fenderlove (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fenderlove) wrote2008-07-02 02:18 am
fenderlove) wrote2008-07-02 02:18 am
Entry tags:
Fenderlove and the Horrible College Flat-mate (and the 3 Unfortunate Sequels)
It's no secret amongst my real-life pals that I've had the worst luck when it comes to roommates and flat-mates. I seem to get stuck with people who are absolutely wretched. Here's some highlights of the four years of hellish roommates I've had.
Freshman Year- Double Occupancy Dorm Room with Private Bathroom
R. was my first and only "room"mate. We lived in a double occupancy room at a small hippie college; I thought I had lucked out- we were the only people on the entire campus with a private bathroom. For the first few weeks it was great, and then R. turned psycho. She was and is the nastiest person I've ever known. She never showered for the first semester until her parents (rich yuppies who were big hippies in their own time before they got their trust-funds and are now conservative big wigs) came to visit. After said shower, there was a dark greasy film in the bathroom floor which she refused to clean. During this rather unpleasant semester, she never wore feminine hygiene products- she just wore skirts all the time and let blood ooze down her legs and onto the carpet (yes, she went to classes this way). She didn't brush her teeth or her hair ever; she walked around the dorm nude and sat on chairs that we all had to share; she pissed in her bed and just let the mattress fester, and she stole food from other people even though she received a $3000 a month allowance. She defecated on the toilet seat (she sat on it backwards because sitting the proper way is conforming to "social norms"), and worst of all expected me to clean it because I was "on scholarship and [her] parents paid full price!" When I refused to clean up her feces, she just left it there. I couldn't use my own bloody bathroom for over a month because of it; finally, one of the other people in the dorm cleaned it up out of pity for me. And to end this part of my story on another R. excrement moment, she video-taped herself going to bathroom and tried to force me to watch it. She stuck the camera in the toilet while she relieved herself, set the video to techno music, and turned the tape in as her final project for a sculpture class (she called it a "life sculpture"). Not only did she receive an A for this "project," she received a grant from the college to do a sculpture for the school grounds (but one not made of human fecal matter). She bought $5000 on dead grass, the kind used on hula skirts, and piled it up in the middle of the campus lawn and let the wind carrying it all over the place. She was praised for her "brilliant and innovative evolving sculpture." The groundskeepers were less thrilled than the art professors. I transferred to a different school.
Sophomore Year- Private Room in Women's Dormitory, Communal Bathroom.
This year was the closest I came to not having to share my living space with people, and so is the shortest tale. This was the first year at the college I transferred to and was very happy not to have to deal with sharing a sleeping space with anyone else. Unfortunately, I had the neighbor from hell that I had to share a bathroom with. B. was a heavy sleeper which was very unfortunate for me. You see, B. slept so heavily that she needed three alarm clocks, her cellphone alarm, and her TV alarm to wake her up, and to make sure that she was up on time, she would have them go off at 4AM so that she would be sure to wake up at some point before 10AM to get ready for class. All five alarms would go off at max volume for HOURS before she finally woke up. I tried several times to call the front desk to wake her up, but apparently she couldn't hear the phone due to all her alarms. But loudness was the least of the problems I had from B. She lived in the dorms, but she was the mother of four small children, which obviously couldn't live in the dorm with her (the school does have family housing). Her kids stayed with her mother who lived twenty minutes away, and sometimes they would come and visit her at the dorm, which I never had a problem until they started spending the night there. Babies crying at all hours during the night and her three year old son liked to roam around female-only bathroom peeping under shower doors and bathroom stalls. I never complained about it until finals week when she started smacking her son around in the hallway and locked him out of her room. The kid wandered up and down the hallway banging on everyone's door at 3AM, screaming that he was hungry. I called the police. I'm not sure what happened next except that the police knocked on her door and there was a lot of belligerent screaming and then she left and didn't come back for two days. When she did come back, she left a note on my door threatening to kill me because I was nosy and that I must hate her because she was a "rocker." Note was handed over to campus security, and she was kicked out of the university housing system. I decided apartment life was the way to go.
Junior Year- On-Campus 4-Person Apartment, Private Bedroom, 2 Shared Bathrooms.
