GOD YES. I tell my sibling this a million times. If you want to borrow a bag or some jewelry, just LET ME KNOW. In consideration of the fact that that stuff belongs to me, I''d like to know where it is. What if I go to use it and it's not there? I say this a million times and it doesn't seem to get through. In need of my own apartment, like yesterday.

The communal dorm kitchen was a disaster. People constantly left angry notes telling the women of our dorm to clean up after themselves like grown women to hexes put upon some the bitch who decided to slice into a freshly baked birthday cake. I myself left an angry note cursing the lady who stole my hummus and pita bread!

So glad those days are over ;)

I have used the nasty-o-grams to my advantage a LOT!!! LOVE THEM!!!

I don't live in a group living situation, but I frequently have to leave notes on specific food items telling my son not to eat it. Otherwise what would be enough for all for dinner would become an afternoon snack for him.

I shared a house with four other women in college. We each got half a shelf of a 3-level fridge, with the remaining half shelf for our Brita tank. The veggie drawers were used as needed, and one roommate would buy a lot of produce but not get around to consuming it. As things became rotten, I'd remove them because it was unappetizing to me to have a stinky refrigerator. After a few times, I left a note on our kitchen whiteboard requesting that "whomever keeps letting their veggies rot, please clean up after yourself - I don't like removing your liquid lettuces and cucumbers."

It got back to me from a mutual friend that Rotting-veggie Roomie told the story as the rest of the house ganging up on her and tacking the cease-and-desist note on her bedroom door with a carving knife, Martin Luther-style!

I now share a fridge and apartment with two friends. There's no food-swiping problem, but since space is cramped, I long for the day when I can have one to myself! Dreams of a 20-something...

Oh I was the queen of the post-it note in our four-person, one bathroom dorm room at art school! I kept mine very simple..."Flush" placed directly across from the toilet; "Gross" placed...well everywhere that wasn't cleaned properly (or at all)...

Sometimes it makes you wonder how (or by whom) people were raised!!

There are definitely notes I want to leave around the house like "hey, you put the oven rack in backwards, idiot" or "please don't clean the coffee table with 409...that's what pledge is for." But I resist. Rooming with friends is eye-opening. For all of you note lovers, this website will keep you entertained for hours: http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/

I have a "NO TOUCH" note in all CAPS on the button for the thermostat. My husband (who is a lovely person generally who almost never annoys me) always changes the temperature of the house on a daily basis depending on if he's warm or chilly. Drives me nuts!

I love passiveaggressivenotes.com. That microwave one is a classic from there (and so retarded -- really? this is what you have to be upset about in life? a blinking microwave clock?).

I have to (sheepishly) admit that I've been the very deserving recipient of a note like this once or twice. In my freshman naivete, it really never occurred to me that you shouldn't help yourself to whatever is in the fridge. Horrible, I know!! Privileged, suburban white girl over here, I totally admit it! In my defense, it never occurred to me that I shouldn't let other folks eat the food I paid for and I never had a problem with it. I used to call from the grocery store and ask if I needed to get anything for the dorm, never even thinking that I should probably get folks to chip in. So if allowed to continue in my misguided ways, I think it still would have evened out...maybe. Lol.

I have a book called 'I lick my cheese (and other notes...)' and it is freaking hilarious. If anyone needs a smile after dealing with crappy flatmates, I recommend that book.

The microwave post-it note is hilarious. At work, we have a "farm" of about 30 microwaves in one room (so employees can get a healthy dose of radiation when warming up their lunches) and I am really tempted to put a note like this one on every single one of the microwaves, just for fun. :-)

I got pretty annoyed the other day when we finally had a hot sunny summer day and I went to make iced tea only to find that the housemate had already taken my 2L tea jug to make some for himself, which he then drank over several days. No sipping iced tea by the pool for me. Amongst his other sins, he also uses the tea towels that I use to wipe up clean dishes to clean up messes on the floor, then hangs them back up and never washes them.

I think I'm just kind of 'over' having a housemate so any slip up he makes drives me crazy. He has been bring up his cash situation in conversation recently and although I don't want to see him struggle, there is part of me that secretly wishes he'd go back to live with his parents. I can afford the apartment without him and everything besides what is in his room belongs to me anyway, but keeping him around does save me a lot of money. I'm not sure how you have a conversation with someone telling them that you just don't want to live with them anymore.

I was, as a matter of fact, the subject of vitriol: in fact, somewhere in the stuff I should have cleared away years ago is a beautiful, elaborate12 x 20 water color poster detailing the complex steps involved showing how to replace a used-up toilet paper tube with a full, new one. It just appeared in the bathroom one day, and I only had one other roommate at the time. An example of why I come to a halt every time I get inspired by motivational clutter-clearing posts and articles.

passiveaggressivenotes!

What always got me was a certain college roommate (who was renting a room FROM me, not with me) who would leave passive-aggressive notes around the house and sign them "The Management."
The house was in my name, as were the bills, and the dishes and furniture were all mine, and somehow she was "management?' I'm sure she just thought she was being cute, but please.

