The first week of school is exciting, new and scary. My first week sucked. I’ll attribute this to my awful roommate and the fact that it was ridiculously hot and my dorm had no AC. With these factors and a combination of a few other things I ended up sleeping in my friends room for the first few weeks. On that note, there are a few things that I think every roommate should try to not do.
- The Pig- There’s a difference between being messy and being straight up disgusting. Leaving your clothes around is one thing but leaving moldy ramen in the corner of the room isn’t exactlyA roommate material. Leaving your dishes in the sink for days is bound to piss some of your roommates off and should be avoided at all costs. The amount of “house meetings” and arguments that I have experienced would never have happened if we all just kept our things clean.
- The Promiscuous One- Maybe you’ve experienced this first hand, or seen it in a movie, or maybe you are that person but bringing random people back for a drunken hookup several times a week can get annoying if you’re sharing a room with someone. Being “sexiled” is never fun.
- The Crook- Some people like to “borrow” clothes and then you never the article of clothing ever again. Some like to steal your headphones and hope you don’t notice. Others use your milk all semester because they’re too lazy to go out and buy their own.
Worst Roommate Tale
“My potluck roommate, freshman year: Francie.
I arrived in the room with my parents, and she was already settled. She was sharpening a massive knife. My dad joked and asked if she was preparing for a really bad roommate. She informed us it was a hunting knife and that she had gutted “tons of deer” with it.
Weeks passed and Francie began to skip all of her classes, leading to a lot of phone calls to the room. She ate fried chicken in her bed, leaving the greasy boxes in her bed, in a pile of dirty laundry, papers, and other random objects. She slept under this pile. It smelled. The pile was usually peaked by her television – all on her little twin bed.
She left her car in teacher’s spots and acquired so many parking tickets that she got towed. She had all-day phone arguments with her parents, who at some point acquired my phone number and started calling me to make Francie do things. In the interests of them leaving me alone, I would deliver their messages with a little bit of teenage rebel voice, so she didn’t think I was trying to be a narc, but I was fed up with her being in the room and never going anywhere also. I wanted her to go to class and leave me alone and eat fried chicken somewhere else.
One day, I finally said, “Look, I need your parents to stop calling me – why can’t you just do what they say or at least not be an idiot and get a million parking tickets that they have to pay for, so they don’t know you’re being ridiculous?!” She said, “fine, be a bitch.”
Later that day I came back from class or some activity and she had taken her hunting knife to my mattress, a lot of my clothes, our rug, our bean bag chair, and had killed a squirrel with it and left it in my bed. I called her parents and threatened to press charges. They wrote me a big old check and she got kicked out of school for failing everything, having that knife, smoking in the dorm room, and bringing an animal carcass inside. I didn’t even have to tattle on her.”
With all the awful things that roommates can do sometimes they can become your best friends and the best roommates ever.
College Survival 