I thought my problems would be solved when I moved into an apartment! Man, was I wrong! I first shared an apartment with T., K., and M. One of my sorority sisters had lived in the apartment before I did with the others, and she said they were all really nice. Everything went great for the first month until M., with whom I shared a bathroom, started knocking on my door every two seconds needing me to tell her how to fix her life. She was on every kind of medication available, had a really horrid family life, and didn't seem to be able to pick friends who wouldn't try to use her in some way. I felt awful for her and tried to be there for her as much as possible, but it got to the point where I couldn't go home. She would be standing at my bedroom door, crying and needing me to tell her what to do with her life. I honestly didn't know what to do; everything I suggested made her more and more upset. I tried introducing her to my friends, but it's really hard for people to warm up to you if you always start a conversation with "Do you ever wonder what it would feel like to die? Don't you just want to just die?" I suggested that she see the school's counseling service, and she did. They recommended that she spend 72 hours in observation at the local hospital's psych ward, and she did.
During the 72 hours that she was gone, K. got a new boyfriend would wanted to stay the night (which was against the apartment policy rules). He would bring his friend over, and while he stayed the night in K.'s room, his friend would sleep in his underwear on our couch. It made me uncomfortable, but I just kept my door locked and hope she would find a boyfriend without a third wheel. Well, when M. came home after her hospital visit, she was unaware of the "house guest." So when she opened the front door late in the night and a very large man in his underwear jumps out of the shadows and starts screaming at her, she was understanding freaked out. She ran to her room and dialed 911, which resulted in campus police, three resident advisors, and the real police showing up. When M. was finally assured that it was safe, she came out of her room to explain what happened. She was embarrassed and confused. T., K., and K's boyfriend decided to make an appearance at that point, and K. proceeded to go ballistic. She called M. a host of very rude names and threatened to "slit [her] throat." Normally, an out and out threat like that in front of police and resident advisors is a sure way to get kicked out of the campus housing system, but once she was reprimanded, K. turned on the waterworks, claimed to be a Freshman who didn't know any better (she was a Junior at the time), and got off scott free. M. moved to another dorm, where she went off her meds, never left her room, failed all her class, lost her scholarships, and was booted out of school.
Until the end of the semester, I had a bathroom all to myself and was left mostly alone. At the start of the new semester, C. moved into M.'s old room. She was an alcoholic 18 year old who cared more about her hair than her own safety. While suffering from alcohol poisoning and vomiting everywhere, she still insisted her friends take her clubbing even though she couldn't hold herself up on her own two feet. I had to clean up all the vomit. I applied for a new apartment at the end of the semester.
Senior Year- On-Campus 4-Person Apartment, Private Bedroom, 2 Shared Bathrooms (a different one)
I thought I had it made that year because I was living with a resident advisor. I was right!... For the first semester. No one was ever home but me. The resident advisor was always out working, one flat-mate lived at home and just used her room as a storage bin, and the other flat-mate never showed up so I didn't have to share my bathroom with anyone! Yay! But that peace would soon end.
At the end of that Fall semester, the resident advisor moved out and was replaced with another one; I'll call her N. N. didn't want to be a resident advisor; she hated the job, but needed the money for school plus the bonus of free housing. This made her quite bitter. She liked to invite her boyfriend and tons of her friends over for parties, ignoring the rules of the housing agreement because she could, and ranting at me if she thought I had broken any. She couldn't take care of herself. She didn't buy a garbage can for the kitchen, so she just used a box she found which she filled up with rotting food garbage. Finally, after the smell and infestation of gnats was more than I could bear, I had one of my sorority sisters help me move the box into the dumpster outside... which caused a thousand more gnats to fly out and attack us. Her friends ate my foods, used the bathroom I had to clean and left it a mess, and were extremely loud, obnoxious, and rude. Still, I thought I could deal with her for a semester because I still had my private bathroom... and then the others came.
