Ahhh roommate Dave- he shot a rattlesnake in the desert, brought it home and skinned it in the kitchen sink.

I had a roommate who threw my new kitten to the floor with such force she broke it's leg.

I called her boyfriend, told him what happened, and said I wanted the girl out of my apartment by the time I returned from the vet.

In the end, her boyfriend married her new roommate. Karma, baby.

Acid-trip Anita: every Monday, I'd return to our dorm room to find her tripping, usually surrounded by 40s of Highlife... She lasted one semester. Great way to kick off my freshman year!

I haven't had a room mate since then, come to think of it...

@Village, whoo, I admire your self-restraint. I'd have gotten the police involved either by calling them or by doing something that would have gotten me arrested, and I don't even know which.

Years ago I lived with two roommates and one of them had a boyfriend who bought her a puppy. This puppy peed and crapped everywhere but they were too busy having frequent noisy sex to clean it up. I was getting ready to leave the country (and this apt.) and had left my job. The boyfriend came by one day when she was at work and erupted in an unbelievable rage AT ME for not cleaning up after the puppy! I left and went to stay with a friend. My roommate never acknowledged that he had been out of line. Of course, she married him and it was a disaster. I just saw her for the first time in 35 years. I realized I never knew what happened to the dog.

My college roommate was deeply religious (I am not) EVERY night she would offer to read the Bible to me. I always turned her down. In addition, she always prayed for my salvation (outloud) before going to bed. Clearly, I'm going to hell in her eyes.

I had a roommate once who had quite a few, er, "dates" come home with him on a regular basis. I thought he was just being indiscriminate, and didn't say anything, until it got to where he was bringing so many people home that I didn't feel safe in my own apartment, never knowing who was there or when he would show up with yet another person I didn't know.
When I spoke to him about it, I found out he was a prostitute. >_<

I had a roommate once who was a nice enough girl but a little forgetful and tried to burn the place down a few times as a result - once left a candle burning and instead of calling me just figured I would find it, once left a George Foreman grill plugged in with a potholder on top for a day, and once left eggs boiling in water for hours before I came home and smelled smoke and there was no more water in the pot. Sheesh.

I lived with the four same roommates for roughly five yeas and we lived in perfect harmony so I didn't think much about taking on a new roommate when I moved out of the house. Boy was I unprepared for what was to come.

My current roommate smells TERRIBLE, refuses to contribute to house cleaning, leaves the front and back door unlocked, trims his body hair and leaves the remains all over the sink and bathroom, never pays rent on time, leaves dirty dishes stacked in the sink for weeks, and is a social recluse who never acknowledges my presence. Ugh, the list goes on and on. I can't wait until our lease is up.

Had a roomate who didn't want to wash dishes, so she piled them up under her bed. She also refused to remover personal hygiene products from her undergarments before washing and drying them.... and I often found the laundered product left in the dryer.

Another roommate (it's now ten years later and I hope she reads this blog), was a horrible pig. She showered infrenquently, "borrowed" my clothing without asking and "forgot" to return said items, and when her cat vomited on the carpet, she'd wipe the top detritus from the carpet, but would never use water or cleaner to get the acid and bile out of the fiber. The carpet had a crusty texture as a result. She was a convert to Judasim and would leave candles burning and go to sleep, claiming that letting the candle burn was required for Shabbat (I have yet to read any documentation about the "risk your home and life and go to sleep with the candle burning" decree) . Ironic that bathing is also part of the ritual, but was usually excluded.

I had a roommate who came home from a vacation in Chicago with a souvenier: a new boyfriend.

NBF sat around the apartment watching TV all day, not contributing to rent (I was told that since they were sharing a bedroom that there was no need to split the rent differently) or the increased power bills, or the increased food bills, or even cleaning the apartment, and as far as I could tell, not looking for a job - I think he expected to be taken care of...

I finally put my foot down and insisted that they both needed to look for somewhere else to live as this wasn't working: NBF was gone and back to Chicago within the month.

I lived with 2 boys I didn't know, but a girl I knew vouched for them. It was all well & good until one of them got dumped by his girlfriend.

He was a bar-back in a strip club. I think he stopped going to school & just worked & partied full-time. I worked 9-5 & went to school. I often woke up to him & his friends starting a bongo/video game/techno party in the living room at 2am on a Tuesday. Or Thursday. Or whenever he wanted. Often it would go until 4-6am despite my freak-outs.

After enough complaints about the loudness & parties, he stole my room's doorknob & denied it. Then he gave away a pair of my shoes to a friend. He would yell at me in front of his friends while I stood there in my pyjamas. He called me a crazy bitch for not dealing with his 'different lifestyle'.

But then, I hooped his toothbrush in the toilet every day. And let my uncle who helped me move out take all his video games & left him with a mess & owing on all utility bills.

