Horrible roommates come in different shapes, sizes, smells, threats, and personality traits. But these people have put up with more than enough from their unfortunate college roommate. And now, these innocent people are dishing on the drama that was the life they once lived...
Why She Was Covered Clown Makeup…
“My roommate told me a week before school started that she was bipolar. I know that a lot of people with this disorder take meds and have it under control so I was like, ‘Alright, that’s no big deal.’ We got along really well and hung out over the summer and stuff.
Then, we move in together. Halloween weekend she eats an edible and drinks a ton and mixes all this with her medication. That Sunday afternoon at 2:30 pm I go to open the blinds so that I can study. SHE FLIPS OUT AND STORMS OUT OF THE ROOM AND DOESN’T COME BACK FOR THREE DAYS.
A month later I come back from water polo practice one night and go on my computer to start homework. She was lying on her bed covered in clown makeup. She was having an episode.
I open my laptop and find that she had changed my wallpaper to a tiled pop-art photo that she took on MY PHOTOBOOTH. The photo is of her screaming with her crazy makeup on.
She was INSANE!”
The Newspaper Hoarder With Even Worse Hygiene
“It’s move-in day, and the kid seems fairly normal. He brings in all of his boxes and stuff and I can see in a clear plastic container he has sheets for his bed, a bedspread, a pillow, etc. All of this stayed in that box the entire semester. He slept on the plastic mattress cover, which started out white but ended up being a grimy yellow color. He had serious hygiene problems as well. Being completely honest, he showered perhaps once a month. He also owned no deodorant except the small travel stick he had arrived with, which ran out after two weeks. He had a bottle of shampoo which sat unused on his desk the entire semester.
He didn’t do laundry, ever. I know this because he owned a single small bottle of Tide that also sat on his desk untouched the entire semester. Instead, as his clothes were worn, they were stuffed into a large sack. When it was full, he would pull out the clothes from the bottom and wear them again. He liked to lean against the wall and read, which left giant grease stains all over his side of the room.
My roommate was obsessed with politics and Obama since this was 2008. He was online on his Macbook reading the entire day when not in class. I tried to talk to him, but he denied everything, claiming that he showered daily and used deodorant.
Eventually, our room started to smell so bad that I avoided it at all costs, returning late at night to sleep and then leaving early in the morning. I found out later that our room smelled so bad because he was hoarding newspapers, which had started to rot. He bought the paper every day and kept all of them in his closet, where his clothes should have been.
Luckily he transferred after the first semester and I had the room all to myself the rest of the year.”
Kitchen Not Clean Enough For You?
“After a year into my studies, I decided to move into a house with a good friend of mine (Mr. A) and his friend (Mr. B). Mr. A was a classy dude so I just assumed he would hang with classy dudes. Turns out Mr. B was a classic Alpha male character and we were both just regular chill bros and not alphas at all.
Fast forward to a few months into living together. Mr. B is in the kitchen cooking what I recall he named ‘Jamaican paddies’ when all of a sudden he flips out and takes the tray from inside the oven and throws it in the middle of the kitchen. Then he proceeds to grab the cutlery drawer and empty it on top of the pile. He then leaves a note…
Before I get the royal ‘well you should have cleaned the kitchen’ treatment, the kitchen was pretty clean. I have lived with messy people and I have, to be fair, been messy myself once in a while. This was not the case at the time and Mr. A and all of our friends can attest to it.
Myself and Mr. A lived with that kitchen like that for 2 and a half months. We did not clean a single thing on that floor. The icing on the cake? He ended up telling his girlfriend to come coerce us into cleaning it cause after all we had caused this to happen. We just laughed and told her to clean it. She eventually did, and as far as I know, she is no longer with him.
And then when I moved out he was so angry at me that he decided to threaten me. He barged into my room yelling and begging me to punch him. Me and my friend just stood right in front of him laughing until he flipped out as expected. He turned around and punched a huge dent on my bedroom door. All I said was ‘I’m sure your parents (the landlords!) will love to hear how that got there.’ The final day of moving out I explained to them the events that unfolded and told them with the nicest of intentions that their son might be in need of psychological counseling. They didn’t verbally agree with my words, but their physical and facial reactions were enough to suggest otherwise.”
