Living with a roommate can be difficult. There can be a whole myriad of problems that can bubble to the surface. Usually, people can work them out in a calm way and at least make the living situation tolerable.
Then there are the roommates that just go way too far. The ones that don't seem to have a sense of other people or those people's concerns or feelings. They are the ones that deserve to be served serious revenge and these are the stories from people that have done it. Anyone who has had a bad roommate will love these stories.
Cold Comfort
“I was roommates with a girl who was a complete slob. She never cleaned up after herself, left heaps of trash and clothes everywhere (namely my clothes, as she would frequently wear my clothes and just leave them dirty on the floor so week after week, I had nothing to wear).
After a while, I grew fed up with the situation. She made a joke one night about only having one pair of clean underwear left to wear as she had, once again, failed to do laundry.
I froze her last pair of underwear and left it in the freezer for her to find in the morning when she went to retrieve the waffles for breakfast. We did not stay roommates for very long, thankfully.”
So Small, So Satisfying
“When I was younger, I found out my roommate cancelled our lease, leaving me one week to find a new place to live because she was just tired of paying rent and had the luxury of being able to move back home. My dad lived on a boat and my mom was god knows where, so I had nowhere to go. She and her SO loved doing elaborate jigsaw puzzles, so I threw away 1 piece of two different puzzles they were working on.”
Massive Revenge, No Consequences
“A roommate of mine would always consistently prank me, like setting stupid traps or just other random, annoying things. He also had a habit of messing with my stuff and wearing my clothes, thinking I wouldn’t notice.
My revenge came when one night I had a few buddies over and he had just come back from a long night of drinking and went into his room and crashed.
While he was sleeping, me and my buddies carried him and his mattress outside in the backyard while it was snowing outside, and let him lay there for like 5 minutes, then we started throwing snowballs to wake him. He was so trashed that even after hitting him with snowballs and waking him up from his slumber, he just curled back up under his blanket and went to sleep.
An hour or two after, he came pounding on the door, mattress in hand and all. When he asked me how he ended up outside, I just told him when he came in the house all he said was that he wanted to build an igloo outside and took his bed and blankets and went to sleep in the backyard.
He believed my story. I laughed all the way to work.”
They Went To The Next Level
“Many years ago, I lived in a massive shared house (there were 8 of us).
We had a long driveway along the side of the house that was a single car width. Jerkoff Housemate (JH) was parked first, with Good-Egg (GE) parked closer to the street, blocking JH in.
JH was a 6ft dude/bro; GE was a 5ft very feminine woman. We’d all paid GE bill money a few weeks before, except for JH.
JH comes in to get GE to move her car…by screaming abuse at her. GE calmly replies, ‘Pay me what you owe for the bills and I will move my car.’ He then rants about how he has a meeting in ten minutes and screams more abusive things and even appeals to me (as the only other person home) to support him. I back GE – she’s being entirely reasonable.
After 45 minutes of abuse, he walks down to the street and orders a cab. That night, when he gets home, he sneaks all his stuff out of the house and does a runner, never to be seen again.
Revenge time: It turns out that JH was on unemployment benefits, and had a publicly appointed defender for an upcoming court case. He’d also had a birthday recently, and we all met his mom – who was divorced and used her maiden name.
Armed with his date of birth and mother’s maiden name, we cancelled his benefits and his defender. It felt pretty good.”
Mahna Ha Ha Ha
“In college, our dorm rooms were laid out like an H with a double bedroom on each side connected by a bathroom in the middle. The bathroom had a lock on the bedroom side of the door so your suitemates couldn’t enter your room.
My suitemates were pretty obnoxious. They never bought toilet paper but used an ungodly amount of it any time I left some in the bathroom. They never cleaned the bathroom. They left their hair all over the shower. They would listen to country music really loudly. I just didn’t like them at all.
My roommate and I were leaving for the weekend and knew that the suitemates had a campus ministry event so they’d be staying there. On our way out, we put the Muppets ‘Mahna Mahna’ song on repeat, not so loud that it would be a noise complaint requiring an R.A. to enter the room to turn it off, but loud enough that it would be audible while they were trying to sleep or study, and it would definitely seep into their minds.
I heard them humming it for months afterward.”
The Unfortunate Package
“My little brother and his girlfriend came to stay at my house for the weekend, and the girlfriend was super self-centered and obnoxious. When they left, she forgot her clothes and toiletries because she left them sprawled all over my bathroom.