I'm an eye-for-an-eye kinda girl.

s1ren, I'm sorry, but I laughed and laughed. ^^

Freshman year of college, my roommate tried to do laundry while drunk, spilled detergent all over the carpet in our dorm room, used her towels to sop it up, then threw all of the towels in the shower to rinse them off. She left the water running and passed out in her bed. Later that night when I came home and went to use the bathroom, I was greeted with a cartoon-like tidal wave of bubbles. I heard she went to rehab twice before college was over.

I had some nerdy IT guy as a roommate, he would bring home really unattractive "gamer" girls to try to get laid. One time his company had a Christmas party, he came home wasted, vomited RED in the entire hallway and it smelled like shrimp cocktails, buffalo wings, mixed drinks. He took off all his clothes and started "attempting" to clean the hallway. It smelled for months, in addition to his lack of his own hygiene issues... He was the most fowl person I had ever lived with!!! The list goes on and on with him. I'm glad to be ALONE now!

My first year of college I got a roomate I absolutely adored. She was fun, outgoing, friendly and an absolute sweetheart. Here I thought my luck was amazing. Not so much, she got hired on as a resident assistant at another dorm and second semester she was replaced by a hell spawn. The girl never spoke to me, always had her boyfriend over, never seemed to go to class and when my (then long distance) boyfriend sent me a dozen roses, she decided it would be fun to pour bleach on the roses.. (not in the water, simply over the roses). Another day I came home around 3 a.m. to find her boyfriend jumping around on my bed in his underwear.... our final day at the dorm it took EVERY last ounce of restraint for me not to pour bleach throughout her entire closet....

While living in London, I had a roommate that would come home at night, get absolutely trashed, then in the middle of the night, in a drunken stupor, come in my room and pee on my carpet. Apparently, while drunk, he could never distinguish my room from the bathroom.

These stories are crackin' me up. Brings back so many memories of past roommates!

@bepsf - Your story is classic....hilarious!

My freshman year roommate liked to party and drink a lot but was not good at holding her liquor. Night before Parents' Weekend, she stumbles home at 3am and proceeds to get sick all over our room (and down the entire hallway). She passes out. I'm awake and grossed out. I wake her up, hand her a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of Mr. Clean and tell her to clean it up, while I go next door and crash with a friend. The rest of my neighbors wake up the next morning and make her clean the rest of the hallway up too, before all of our parents show up for the scheduled 9am dorm visit. Needless to say, she was very embarrassed and soon tuned down the drinking and partying. I think she wound up a double major in economics and Chinese...

I've never had a roommate, by choice. I'm a mild recluse and clean often. To live with someone who was messy and smelled would kill me. I don't know how you guys did it.

i lived with my amorous male friend who brought home so many girls that i had two drunken, completely naked women crawl in my bed within a single week. thank god it was just for a summer.

I once had a roommate in a 6 by 8 dorm who had family reunions in our dorm. Every afternoon, I would come back from class to her mother eating popcorn on her bed and cousins, aunts, and uncles, playing in the 3 foot of floor space that we had.

Our living situation came to a head when she told my I needed to clean the WHOLE bathroom because my boyfriend had used it (and I mean lightly used it) after hanging out on a Friday night when she was out.

Mind you we switched off every other week to clean the bathroom and it was her week. Mind you I cleaned it during every one of her family reunions including potty training her 2 year old boy cousin (which meant urine was everywhere).

This confrontation resulted in my one and only fist fight in my life. She poked me in the head and kicked my camera and it was go time.

She had 30lbs on me but I was on top. I won round one but she won the battle as I moved out within the week because I was sick of sleeping with one eye open.

I've been OBSESSED with this Jezebel thread for the past few days. In fact, my favourite activity at the moment is to read through it whilst hanging out in my very own apartment (shared only with my boyfriend, who's pretty damn dreamy to live with) and thank my lucky stars that I don't have to put up with housemates anymore. I lived in shared houses for seven years before getting my own place and that was PLENTY. I can tell I'm going to be addicted to this thread now too. Thanks AT! (I mean that in a good way.)

Helen
livingonscreen.com

We've only ever had one roommate. He was an Army buddy of my husband's. Everything was okay until his last girlfriend, whom I lovingly refer to as "the c*nt". She was a psychopath. I actually have a whole series of blog posts related just to her and her insanity.

Like, the fact that she was married, acted like (but never said) she was leaving her husband, only to change her name legally to her husband's three months after she hooked up and moved in with our roommate.

And calling to tell him she tried to commit suicide by sticking catheters in her arm (which my husband assures me you can't because of something about blood pressure, which she would know also since they are both medics). The roommate tried to do the same thing a few weeks later when she refused to come home, called her and she said she'd call 911 and never did. My husband drove an hour to come make sure he was okay, since he called him too, only to have him be totally ungrateful he came, then leave to go check on the c*nt to make sure *she* was okay.