He Completely Changed Into A Lifeless Soul Second Semester
“My roommate freshman year was really cool, for the first semester. We liked video games, most of the same music, got along well, etc. We were also both majoring in the same subject, so that was cool. So, the first semester went by very smoothly.
Enter the second semester. We get back from the holidays, and he goes back home on the first weekend after the break. He comes back Saturday afternoon and seemed generally upset, so I asked him what was wrong. Well, he never told me the full story, but his girlfriend broke up with him. After that, it all went to freaking chaos. He would play call of duty and SCREAM at the television (on my Xbox/tv/internet… we only had 2 ethernet ports and no wireless, so I would let him use mine for Xbox live if I wasn’t there, and let him finish a couple games after I got back before making him return my internet). I mean he would freaking yell at this game all of the time!
He would get food, most notably sushi with very generous amounts of soy sauce, leave his trash on MY desk, on MY FREAKING COMPUTER, getting soy sauce all over it. Luckily, it was only on the outside, but I was still upset. Very upset. He left all sorts of other trash on my desk and on my bed, which I made him clean up. He seemed oblivious to it. ‘Dude… clean your freaking trash off my stuff… seriously, this has got to stop.’ ‘Oh, my bad I didn’t notice.’
He would wake up at 3 in the morning and start watching the world of warcraft videos on youtube at full blast, and seemingly didn’t notice that I was in the room (again ‘oh sorry dude, my bad’). If he wasn’t in bed by 9 o’clock, he would come home at 1-2 in the morning, turn the light on, and get on the phone (once again…. he says, ‘Oh sorry, my bad’).
In addition to leaving his trash everywhere, he just threw all of his stuff like clothes, books, papers, gadgets, etc, under his bed, which eventually spread out into such a massive pile that I couldn’t open our dorm room door.
When he went to bed at 9:00 pm and I wasn’t even remotely tired, I would turn my computer brightness all the way down and plug in headphones so he could sleep, but he’d just wake up and tell me to shut it the heck off, to which I replied, ‘Look, it’s only like 9:30. You live with another person. I try to be as considerate as I can, but seriously, a little bit of computer glow isn’t going to kill you. Wear those eye cover things you bought 3 weeks ago.’ ‘Oh, I forgot I had those.’ Needless to say, it freaking sucked.”
The Crazy Roommate Found Her Online Journal About Her
“My roommate Freshman year was a brat. From the moment we first met, I knew I was doomed. On move-in day, as she berated her Doctor father, she accused the help of stealing her jewelry. ‘You don’t steal, do you?’ was her greeting to me. After our families left she quickly responded to her psychiatrist’s email and asked me when I planned on dropping out so that she could use my bed as a couch. She was rude and was always loudly talking on the phone with her boyfriend. I woke up one night and they were having phone sex.
Her side of the room was disgusting and she told everyone on my floor that I was crazy and jealous of her because I was poor. My first few weeks of college were tough enough and having to deal with her was wearing me down. I coped the only way I knew how I wrote in a (what I thought to be anonymous) online journal. I wrote about the phone sex, the entitlement she had and how miserable it all was making me. She found the journal, used an out of school email address to threaten me bodily harm. I brought it to the resident director and she asked to see what I had written as well.
At the end of the day, I was told that I had a problem with depression and anger and needed to get mandatory counseling (and sign a ‘safety contract’ saying that I would not hurt myself or others) but I was allowed to move into a single room. The brat ended up going crazy (she holed herself in her room and never went to classes), dropping out, and having a kid. I graduated, so I guess I win.”
Threatening Roommate Spared His Life Because ‘He Was So Nice’
“I noticed my roommate was off at the beginning of the year. he would always tell me things like, ‘I have 3 ak-47’s back at my house. If I fail a test I’m going to bring them here.’ and then just laugh it off and say he is kidding. As well as, ‘If I were to kill you I would do it with a knife because no one would ever be able to find out about it.’ Like just really freaky stuff that I would just laugh off.
But then one night he decided to take down a cocktail of pills while crying and saying screw this place. I ran out of the room and immediately went to the RA, but when we got back he was gone. He ran to a different friends dorm room and eventually went to the hospital.