P., who had been using her room for storage, got a boyfriend and needed a place where they could be "alone." I liked her boyfriend; he was polite and funny and was a great tattoo artist, but when he literally moved into our apartment it got a little much. He had a OCD and cleaned all the time, which normally would be a good thing, but finding a strange tattooed man skulking on your bathroom floor in his underwear with a rag and a can of Lysol can be a bit disconcerting. Still, I liked him better than N.'s friends, even if I had to put up with his and P1's loud sexcapades. However, there came a day when both P., her boyfriend, N's and all her friends were in the house, during which time I left to get fresh air only to return hours later to find my bathroom a mess- dirty feminine products in the floor and blood and pubic hair on the toilet seat. I put a sign on the door explaining that unless the others in the apartment were willing to clean the bathroom and pay for the cleaning supplies, then they were not allowed in the bathroom. The next day one of N's snotty friends is banging on my door asking me why I have to be such a bitch; I explain to him how I found the bathroom the day before and how I should not be forced to clean up someone else's biohazard. I also explained how if they had asked me first before using the bathroom or at least cleaned up after themselves, I wouldn't have minded them being in there (after all, if they had been courteous and respectful of my space to begin with I would have never have known they were in there in the first place). I thought that settled the matter. However, the next day, I got back from classes and my bathroom was wrecked- my hairbrush was in the toilet, all my shampoo, toothepaste, soap, and mouth wash was poured into the bathtub, my shower curtain was ripped up, and someone had pissed in the floor. My toothbrush looked suspiciously untouched, so I threw it away along with everything else. I told N. that if she didn't do something about what happened that I was going to report her to the Dean of Housing, not only for failing in her duties as an resident advisor, but also for destroying property and giving out her keys to non-apartment residents (a violation of the housing agreement). Her solution to the matter was to blame P. and her boyfriend for the whole thing, resulting in them moving out and thinking that I blamed them. I felt awful about it and never got to explain what really happened. The only good thing that happened after that was that N. stopped bringing her friends over and was never around. I got the apartment back to myself, but not the way I wanted it. I applied to live in the same apartment because N. said she didn't want to be a resident advisor anymore which means she can't live there.
So that's my story thus far. I still have one more semester to go (due to my transferring from another college putting me behind in the graphic design program at the university I go to now). I have the fear about who my new flat-mates will be. I just want someone who follows the housing agreement and is respectful of my space and the shared living space just as I am respectful of it and their space. Is that so much to ask?
x-posted @![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
housematehorror
Freshman Year- Double Occupancy Dorm Room with Private Bathroom
R. was my first and only "room"mate. We lived in a double occupancy room at a small hippie college; I thought I had lucked out- we were the only people on the entire campus with a private bathroom. For the first few weeks it was great, and then R. turned psycho. She was and is the nastiest person I've ever known. She never showered for the first semester until her parents (rich yuppies who were big hippies in their own time before they got their trust-funds and are now conservative big wigs) came to visit. After said shower, there was a dark greasy film in the bathroom floor which she refused to clean. During this rather unpleasant semester, she never wore feminine hygiene products- she just wore skirts all the time and let blood ooze down her legs and onto the carpet (yes, she went to classes this way). She didn't brush her teeth or her hair ever; she walked around the dorm nude and sat on chairs that we all had to share; she pissed in her bed and just let the mattress fester, and she stole food from other people even though she received a $3000 a month allowance. She defecated on the toilet seat (she sat on it backwards because sitting the proper way is conforming to "social norms"), and worst of all expected me to clean it because I was "on scholarship and [her] parents paid full price!" When I refused to clean up her feces, she just left it there. I couldn't use my own bloody bathroom for over a month because of it; finally, one of the other people in the dorm cleaned it up out of pity for me. And to end this part of my story on another R. excrement moment, she video-taped herself going to bathroom and tried to force me to watch it. She stuck the camera in the toilet while she relieved herself, set the video to techno music, and turned the tape in as her final project for a sculpture class (she called it a "life sculpture"). Not only did she receive an A for this "project," she received a grant from the college to do a sculpture for the school grounds (but one not made of human fecal matter). She bought $5000 on dead grass, the kind used on hula skirts, and piled it up in the middle of the campus lawn and let the wind carrying it all over the place. She was praised for her "brilliant and innovative evolving sculpture." The groundskeepers were less thrilled than the art professors. I transferred to a different school.