About a week later, she and my brother moved into an apartment together. After he paid for the moving truck, deposit and utilities, she cheated on him with her ex and kicked him out of the apartment. This left him broke, homeless, and heartbroken.
In the days after the breakup, she kept calling and emailing him several times per day, demanding that he ask me to ship her clothes and toiletries back to her (‘I mean, it’s really important. It’s my NORTHFACE.’) My brother called and pleaded with me to ship them to her so she would stop having a reason to contact him.
Being the loving sister that I am, I gathered up the Really Important Northface sweatshirt, shorts, underwear, shampoo, conditioner, soap and razor. I folded everything nicely. I then wrote a nice note apologizing for taking so long to mail them to her, and let her know that I hope all is well. The note was written in permanent marker, and the paper happened to be resting on the Really Important Northface when I wrote it. Unfortunately, the ink bled straight through the paper and onto the shirt. Also, unfortunately, the shampoo, soap and conditioner caps were not tightly secured on their bottles, and the contents leaked out all over the clothes, further spreading the ink. The most unfortunate result, though, was that her razor didn’t have any sort of protective cap or container and left little slashes all over the front of the Really Important Northface.
She received the package, and my brother never heard from her again.”
What Goes Around Comes Around
“I was dating this girl, thought she was the one, so I gave her the keys to my apartment. I worked late for my job but I was just happy there was someone in my bed when I got home at 2 in the morning. Came home one night and she was awake. She confessed to using my apartment to cheat on me with 7 different people. So I packed her stuff up and told her to leave for good. Then I lied to her and said I moved to Seattle. I moved to Hawaii instead. Three months after being in Hawaii, I get a phone call from her. I answer, and to my surprise she’s called me from the Seattle airport. She flew out there to try and fix things between us. The dialog goes as follows:
Me: ‘So you’re in Seattle?’
Her: ‘Yeah! Weren’t you listening? I came here to fix us.’
Me: ‘Oh…well that’s bad.’
Her: ‘What’s bad?’
Me: ‘I’m in Hawaii!’ (then hung up the phone).
(Phone rings, I answer).
Her: ‘YOU LIED TO ME!!’
Me: ‘Huh, how does it feel?’ I hang up again.
I don’t know if that’s petty, but to me was a good revenge.”
There Is Always One Bad One
“I had three roommates in college, and we were in a suite style dorm. Three of us cleaned up after ourselves and got along pretty well, but you know how it goes. There is always that one person.
The 4th roommate was as inconsiderate as could be. He would always leave trash around the room, he would dirty every dish and would consequently overfill out 40-gallon trash bags. He would be very loud when we were trying to sleep. He would always open the fridge to see if anyone brought any food from home and ask, ‘This yours?’ followed by, ‘This have pork in it?’ He was Muslim, so he didn’t eat pork. He would leave his locked tablet on full volume and 5 times a day it would go off, playing the call to prayer, for him to pray to Mecca. The problem with that is he would never take his tablet out of the room. Since the tablet was locked we couldn’t silence the app when he wasn’t home. Also, he slept on the bunk above me, and if I wasn’t asleep before he went to bed I would have to wait for him to quit tossing around before I could fall asleep. He didn’t just calmly roll over, he’d thrash until he got comfy.
Time for the petty revenge.
We started to hold the power button on his tablet every time he left the room so it would power off. We would pile his dirty dishes on his desk until he washed them. If there were papers on the floor, they went in the trash no questions asked. He had a very musty smell to him so one of my roommates would douse his bed in disinfectant once a day or else the scent would overwhelm the whole room. The cherry on top of this petty revenge was on move out day.
For about 8 months, my two friends and I kept the room presentable. We always picked up before we left for a weekend, or helped each other tidy up before our girlfriends would come over. But he refused to participate, ‘I didn’t make a mess,’ or ‘That’s not mine.’ So the second half of the second semester, we just stopped cleaning. We went cold turkey. Then finals week came and we knew he was moving out Friday so we packed our stuff up and got out of there on Thursday morning.
The school’s policy is that the last person to check out is responsible for the room being cleaned. He came back to the room and saw the 3 of us signing out with the RA and asked, ‘You guys leavin’?’ We said yup, and the RA said, ‘Make sure this place gets clean or you are the one that gets crucified.’ The look on his face was so worth it.”
Leaving A Going Away Present
“I lived in a shared house with two guys and another girl.
We all shared a bathroom and it always smelled like vomit, with makeup and hair dye always all over the mirror and sink and a weird splashback stain on the wall next to the toilet.