And breaking her hand on his chest by hitting him repeatedly. He's the one that took her to the ER afterward.

Eventually she ended up telling him telling him she had an abortion (which we still aren't sure if she really did or not) and she bought a one way ticket to India and texted him "Don't be sad, you're in my heart always :)" after refusing to let him take her to the airport. He later figured out she really went back to her husband (duh!). This all happened over the course of three or four months.

It was almost two years ago and he still hasn't had sex since then, even though he's been with his new girlfriend for almost as long. I'm pretty sure he still checks in on the c*nt too.

Friends always want to hear this story, as chilling as it is. In 2nd year University, I got a room in a house with 6 other students. I didn't know any of them before I moved in, but became good friends with a couple of them. The rest came and went. We had some doozies. But Juan was the best, by far.

Juan just appeared one day when I came home from school. He had all the lights off, curtains closed, slumped on the sofa watching tv. He was dressed all in black. He seemed nice enough, in a very quiet, brooding sort of way. He kept to himself and barely spoke two words. We all thought it was a bit creepy how he liked to sit in the dark in the middle of the day, and he didn't seem to work or go to school. We didn't know anything about him. The landlords had an agent who would bring people in without any introductions.

After a few weeks of Juan sharing our space in a basically invisible manner (spending most of his time locked in his bedroom), one day there was a rap at the door: It was a cop.

"Excuse me, we are looking for a Juan Xxxxx."

"He hasn't been here since last night," I said.

"OK, well, can you give us a call when he come home?"

"Sure," I said, a little perplexed. The cop turned to leave. "But can you tell me why you are looking for Juan?"

The cop smiled. "Oh, we know Juan very well. He was reportedly chasing someone down King St. last night with a butcher knife. Let us know when he gets back." He nodded and walked to his cruiser.

I stood at the door, watched the cruiser drive off, then locked myself back in the house. Interesting.

Curiosity got the best of me. I went into Juan's room, and noticed several knife holes in the top of his mattress. Four playing card were pasted to his pillow with oil paint. Chills.

I went into the kitched, pulled out the drawer, and scrounged for the butcher knife. Gone.

I went into the upstairs bathroom (my room was in the basement and we had our own bathroom down there so I never used the one upstairs). Cue scary movie moment music: Oil paints of various colours were smeared all over the mirror and countertop.

Juan never came back. A few days later his parents came and moved all his stuff out without a word.

My sleep was a bit unsettled for a few weeks after this!

@ artdirectingmylife

Hahahaha... great story!

After these stories, I have decided to NEVER take a roommate.

Or become a landlord, for that matter....hay for guinea pigs on the hardwood floors????

Let's see here! What did my roommate do?

- Wouldn't train her dog to pee/poop outside. Instead her dog would do its business in my garage next to my washer/dryer. Oh and she'd get annoyed when I'd ask her to pick it up.
- Smoked pot in the house when we clearly stated she couldn't before moving in.
- Had her ex-boyfriend over without our permission when my husband and I were out of town one weekend.
- Wouldn't contribute to paying any bills because she felt we "didn't need the money."
- Never put anything back where she got stuff from. I always had to hunt for things.
- Expected us to drive her to and from work, which was a quarter of a mile down the street. She has a bicycle.
- Occasionally forgot to lock the front door when no one was home.
- Used all my personal care items and never bought her own. I eventually had to hide my stuff after every shower.
- Bought several unnecessary items from her work (grocery store) every day, drugs, etc. but complained she had no money.
- Never helped clean around the house, especially when it was her mess.

Needless to say we kicked her out!

What if my husband is the worst roommate I've ever had...?

*sigh* :-)

Wow. I definitely won the roommate lottery. Thank you for showing me how blessed I am, everyone.

my worst was a roommate who demanded i call the utilities company and figure out exactly how much electricity she used vs. how much i used and tried to convince me that this would be a much more fair way to determine how much to pay for the bill instead of 50/50. i later kicked her out because she refused to pay rent until we got the utilities thing figured out.

my husband had a few horrible ones. his junior year of college he got stuck with a guy who decided to buy all of the remaining stock from a comic book store that was going out of business. there were so many comics in his room, he had to start sleeping in the living room. he was going to sell them on eBay, but then got distracted. his distraction? eTrade. he didn't have any money to buy stocks (remember, he spent all the money he had on comic books), so he put everything on credit cards. and he was really not good at playing the stock market.
another one of his roommates (another random guy he didn't really know) once came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel and proceeded to hang out on the couch while my husband's female friends were visiting. ew.

@ monthcalledmae

Haha... Your cheapskate-electric-bill roommate reminded me of one of my many roommates who we called the Niggler. He was forever complaining about our overuse of electricity. When we would turn the kettle on, he would run and unplug is just before it boiled. "It's not necessary for it to whistle. It saves energy to unplug it just before that happens." I used to run and plug it back in, we had a few arguments about that. Everyone should know you can't make a decent tea without boiling water!