Sophomore Year- Private Room in Women's Dormitory, Communal Bathroom.
This year was the closest I came to not having to share my living space with people, and so is the shortest tale. This was the first year at the college I transferred to and was very happy not to have to deal with sharing a sleeping space with anyone else. Unfortunately, I had the neighbor from hell that I had to share a bathroom with. B. was a heavy sleeper which was very unfortunate for me. You see, B. slept so heavily that she needed three alarm clocks, her cellphone alarm, and her TV alarm to wake her up, and to make sure that she was up on time, she would have them go off at 4AM so that she would be sure to wake up at some point before 10AM to get ready for class. All five alarms would go off at max volume for HOURS before she finally woke up. I tried several times to call the front desk to wake her up, but apparently she couldn't hear the phone due to all her alarms. But loudness was the least of the problems I had from B. She lived in the dorms, but she was the mother of four small children, which obviously couldn't live in the dorm with her (the school does have family housing). Her kids stayed with her mother who lived twenty minutes away, and sometimes they would come and visit her at the dorm, which I never had a problem until they started spending the night there. Babies crying at all hours during the night and her three year old son liked to roam around female-only bathroom peeping under shower doors and bathroom stalls. I never complained about it until finals week when she started smacking her son around in the hallway and locked him out of her room. The kid wandered up and down the hallway banging on everyone's door at 3AM, screaming that he was hungry. I called the police. I'm not sure what happened next except that the police knocked on her door and there was a lot of belligerent screaming and then she left and didn't come back for two days. When she did come back, she left a note on my door threatening to kill me because I was nosy and that I must hate her because she was a "rocker." Note was handed over to campus security, and she was kicked out of the university housing system. I decided apartment life was the way to go.
Junior Year- On-Campus 4-Person Apartment, Private Bedroom, 2 Shared Bathrooms.
I thought my problems would be solved when I moved into an apartment! Man, was I wrong! I first shared an apartment with T., K., and M. One of my sorority sisters had lived in the apartment before I did with the others, and she said they were all really nice. Everything went great for the first month until M., with whom I shared a bathroom, started knocking on my door every two seconds needing me to tell her how to fix her life. She was on every kind of medication available, had a really horrid family life, and didn't seem to be able to pick friends who wouldn't try to use her in some way. I felt awful for her and tried to be there for her as much as possible, but it got to the point where I couldn't go home. She would be standing at my bedroom door, crying and needing me to tell her what to do with her life. I honestly didn't know what to do; everything I suggested made her more and more upset. I tried introducing her to my friends, but it's really hard for people to warm up to you if you always start a conversation with "Do you ever wonder what it would feel like to die? Don't you just want to just die?" I suggested that she see the school's counseling service, and she did. They recommended that she spend 72 hours in observation at the local hospital's psych ward, and she did.
During the 72 hours that she was gone, K. got a new boyfriend would wanted to stay the night (which was against the apartment policy rules). He would bring his friend over, and while he stayed the night in K.'s room, his friend would sleep in his underwear on our couch. It made me uncomfortable, but I just kept my door locked and hope she would find a boyfriend without a third wheel. Well, when M. came home after her hospital visit, she was unaware of the "house guest." So when she opened the front door late in the night and a very large man in his underwear jumps out of the shadows and starts screaming at her, she was understanding freaked out. She ran to her room and dialed 911, which resulted in campus police, three resident advisors, and the real police showing up. When M. was finally assured that it was safe, she came out of her room to explain what happened. She was embarrassed and confused. T., K., and K's boyfriend decided to make an appearance at that point, and K. proceeded to go ballistic. She called M. a host of very rude names and threatened to "slit [her] throat." Normally, an out and out threat like that in front of police and resident advisors is a sure way to get kicked out of the campus housing system, but once she was reprimanded, K. turned on the waterworks, claimed to be a Freshman who didn't know any better (she was a Junior at the time), and got off scott free. M. moved to another dorm, where she went off her meds, never left her room, failed all her class, lost her scholarships, and was booted out of school.