When he was at the hospital the police searched the room and found 3 months worth of medication for bipolar disorder, 3 dozen knives stashed around the room, and his diary that stated, ‘If my roommate wasn’t such a nice kid, he would be coming down with me tonight.’ Then when he got out of the hospital he started texting me things like, ‘Hello roommate, how are things at (insert home address here). I haven’t heard from you in a long time. I think I’m going to have to come pay you and your parents a visit at (insert home address here).’
I was in a messed up place for about 3 months after this happened.”
She Intentionally Got Pregnant
“My roommate freshman year had a boyfriend, long distance. He was a senior in high school and lived about four hours away from where we went to college. They always had problems in their relationship. A few months in she began to suspect he was cheating on her, and in fact, she discovered he was. He broke up with her and started dating this other girl in his hometown.
Now my roommate was pretty angry about this and wanted to go about winning him back. So she continued to visit him in his hometown and sleep with him on the weekends behind this other girl’s back. But the crazy part: she decides she needs to get pregnant in order to win him back from the other girl. She secretly stops taking birth control, buys about one zillion pregnancy tests, and secretly would do those hip-thrust exercises after having sex with him to increase her chances of getting pregnant. This is all despite my constant nagging that this isn’t a very good plan.
Lo and behold three months later she gets pregnant. She drops out of school right before spring finals to live at home and date this guy (who eventually re-dumped her and ended up marrying someone else). The baby was pretty cute though.”
The Bratty, Trashy Girl That Got A Boyfriend
“We shall call her Sally. I met Sally on a ‘Class of 2014’ social media page and we messaged back and forth, and she seemed cool. We agreed to be roommates; I didn’t really know her, or anyone else for that matter, I just wanted to make sure they were normal, and she seemed normal. Cue to a few weeks before school started. ALL SUMMER she posted on my wall, blew my phone up, just ‘Woo, so excited for school!!!!’ It was obvious that she had decided that we were to be best friends.
Okay. I can handle that. Now is time for her description: short, maybe 5’1/5’2, curvy, crazy curly black hair, and a Cleveland accent. Then it was finally move-in day; I had arrived before her, and when she walked through the door I approached her, saying something, like, ‘Yay, we’ve finally met!’ and going in for a hug or whatever. Instead, she looks at my fingernail polish (burgundy) and my toenail polish (pink) and she said, ‘Ew. Your fingernail and toenail polish don’t match. I don’t like that.’
THE HECK?
That entire first week she dominated every conversation she had with anyone in the dorm, telling them how she modeled for a hair magazine (which she brought to school, btw, displayed on her desk), how she’s Jewish, how she’s allergic to apples, how she never works out but has the PERFECT body and every boring, uninteresting fact about her. Within the first two days, she spied a boy down the hall and WAS UP HIS BUTT, dear Lord.
They started dating. She ONLY hung out with him, for HOURS every day, just sitting on her bed, or his bed, or IDK, just together. And I was friends with him and his roomie so it was chill, until one night, he stayed over in her room (which is down the hall…really?) and they decide to have sex while I was there. Our beds were set up so that they touched; MY BED WAS MOVING. I promptly got up at 3:30 AM and crashed on my other friend’s futons. She absolutely dropped everyone else who she had tried to force a friendship on (which I was cool with) but then would get emotional when she was excluded. She was a little fun sucker with everything we did. She didn’t drink, which is totally cool, I respect that, but she would join the people on the floor who went out plastered, and become distant and angry with everyone, especially her boyfriend. With whom she fell ‘in love’ with within the first few weeks of dating.
Oh, and she cried. Constantly. About her boyfriend, about ME, about anything at all. She cried about 3 times a week, at least. Her boyfriend and her began to fight; SCREAMING, crying, angry fights all IN MY ROOM. Now, I’m very involved at my school; I also studied a lot at the library, had a job, and had a lot of friends in the same dorm, so I rarely was in my room at all, but it really gets annoying when at least 2 times a week for a few hours at a time having to avoid the room. But, I understood, couples fight, and they’re in a dorm, where else are they supposed to do that?