I shared a basement with the Niggler and another roommate (who happened to be normal). The Normal one and I had put a string of Christmas lights over our door and plugged it in at night to serve as a nitelite for trips to the bathroom. Well, the Niggler used to run out after we had gone to bed and unplug the Christmas lights. He did this a few nights in a row when I explained that we used it as a nitelite and would appreciate it if he left it on. He huffed and puffed about the electric bill. So I went and figured out how much electricity the string of lights were eating up, and it was about 23 cents a month. So I taped a quarter to his bedroom door and explained later that it was for the string of lights, and that he could keep the change.

when i 19 i had a roommate who got a large pizza delivered every day. he would eat half, and then throw the box containing the other half in a pile next to the trash can. we finally convinced him to take the trash and pizza boxes out to the dumpster, and he threw the trash can out with it. he wasn't being spiteful, he honestly thought that's how it worked.

Only ever shared with DrHeliotrope, who is as wonderfully anal as me.
Knew someone who was sharing with a group of friends, and had agreed each to pay a bill. One girl not only didnt pay her agreed bill (only the rent, mind) but had sent a little note to the landlord to let him know she wasn't bc she'd had a few extra expenses that semester. It took them weeks to find this out, and even longer to explain to her why this was not really on.

When I moved back to my hometown after school, to save money, I rented a room in a house. The owner of the house lived there too and she was nice but really really really cheap. She refused to let us heat the house above 55F in the winter. Luckily, I had control of the heat in my room or I would have just spent all winter in bed under the blankets. The house had no air conditioning so the summers were spent sweating in front of a fan. I lasted just over a year.

While living in Virginia in my youth I had 3 roomies, two of whom had a habit of storing fresh caught catfish in the bathtub until cleaning...

I learned early on that I prefer to live alone.

I had a roommate for 2 1/2 years who was one of my best friends that I moved to a new city with, but to this day I still cringe when I remember a few of the downsides of living with him. Some funny stuff too, I'll get to that.

Gross activity 1 occured when he and I and my girlfriend were watching a movie. He was alone on the love seat, and I looked up to notice him picking his butt, bringing his fingers up to his face, looking at whatever he picked out of his pubes, sniffing his fingers, then flicking whatever it was onto the floor. How my girlfriend never noticed this I will never know.

Gross incident 2: I knew his parents were coming to town one Saturday, and when I got up I noticed that the toilet rim was just caked in freshly trimmed pubic hair. I had to clean it up and he didn't see why it was impolite to have such a nasty toilet should his parents have to use it.

Gross incident 3: once when I opened the cabinet to throw something away in the bathroom trashcan, my hand came within centimeters of a used, bloody condom. I raised hell about it and like the pubes, he didn't get why it was so disgusting.

Of the funnier moments, he had ab affinity for doing his exercises in the living room, completely naked, without caring that the blinds were up. Jumping jacks, ahem, full frontal nude jumping jacks in front of the windows where neighbors across the courtyard on any floor could have seen him. He'd also usually switch to naked exercises when random friends would be over. It was always hysterical.

Gross stuff aside it was the time of my life!

I've been pretty lucky with roommates, but my fiance has a good story... one involving a court case, even:

In college he was living together with 3 other guys. They had divided up the various housework, and Frank was in charge of paying all the bills and rent. So a couple times a month, he would approach the other guys with his calculator and say, "I need this much for the rent" or "that much for the gas bill".

Well, after 8 or 9 months, Frank moved away rather suddenly, and it turned out that he had been paying the absolute minimum on all the utilities (just enough to keep them turned on, basically) and pocketing the rest. Best part? The rent contract, all the bills for the utilities... none of it was in his name, so he couldn't be held legally accountable for any of it.

I've only had 2 roommates, both in college.

I thought the first one would be a good one, because she was Asian and seemed like the stereotypical quiet, clean Asian.

Nuh-uh.

Slowly, as the semester went on, she started going seriously off her rocker. She accused me several times of stealing and/or hiding her things (I never did), she accused my faux-oriental bedspread of being "Satanic" because it had dragons on it, she bothered me about converting/being more Christian, she bothered me to exercise because she perceived me as overweight (I'm actually quite healthy, thanks), she would sing pop songs loudly and off-key while I was attempting to study or read. The worst part, though, was that she started laughing. Not just a little -- all the time. In the room, in the (communal) bathroom, down the hallway...it got to the point that, after I switched rooms, I said "that laughing girl" and anyone on my floor knew who she was.

My second roommate was so much better!

If you want the worst/funniest roomate story, google Martin Random room mate story. Best/Worst thing you'lll ever read.