night we get there, his ex found out I was there, so she came to his parents’ house to try to talk to him; she was p*ssed.
I let them talk and he comes back and we go out; everything’s okay. A week later, his ex sends me a recording of them talking. He tells her I’m a friend, that he made sure he’s leaving 2 weeks later than me to spend time with her, that he doesn’t even like me, he wants to get back with her, etc. A lot of bad sh*t. A few stressful weeks later, I’m back home.
By the way, the reason why I’m so forgiving of him is because he had a rough childhood and doesn’t do confrontation at all.
Even if it’s over splitting the groceries. So I try my best to be a good person to him.
Then I find out all the criminal activity. He buys stolen credit card information off the dark web, and buys counterfeit money. Tax evasion. Stole $1,000+ in electronics from his workplace and sold it. A lot of theft basically. I realize this guy is a sociopath. Lies, feels no remorse, does whatever he wants all while avoiding any responsibility and consequence for his actions.
He doesn’t know where to draw the line.
I don’t have a problem with someone stealing from Walmart if they know where to draw the line and understand the ethics of it. That may seem strange to some of you, but that makes perfect sense. The problem is when they think they can do that to people close to them and evade all consequences. When they cross those lines with their own family, friends, etc.
He has to go back to his country again.
He cheats on me with my ex and lies upfront to my face. He lies about finances to my face and feels no remorse.
So I reported him to his workplace anonymously. I didn’t know he had my email password and he found out that I reported him. My reasoning is that I am so. F*cking. Tired. Of bad people getting away with whatever they want. Taking advantage of people to the point of mental distress and thinking they can evade all consequences.
I don’t feel bad. His manager is friends with him, and he told me himself if they ever found out, they wouldn’t report him; they would just fire him. I just wanted him to feel one of his consequences. My actions weren’t right, but HE DID those things. He is now moving out and plotting to destroy my life.
He emotionally and financially abused me and the people around him. I did one thing in return. Yet I am now the most terrible person on the planet apparently. And I’d do it again, LOL. And somehow people in my life are saying it’s my fault for being forgiving the first few times as if it’s wrong to be a good person to someone and have them f*ck you over for it.”
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