The girl never had food and I never saw her cook. I went away for a weekend and came back to most of my food and drink gone and the bathroom smelling so bad.
I contacted the landlord and they couldn’t be bothered to deal with it as she always paid on time. I decided to move out. When I was getting the last of my stuff I needed to use the toilet pretty bad. Obviously, the was no toilet paper since she always used it all, so I took a pair of her socks off the radiator, pooped in them then put them back. Yes, the heating was on.”
Too Far?
“I had a nightmare of a roommate senior year while I was finishing up my bachelors degree in social science.
He partied all the time, would come back to the dorm late night and wake me up playing music or watching TV in the room at like 2 in the morning, and he knew I had 8 AM classes most days of the week. I pleaded with him to be more quiet when he came in late and at least wear headphones if he was going to listen to music, but he couldn’t care less and told me I was welcome to go sleep out in the common area if it bothered me, that it was his room too.
I bought a ton of adult beverages, left them in a suitcase under his bed with some cash in it, and called in an anonymous tip to campus security that my roommate was selling it all on campus to underage kids. Security came over later that night when I was trying to sleep and he had been drinking a lot, playing loud music, and busted him. The next day, he had to pack up all his belongings and was forced to move out.
He lost his housing privileges and I ended up having a single to myself for the rest of the semester.
Later that year, he started a fight with me at a frat party on campus and ended up getting kicked out of school.”
Clean Teeth With This!
“My brother used to leave streaks on the toilet seat. Like, there would just be a line of grossness in the spot where your crack is on the toilet seat. I was constantly telling him to wipe it off and he never would.
So I started using his toothbrush to clean it up and never told him. It went on for like a year. I might tell him one day but we aren’t close at all so it probably wouldn’t be funny to him.”
“Suck On That”
“One of my husband’s friends lived with us shortly after I gave birth. He was constantly doing idiotic, and inconsiderate stuff behind the scenes to bother me, but acting totally cool in front of my husband. He was completely grossed out by mother’s milk, so I baked their favorite cake with my milk. Said it was the best they’ve ever had. Suck on that.”
Spread Rumors, Get Slammed
“My former roommate/best friend out of the blue started spreading completely fabricated rumors about me. When I heard about them I didn’t confront her or call her out.
Instead, I blocked her in every way and took all my stuff out of our shared storage unit and never reminded her about paying her half. Until months later, when she showed up on my doorstep to tell me that they had repo’d everything in the unit.
She had every childhood photo, family heirlooms, expensive furniture and a small jewelry collection in there.
Got what she deserved as far as I’m concerned.”
“Don’t Mess With My Dogs”
“I found out my then boyfriend was cheating on me. Then he threw my dog across the room when we were discussing what he had done. I moved out immediately, more because of him hurting my dog than anything. So as I was moving out, I took his entire smut DVD collection and microwaved them one by one. It only takes 3 second each. Took me about an hour to go through them all. I put them back in the case, then back where they belonged. Not sure if the microwave was still usable, did not really care.
He was also a manager at a restaurant and would bring home tons of food. They had really nice coolers that the food came in so I called the GM and explained that I had moved out and that I wanted to return the boxes. He lost his job. Then I was getting collection calls for him. Gave them the new girl’s work and personal number so they could find him.
Don’t mess with my dogs.”
Making The Products More Natural
“Let me start off by saying my old roommate in college was TERRIBLE.
We shared a bathroom but didn’t share products.
I noticed during one of my showers that she had the same shampoo and conditioner bottles in the shower for a long time. I picked them up and they were both completely empty, which obviously meant she had been using mine for I don’t even know how long.
So since I had about a quarter left in my bottles, I peed in my bottles, left them in the shower, and went out and got new ones and carried them in and out when I took a shower secretly.
Eventually, my bottles were empty mwahahaha.”
He Stood Alone, They Got Him Back
“I had a terrible roommate in college.
Five of us rented an apartment. We’d all chip in for food, except the terrible guy. He’d hide food in his room, where he had a mini-fridge hidden in his closet. He wouldn’t do dishes, despite all of us agreeing to rotate the chores before we even moved in together. He was filthy, he ate our collective food, refuse to clean up his share and I even caught him straight up spitting on the floor.
One night, while he was still in class, we’d discovered his food stash. We all made gigantic mixing bowls of cereal with the boxes from his closet and his gallon of milk. We were all watching TV eating whole boxes of his cereal when he got home. He came in and noticed and just said: ‘Yo, that’s messed up guys.’