Wow, I lived with my share of ridiculous roommates before getting married but I always found clear communication to be a better problem solver than snarky post-its. Who wants to listen to someone who writes condescending notes all over the place?

I had a college housemate who caused the other four of us endless trouble. She was bouncing checks all over California and some of these were for rent and utilities. Our landlord and utility companies were not very understanding and wanted to boot us out/cut off service. The crowning blow came when the police showed up on our doorstep to arrest her (she hadn't been home in days and we had no idea where she was) for the check mess. After considerable effort, we finally got rid of her. The other housemates weren't exactly prize winners themselves; one of them used to scrub the bathtub with the toilet brush (we found this out after many months) and another used to have sex in my bed with a variety of guys whenever I wasn't home (she didn't see why this should be a problem). I do not miss those days at all!

Haha- we had a guy leave the bones of a rotisserie chicken sitting on the table in our teacher's lounge at work. Overnight. During the AZ summer. I ended up writing a note on the door reminding him that we are not, in fact, Vikings, and that the trash can was a mere 12 steps away. Same dude took a deli pack of Carl Buddig "turkey" lunch meat into the teacher bathroom, ate while dropping a deuce, and then accidentally left it on top of the toilet tank. Talk about a WTF discovery for the next person. We also now have a list of bathroom etiquette rules posted over the staff toilet, since apparently, teachers can't remember to wipe up their pee dribbles or flush twice to be thorough.

I'm seriously contemplating leaving a passive aggressive note in our building's entry area. Apartments where I live tend to have short tenancies so chances are you get 4-5 letters every week addressed to other people, it is easy enough to write RTS on them and then drop them off at the many post boxes within 3 minutes walk. Some of my neighbours keep leaving piles of this mail in the hallway instead. I've taken to picking it all back up and putting it in their letter boxes everyday but they don't seem to be getting the message.

Fortunately my roommate is a super sweet girl so that we agree that anything in the refrigerator is for the taking, except for pre-packaged meals. It's her boyfriend I grumble about because he doesn't live here (hence doesn't pay rent) but stays at least 4 days out of the week. After 10 months I finally got him to take off his stupid faux combat shoes at the door. Ever noticed the skinnier the guy the bigger their faux combat shoes? My attitude toward the combat boots are the same with hummers, unless you're on the front line in Iraq you have no business using either.

Alicee, I would just say that the sublease's end date (make sure to first have one) is coming up and your sister/cousin/niece/mother is moving in as "originally" planned before rommie moved in. Or if you don't have an official sublease end date, still go ahead and say sister/cousin/niece/mother is moving in and he needs to find another place to live because family comes first. Whether or not you have a sister/cousin/niece/mother is besides the point.

I had fantastic roommates in college & law school. I was so lucky & spoiled (& I didn't even realize it at the time), & I'm still close friends with all of them today. It wasn't until I moved from the deep south to a big city to start my professional career after law school that I one awful roommate - a person I knew from college. I was trying to save money & get a hang of city life before living alone. Wow ... a two-year period that went from good, to bad, to unbearable with me counting down the days until the lease was ending on my work calendar & being grateful that I was having to work long hours. You definitely learn a lot about someone by living with them. I moved out 10 months ago into my own 1 bedroom/1 bathroom apartment. I hope I'm never in a place to have another roommate - the jury is still out on whether I would consider a husband or children as roommates. I may be keeping this 1 bedroom for a while. For everyone with bad roommate experiences, I sympathize.

Ha. After sharing a house with 10 girls in college, I've seen my share of snarky post-its. Once, someone left a crumpled up tissue on the bathroom counter. It was sitting there for like 3 days, until someone taped it to the mirror with a note that said "this is absolutely DISGUSTING. if this is yours, THROW IT AWAY!"

Funny! I read a similarly amusing article yesterday, involving notes to annoying neighbors.
Check it out (Warning - language):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2100775/Hilarious-anonymous-notes-left-neighbours-doors.html

Of course this never happened at my house since I was the perfect roommate...

THANK GOODNESS i only had a roommate for one quarter during college (except the siblings growing up). i thought my habits would rub off on her--no dice. i onced filled a large garbage bag with all her jack-in -the-box, pizza boxes, and other funky moldy items. Even though Ive been tempted to go from living alone to a roommate and save some dough, my sanity and privacy is worth the extra bucks.

@Username26, I assumed Alicee is the owner of the apartment from the sentence "what is in his room belongs to me anyway". Wow, does Ontario hate homeowners? I've heard of some places that makes it next to impossible for land/homeowners to get rid of hellish tenants so the last thing you want to do is rent out your property. I agree the honest approach is best, but if hellish tenants are hell-bent on staying, no amount of "honest approach" is going to work. Just say the (existing) relative changed her mind and make sure the said relative is on board.

@Frontporch... (Oh, please, please don't use the "R" word... I can tell you probably didn't mean anything by using it, but it kinda sucks to read it here) Thank you!