Throughout the entire year, I don’t think she studied at all (communications major, gah.) The TV that she brought was. Never. Off. She watched TV constantly. As soon as she woke up, the TV was on. If I returned after she had fallen asleep, the TV was still on. All day, every day. And it wasn’t even good channels; it was a very diverse mixture of ET, MTV, or BRAVO. and if she had already seen the episode, she WOULD STILL WATCH IT AGAIN. It honestly was appalling seeing that much blatant inactivity.
I mean, sometimes she would go outside the dorm. She had a job that she worked about 10-15 hours a week, an understandable amount as a college student, you don’t want to become overwhelmed. But then she QUIT because she didn’t like working on Sundays because that was the day her boyfriend got brunch with HIS friends, and she didn’t want to miss out on spending time with him. WAT.
This summer, they—as you probably guessed—broke up. She went into a crazy depressive mode and BLEW EVERYONE’S PHONES UP. She apologized to me, about how she should have known, boys would leave before friends (like, no way, everyone knows that.) She is now up everyone’s asses trying to repair the friendships that she actually never cultivated …so there’s nothing there to repair. Our circle of friends (and by our friends, I mean her ex-boyfriend’s and my friends), absolutely despise her and I just sit back and chuckle to myself. I’m excited for this year to start.”
Living With A Cologne-Obsessed Jesus…
“I literally lived with a guy named Jesus that was into two things:
1. Jesus
2. Cologne
Here’s the daily ritual:
He would wake up and then choose an outfit. Immediately sprays cologne on it.
He would then go to take a shower, presumably with lots of ‘products’.
After, the return from the shower, he would again, apply cologne to his body.
Then apply clothes to his body. And oh yes, add more cologne.
Time for food! He went to breakfast hall, to eat.
After breakfast, he would come back to the dorm and touch up cologne if necessary.
Finally made it to class.
Lunchtime. uh-oh! The cologne wore off. So he would stop by the dormitory and apply cologne.
Ate his lunch and then would go to play some tennis.
Uh-oh! The cologne came off with sweat and shower. The perfect solution: add more cologne!
Then more boring class.
Dinnertime? Ah not yet! He would need to stop by dorm and re-up on stink.
Ate his dinner and then went to Bible study. ‘Hey, guys! I’ll be right there. I just gotta go back to my room and get my bible and put on some cologne.’
Wow, that was a hard day I think I’ll take a shower…and get ready for bed by spraying some freaking cologne all over myself.
And then sometimes he would lay out his clothes for the next day and put cologne on them before he went to sleep. OMG!
The absolute worst was when I was returning from fall break and could recognize the stench before I even got inside the lobby. It reeked from the basement entry all the way up to the third floor. As soon as I got onto my hall, I was approached by a group of guys. ‘Dude we know it’s coming from your room you have to talk to this guy about his cologne habit!’
I opened the door to find him underneath a mountain of blankets, hiding from the air. ‘Jesus! What the heck is up with the cologne?’
He was literally bawling. He had broken his bottle in his desk drawer. Judging from the size of some of the broken glass remnants, this would be about a half-gallon size bottle of ‘blue steel.’ If you’re ever at a stink-counter in the mall, check it out if you want to have a nasal nightmare.”
Not The German Roommate He Thought He Would Be…
“One of my freshman roommates named Hans was far from the sausage eating, beer drinking, huge German man we thought he would be. Our first hint was the 15-20 bottles of medication in his medicine cabinet. His mother would drive an hour or so every week to resupply his meds. That was just the tip of the iceberg though. About a month into school, Hans began fencing club. Now keep in mind Hans is heavy and would come back from practice literally dripping in his own sweat. Immediately after changing out of his practice clothes, he would go straight to bed, still sweaty and smelly. While gross, we really didn’t care, it was his bed and he could do whatever he wanted.
About a month after that we were sitting around after class when he wasn’t there talking about who had to clean the bathroom next. After some discussion about how disgusting the room smelled, we realized that none of us had ever seen Hans use the shower. To reaffirm our suspicion we stapled his towel to the wall in a few places. If he was showering while we were all in class then the staples would be pulled out.