No. What’s messed up is you not doing your part and abiding by what we all agreed upon.
He was pretty much absentee after that, constantly coming back from class, changing and leaving. He paid his rent though, so, that’s one thing.”
Just To Make A Point
“Years ago, I was at home hanging out with my two roommates and some friends. My female roommate was playing my Guitar Hero game on my Xbox. I was talking to friends and our other roommate when she turned around and yelled, ‘Shut the eff up,’ at me and the group. I got up, opened the Xbox, and snapped my own disc in half. Just so she couldn’t play my game anymore.”
Rubbing It In Her Bed
“My first-year roommate would always have an automatic air freshener that would go off on a timer and every night it would scare the snot out of me.
She would also be obsessed about the way it smelled after I hooked up with someone. The times I told her I was bringing someone back, she would ask me to cover up the ‘musk’ and would just make me feel really bad about myself.
She was a bit homophobic (I was recently out as bi), casually racist, and would never leave the room.
One time I invited my oldest friend to stay over while my roommate was out because we had both been drinking and it was late. My roommate later came back wasted. When she opened the door and saw that there was a girl in my bed (my best friend, who I saw as a sister), she acted as if she’d walked in on us hooking up (we weren’t). I wasn’t out to anyone else on my floor, and since there were other people on our floor escorting my roommate home, I was mortified that they thought the way she did. While my friend and I were helping to make sure she was okay, she kept talking about us being together.
My friend was gay, but she was so uncomfortable that she almost left. I have wonderful roommates now, but I still approach every situation with them with an apology, thinking that they’ll get upset with me like she did. I’m a survivor of emotional abuse, which means that I don’t do well with conflict. So the roommate thing, even if she didn’t mean to be rude, really didn’t help.
So one week, when she left for holidays, in a fit of pettiness, my boyfriend took the batteries out of the air freshener. Then we got busy on her bed. Not my proudest moment and I still feel very bad about it. But on some days when I’m feeling down, it does help make me smile.
I was not a perfect roommate by any means (I was messy, but I did keep it to my side), but the passive aggressiveness and the fact that I never felt like I could have time alone in my own room made me crazy. “
College Roommates That Don’t Care Are The Worst
“My sophomore year roommate in college was a prick for no reason.
Day one, he lies in bed and cranks his TV to full volume for absolutely no reason. His level of nonsense would eventually lead to him immediately jumping up and locking the door the moment I’d leave the room, even for something like brushing my teeth. When the RA would let me back in, he’d sneer, ‘Didn’t you remember your key?’ with a big grin on his face.
My first act of revenge was completely unintentional but I was so happy it happened.
My buddy next door came over PLASTERED one night after drinking and at one point, he poured milk on my idiot roommate’s side of the room. (Sidenote, my roommate went home every weekend so he wasn’t around). The milk had gotten into his book bag slightly so I decided to be a decent guy and wash it so he wouldn’t have a fit. I emptied everything out and put it through the washer and dryer. Turns out I had missed a small pocket and left a floppy disk in his bag, which contained his English comp assignments. All that ‘trauma’ in the washer and dryer wiped the disk. Fast forward to the following week as he’s proceeding to finish his assignment, he can’t find his work and had no other backups.
The second time wasn’t me, but a buddy. Everyone knew of my jerky roommate and how much of a lazy idiot he was. Well during another weekend later in the year, I had some friends visiting who were prospective students. After hearing all the horror stories of this guy, my buddy took roommate’s laundry detergent into the bathroom and blew a load into it, shook it up and put it back on the shelf, ensuring roommate would not truly have clean clothes, ever.
The last time was at the end of the year. After enduring the lockouts, the blaring TV, him using my computer behind my back without asking because his was a piece of junk, etc., I got him kicked out of the dorm. He was so lazy he quit going to all his classes midway through the first semester. He failed his classes but was just close enough that the school offered him a one-semester reprieve to get his grades up.
He went to class for 2 weeks then quit going. He would stay up all night, play poker and then come back and watch TV at an ungodly volume all hours of the morning, then proceed to sleep well into the day. Kind of annoying when I had a normal schedule.
After taking this to the dean, she deemed him to be ‘detrimental to my studies,’ especially since he was basically just renting the bed at this point and nothing else.
So, for the last 3 weeks of school, he was ordered out of the dorm and not allowed to return, forcing him to go back and live with his parents and brother whom he HATED living with, hence why he was freeloading at the university.”