Once I was living with 3 other girls. Roommaets 1 & 2 put up a written sign above the sink saying "please wash your dishes". (I never used the kitchen, so I assume it was aimed at Roommate 3.)

I asked Roommates 1 & 2 politely many times over 6 months to stop leaving their dirty glasses around the living room, but it continued. They also would leave dirty pans all over the kitchen for days at a time. One day I got so pissed off, I took all their dirty dishes into their room and put them on the floor. On top of the dishes, I laid their "Please wash your dishes" sign. It was glorious.

(They were irate at first, but apologized the next day.)

I think HCL and I had the same roommate . . .I remember a nasty note left "from the management" regarding proper blanket folding. It was particularly nasty because I had been in the hospital, just come home, and gotten up to go to the bathroom and came back to find the note. Have not had a roommate since.

My sister and I had two lodgers sharing our parents' home with us while our parents were living abroad. These boys had not been taught to clean up. We had to leave instructions with the cleaning rota like "The sink is supposed to be silver-coloured, not brown", or "Taking the garbage sack out of the bin doesn't count as emptying the bins unless you take it outside". They never really got the hang of it.

My current roommates are great, and I probably deserve to be subjected to passive aggressive notes every now and again re cleaning, but it has yet to happen. One of my past roommates however, was a nightmare. She ate much of my food without contributing, and would do things like eat all but one bite of my ice cream, then put the container back in the fridge. She would make food and leave it sitting on the stove for days, just reheating the contents of the pots, and never actually refrigerating it. We were swarmed by fruit flies because she continually left cut fruit sitting unwrapped on the counter. She was tiny, and instead of bundling up at night, kept warm by cranking our heat up above 80 degrees. In response, she claimed she couldn't afford to buy a blanket. She conveniently didn't want to borrow one, and would come home with 500 bucks worth of clothes at a time. So glad I'm done with that!

Notes. Written some nasty ones, but also received some that really ticked me off...

I hated nothing more than planning out my meals for a whole week and then coming home to an empty box of (let's say) rice with a little note from my roomie attached saying 'oops, went on a binge and couldn't stop here - thank god you always have just wat I crave in your cupboard' and then singned with a darn SMILEY!!! And then I had to actually ask her to replace whatever she took...pfffffffff!

@Keltrue: Sorry, my bad.

I once left a huge note on the christmas tree in our apartment building foyer.
"Santa, please bring Tony a new muffler for Christmas"
The muffler wasn't broken, the idiot had intentionally installed a cherry bomb muffler on his truck, and It woke me every day at FOUR-THIRTY in the freakin morning - including weekends! Oh, the tortures I imagined to repay Tony...

It's probably best that Alicee not lie about potentially imaginary family members, and it's perfectly okay to say, "you know, I think I'd like to live on my own so you need to move out".

I wrote "PUT ME DOWN" on the underside of the toilet seat when i lived with two dudes. It still didn't work.

I'm direct, and if necessary scary. So one roommate "H" asked if she could put my initials on her milk so roommate No 3 would not filch. I thought I would soon have my initials on at least 2/3 of the fridge contents. No 3 and I had several "come to Jesus" conversations - well I did the talking. Everyone else involved smirked a lot and would defend my position when No 3 whined. I'm not so much for notes - or roommates :-).

Yep, my roomate always looks at a poster I put up in the living room. I come home and I hear him shuffle away from the poster as I'm opening the door. He always is friendlier after he thinks I've caught him. This behavior aggravates me further. I become very terse with him when I've suspected him to have been meddling with my poster. I wrote a note that says "this ones for my eyes only pal, close your lids" he still hasn't gotten the picture. I may need to get a poster cover for when I'm gone :(.

Herahere - thanks for the laughs!!! Really. I wish I had been there. ""Come to Jesus" conversations".
Shopman - interesting twist on the issue.Do remember headphones, roomie shouldn't hear your music either. Ho hum.

I have read some many of these notes that I actually avoid writing notes now and prefer to talk to the people in person. It just seems less aggressive.

My husband and I are currently living this his parents and have had out fair share of issues. We moved into help with with financial troubles they were having, but their standard of living was much lower then ours. We often would buy what would be 2 weeks of food for us that would be devoured within 24-48 hours Nothing lasts in the house. We have sat down with them and talked about whats ours and what we want to last a number of times, but nothing helps. Often times notes we leave directly on food we buy "disappears". Additionally food is Often left out and gone to waste. Entire cartons of eggs, milk and deli meats and cheese are left out and forgotten. We once found an entire bag of new chicken that someone had placed in the pantry that was completely defrosted. Mom is an extremely messy cook, foods are left all over the counter, floor oven and sink for days. Their youngest doesn't know how to use a reasonable amount of toilet paper and toilets are often clogged and left uncared for. Absolutely disgusting. But luckily we will be buying a house soon!

I've had people eat my food. Eat my food, but don't mess with a woman's Tupperware! I had to write a note to ask for my Tupperware back. My favorite mess was the Coke can that exploded in the freezer. Nobody would clean it. I want to get my own fridge at work.