Fast forward another month and the staples were still in the wall! The room reeked and we bought a ton of wall plugs and Febreze to cover it up but nothing really worked. Now at this point, Hans had not bathed himself in over 3 months. We sat down with him multiple times and told him we knew he wasn’t showering. After continually denying it, we finally decided to go to the RA.
Eventually, we all had to go to mediation with the RA. There was yelling and he finally agreed to shower although this was still a rarity for the rest of the year. The smell got a little better but I could still never have any friends over.”
Creepy Girl Would Stalk Her Roommate’s Boyfriend
“Not my freshman roommate but my wife’s (just girlfriend at the time, but she’s leveled up a few times since then). The girl had no social life of her own outside of one friend who would corner you and wouldn’t shut up.
Having no social lives or dating lives of their own they took it upon themselves to start stalking me online. Suddenly I was getting tons of hits on sites I’d put together from their dorm network (they didn’t realize I could track that) and they were showing up and signing guestbooks on old Geocities sites I’d done in high school and other crap like that.
One time I forgot my laptop in their room. Roommate decided it would be hilarious to turn it on, go through my stuff, then download a bunch of inappropriate videos and set some of it as the background on my machine. Did I mention that this was all in the 10 minutes it took me to get to my car, realize I didn’t have my computer and walk back up to their room? She ended up downloading a bunch of viruses along with all that inappropriate websites and I had to nuke the hard drive from orbit.
Most roommates have the courtesy to knock on the door if it’s late at night on a weekend and they know their roomie is in there with their SO, but not these two. They would unlock the door as quickly as possible, burst in, and turn on the lights with creepy grins on their faces like they were hoping to find us boinking. We never were because we knew they were going to pull that stuff.
The roommate would sit on my wife’s bed eating food and watching tv but not on her own bed. Her roommate would go through my wife’s stuff when she didn’t think she’d be around.
One day my wife comes home to find that her hairbrush had been picked clean. Roommate’s friend had decided to clean it for her ‘to be nice.’ We never found out what happened to the hair, but I pray that it just went into the trash and not into a hair doll.”
The Last Words His Roommate Said To Him…
“I walked into the room for the first time freshman year and saw him standing in the middle of the room screaming at his dad. He was yelling about not wanting to go, and how he blamed his mom for writing his college essay and filling out the application. He kept calling my roommate (I shall name him Eduardo) an ‘ungrateful human’ and threatening to beat the life out of him if he tried to leave. It was right after he finished speaking that they realized I was in the room. They both pretended nothing had happened, shook my hand, and introduced themselves. Luckily my parents had not walked in with me so they didn’t have to see that and be worried.
Eventually, my parents met his as they helped me set up the room, and talked about how proud of us they were. Eduardo’s dad kept saying things like ‘It’s either college or the street, cause I’m not paying to support a failure.’ My parents, of course, thought he was joking.
Every day this kid told me how much he hated school. He would never go to class, drink in the room all day with the door open (we were a dry campus), scream at everyone, party all night, and generally just be a jerk. He used to watch VH1 every night until 4 AM, with the volume cranked up so loud you couldn’t hear. When I asked him to turn it down because I couldn’t hear, he said he would if I wrestled him. Turns out he was serious. He wanted to WRESTLE me, because of me asking him to turn down that Bret Michaels Rock of Love show. I declined and went to bed. The next day he called his mom to come get him, and she agreed and said she was getting in the car. She never came. He LOST HIS COOL. He broke everything he owned. Punched a hole through his tv, slammed his guitar hero controllers on the ground repeatedly, threw his Xbox out the window, cracked his cell phone in half, ripped his bed sheets. He basically totaled his side of the room. I left the room during all this, assuming he was just blowing off steam, and not knowing he was breaking his stuff.
I walked back into a freaking war zone, with him standing in the middle of the room crying, drinking laundry detergent, yelling about how he wanted to die, and how he took a whole bottle of Advil after he broke his stuff. I ran to get the RA, and he ran and took the broken glass/plastic shards from his computer monitor and started cutting his wrists. The RA and I reentered the room to this kid throwing up detergent and bleeding. Cops called, they feed him charcoal to prevent him from dying due to detergent/pills. (Apparently, they do this instead of ipecac syrup) He left that night. Woke me up to say goodbye. Last thing he said to me?