Until the end of the semester, I had a bathroom all to myself and was left mostly alone. At the start of the new semester, C. moved into M.'s old room. She was an alcoholic 18 year old who cared more about her hair than her own safety. While suffering from alcohol poisoning and vomiting everywhere, she still insisted her friends take her clubbing even though she couldn't hold herself up on her own two feet. I had to clean up all the vomit. I applied for a new apartment at the end of the semester.
Senior Year- On-Campus 4-Person Apartment, Private Bedroom, 2 Shared Bathrooms (a different one)
I thought I had it made that year because I was living with a resident advisor. I was right!... For the first semester. No one was ever home but me. The resident advisor was always out working, one flat-mate lived at home and just used her room as a storage bin, and the other flat-mate never showed up so I didn't have to share my bathroom with anyone! Yay! But that peace would soon end.
At the end of that Fall semester, the resident advisor moved out and was replaced with another one; I'll call her N. N. didn't want to be a resident advisor; she hated the job, but needed the money for school plus the bonus of free housing. This made her quite bitter. She liked to invite her boyfriend and tons of her friends over for parties, ignoring the rules of the housing agreement because she could, and ranting at me if she thought I had broken any. She couldn't take care of herself. She didn't buy a garbage can for the kitchen, so she just used a box she found which she filled up with rotting food garbage. Finally, after the smell and infestation of gnats was more than I could bear, I had one of my sorority sisters help me move the box into the dumpster outside... which caused a thousand more gnats to fly out and attack us. Her friends ate my foods, used the bathroom I had to clean and left it a mess, and were extremely loud, obnoxious, and rude. Still, I thought I could deal with her for a semester because I still had my private bathroom... and then the others came.
P., who had been using her room for storage, got a boyfriend and needed a place where they could be "alone." I liked her boyfriend; he was polite and funny and was a great tattoo artist, but when he literally moved into our apartment it got a little much. He had a OCD and cleaned all the time, which normally would be a good thing, but finding a strange tattooed man skulking on your bathroom floor in his underwear with a rag and a can of Lysol can be a bit disconcerting. Still, I liked him better than N.'s friends, even if I had to put up with his and P1's loud sexcapades. However, there came a day when both P., her boyfriend, N's and all her friends were in the house, during which time I left to get fresh air only to return hours later to find my bathroom a mess- dirty feminine products in the floor and blood and pubic hair on the toilet seat. I put a sign on the door explaining that unless the others in the apartment were willing to clean the bathroom and pay for the cleaning supplies, then they were not allowed in the bathroom. The next day one of N's snotty friends is banging on my door asking me why I have to be such a bitch; I explain to him how I found the bathroom the day before and how I should not be forced to clean up someone else's biohazard. I also explained how if they had asked me first before using the bathroom or at least cleaned up after themselves, I wouldn't have minded them being in there (after all, if they had been courteous and respectful of my space to begin with I would have never have known they were in there in the first place). I thought that settled the matter. However, the next day, I got back from classes and my bathroom was wrecked- my hairbrush was in the toilet, all my shampoo, toothepaste, soap, and mouth wash was poured into the bathtub, my shower curtain was ripped up, and someone had pissed in the floor. My toothbrush looked suspiciously untouched, so I threw it away along with everything else. I told N. that if she didn't do something about what happened that I was going to report her to the Dean of Housing, not only for failing in her duties as an resident advisor, but also for destroying property and giving out her keys to non-apartment residents (a violation of the housing agreement). Her solution to the matter was to blame P. and her boyfriend for the whole thing, resulting in them moving out and thinking that I blamed them. I felt awful about it and never got to explain what really happened. The only good thing that happened after that was that N. stopped bringing her friends over and was never around. I got the apartment back to myself, but not the way I wanted it. I applied to live in the same apartment because N. said she didn't want to be a resident advisor anymore which means she can't live there.
So that's my story thus far. I still have one more semester to go (due to my transferring from another college putting me behind in the graphic design program at the university I go to now). I have the fear about who my new flat-mates will be. I just want someone who follows the housing agreement and is respectful of my space and the shared living space just as I am respectful of it and their space. Is that so much to ask?
x-posted @
housematehorror