‘Goodbye, sorry about ruining your birthday…’ What the heck?
After he left, I needed a new roommate. The guys across the hall were tripled in a room made for 2, so I invited one of them to live with me. He accepted, the RD agreed and less than 2 weeks later he was all moved in. This new guy is great, we really hit it off and become fast friends, and he begins to tell me how Eduardo still texts him. Apparently, he still texted everyone in the rooms near mine. Now I really don’t care because who am I to say who they should and shouldn’t text as long as it doesn’t involve me.
My new roommate (Who I shall name Bill) is a pretty sociable person and has long since made friends with all the neighbors. I always wanted to make friends with the people around us but having Eduardo as a roommate made it incredibly difficult to. His train of thought was that if they were HIS friends, they could not under ANY circumstances be MY friends as well. Honestly looking back on it I guess I was a bit like an abused girlfriend or wife. I’d gotten so used to him being a jerk that I just quietly sat in my room playing video games, afraid to be sociable for fear of awakening the beast. ANYWAY… Bill introduced me to the neighbors, and we all became good friends, and it was once this friendship blossomed that they began to admit to me that not only was Eduardo still texting them, he was becoming more and more angry towards me.
He would text them how things would be better if I had left and not him, and how he’d made some mistakes and wished he could come back. It was at this point that he texted Bill and told him ‘Hey man I’m gunna come visit for the weekend, I’m taking my old bed while I’m there.’ It was at this point that I actually nutted up and decided enough was enough. I called him (still had his number saved in my phone for god knows what reason) and flat out told him he was unwelcome in the room.
I said he was welcome to come get his stuff that he had left that had survived his ‘episode’ (his mini fridge was all that remained) but there was NO WAY I was letting him stay in the room for longer than it took to take his fridge because of the fact that he was a downright horrible person. He flipped out.
He started screaming into the phone how I was the ‘greasiest piece of crap slimeball’ that he’d ever called a friend. I said ‘Sorry, goodbye’ and hung up. He tried calling back, texting, and IM’ing me but I ignored or blocked it all. It was at this point that he started commenting on everything I’ve ever done on Facebook ever. I mean ever. All saying ‘Gay.’ Hundreds of notifications. Finally, he stopped and I thought it was over. Then suddenly Bill gets a text that says, ‘Dude forget him, he won’t say no after this’
Bill asks him what that means and Eduardo responds with, ‘Got my dad’s gun case keys, see you in an hour.’ I’ve never run anywhere faster than I have to the police station that day. I explained the situation, and they called a cop from his area to speak with him and his parents. They assured me nothing was going to happen and that he probably was just pissed and needed to blow off steam. Turns out the cops got to his house as he was getting in the car. He had his dad’s shotgun under the passenger seat.
I called my family, they drove out, and we had a meeting with the police. Eduardo’s mother drove out to school too and met with us. She pleaded that her son needed help and that if I had him arrested he could never change. My parents kept urging me to press charges, but the look in Eduardo’s mom’s eyes was so sad that I told her I wouldn’t if he got help.
And once again everything was fine, for about a week.
Halloween night rolls around, and due to my job on campus, I can’t go out partying. My job consists of sitting at a desk and checking ID cards between 11 pm and 4 am to make sure everyone who enters actually lives in the building. Well, I was informed that joining me and my work partner would be 2 troopers. They told me it was because the shenanigans on Halloween tend to get rowdier than two minimum wage student workers can handle.
I thought that was pretty cool and spent the whole night checking the ID cards of kids dressed up in costumes, trashed out of their skulls. Around 3 AM one officer pulls me aside and says he has to tell me something. The real reason they were there that night was that Eduardo was seen in the area, and they needed to make sure I was safe while they found him. Apparently, kids are harder to identify when they’re all in costume (who knew?) The officer told me they found him on campus around 2 AM, hiding in the service entrance to my dorm building.
He was carrying a knife
This time I was not so lenient and pressed charges. Among other things he is now not allowed within 2 miles of campus, which essentially makes him unable to be in the town the school is located in.
It’s been about 4 years now and I STILL remember every detail vividly”
