<p>A hilarious comment on another thread got me to thinking and wondering about 'bad roommate' stories. My own tale of woe happened freshman year. It turned out that the roomie whom had claimed to be a non-smoker on the housing application, smoked like a cracked chimney. For days on end the room and my clothes reeked of tobacco. And roomie REFUSED to dump the ashtray (a dinner plate-sized thing). Kept it full of butts as some sort of 'shrine.' Clearly roomie had issues.</p>
<p>Oh yeah, I was set up with my freshman roommate by my then BF. She was the GF of one of his friends and so it seemed perfect. I signed up to room with her on his advice having never met her. She was just weird. She was a Drama (Theatre) major and believe me, she always had drama going on.<br>
One of her many weird habits was that she refused to put any of her undergarments in the hall clothes dryer ( like anyone really cared to see them). So on any given day my dorm room was a virtual labyrinth of weird varieties of underwear hanging across the room on clotheslines she strung up between pieces of furniture. I became best friends with the gilrls next door and avoided Drama Queen as much as possible. </p>
<p>For this reason I have no problem with my kids wanting to room with a kid they already know from high sch. It may not be perfect but at least it's a known quantity.</p>
<p>My first roommate was a hoot! We got along very well mostly because she loved shocking me with her wild and crazy exploits. I was a home-spun country girl who learned quite a bit about sex and drugs and rock and roll from that free spirited surfer chick! </p>
<p>Later on though I had the prototypical housemate who wouldn't do her dishes for days at a time. One night after getting tired of mentioning it to her, my other room mate and I put them in her bed.</p>
<p>history mom- when my D was a senior she had issues with dishes, but I did not want to argue with her, so I bagged them up and put them on her bed :) No mess in my kitchen, no fight!</p>
<p>My first roommate was a senior ( I was a new freshman who got put with her because of overbooked dorms).
She had a fiance at home so she went home every weekend, but during the week she never left the room except to go to class. She did not eat in the dining hall, but brought a bag of potatoes back every week and made baked potatoes in a toaster oven in our room for every meal. Our room smelled like baked potato all of the time!!!
She was also quite "mature" ( like a 70 year old) and insisted our room was spotless and quiet all of the time. I was not "allowed" to have friends in the room either. Needless to say, I was not there much - I was usually in friends' rooms down the hall. LOL
Fortunately another girl down the hall graduated in December so I was able to switch rooms for the second semester. Everyone on the floor felt sorry for me so it wasn't so bad- I made lifelong friends with some of my hallmates. LOL
Not as bad as some stories but still kind of weird and funny.</p>
<p>My roommate's best friend from high school lived across the hall from us and spent a lot of time in our room. Several of us kept getting money stolen from our purses. After several months of this, I called the local police dept. and he said he knew how to deal with this. He told me to tell all the girls that we were all going down to the police station to take a lie detector test. Sure enough, my roommate's best friend "cracked". She admitted she had been the one and got daddy to pay us all back. This woman is now a dentist somewhere so watch your fillings!</p>
<p>I had one classic-never went to class, slept until dinner, smoked Chesterfields's unfiltered, rarely showered or washed his clothes--but brilliant. He made a good living taking the LSAT and GRE types tests for people--this was before they would carefully ID everyone. Wrote term papers for $$$ too. Actually a really good guy but we had different lives. I wonder where he is today. Probably rich or dead.</p>
<p>I look back now... and I think <em>I</em> was the roommate from hell. I didn't steal anything, but... I was a slob, constantly broke, often angry... Oh yeah, and I smoked too.</p>
<p>M freshman year roommate was a "winner". She casually said to me about 2 weeks into the school year "oh, by the way. my BF is coming to visit this weekend, so you'll have to sleep somewhere else". Being shy and non-confrontational, I said "OK" (what a wimp I was then - LOL!) So, off I went with my sleeping bag across the hall for what was the first of many more weekends that year. I was then horrified to meet the BF - he was 32, in the Navy and covered in tattoos! Here I was, just 17 from a small Catholic HS living with this sex-fiend!! But. this was the early 70's and just the norm, even for a nice Jesuit college like ours! She ended up dropping out after freshman year, and I lost all contact with her. Another time, I'll tell the story of the junior year roommate who would cut her toenails and leave the clippings all over the floor - ugh!! (I drew the short-straw when we needed to find one more suite mate for our 6-person apartment that year and ended up with toenail woman!)</p>
<p>I had one roommate who spent 14 out of 16 consecutive nights drunk. We had to take out her contacts a couple of times. She got up at 5:30 am to get hair, makeup and clothes ready for an 8 am class. The clincher, though, was when she brought a guy home from a frat party at 2 AM and they spent the night together...in the bed (literally) one foot away from me. This was the night before my German final. When I spoke to her the next day, she had no recollection. I had to tell her what she and her hookup had been doing. That seemed to be her moment of reckoning.</p>
<p>I was probably a roommate from H*** freshman year -- I worked at one of the campus cafeterias and all my clothes smelled like the place. No matter what I did, I couldn't get rid of the smell. It was bad enough socially that I wasn't in a sorority, but having to work, too? The horror! (Suffice it to say I didn't fit in well at the preppy southern flagship I attended. On the other hand, it was in-state and I could afford to work my way through.)</p>
<p>I wrote this limerick about my roommate. To properly appreciate you have to understand that we lived in a converted single, so small one person had to sit down if the other stood up. The upshot however is that we stayed roommates for four years and are still friends, almost 40 years later.</p>
<p>There once was a young man named Norm
Who spent the night with Jane in the the dorm.
Empassioned with love,
They slept up above.
While I, below, tried to ignore 'em.</p>
<p>My freshman year (1975) and my roommate told me that at midnight every night she wanted me to leave the room so that she and her boyfriend (who was at another school) could listen to "Stairway to Heaven" on the radio together!! I never left the room and she made it until October when she transferred to his school.</p>
<p>One of my older sisters shared an old on-campus house her senior year. There was no central heat; instead, there was a big heater in the kitchen, and all the other rooms opened off of that room. As long as all the doors were open, every room stayed warm in the New England winter. But one roommate insisted on keeping her door open all night to get heat even when her boyfriend was visiting, forcing everyone else in the house to either listen to a live porn show or else close their own bedroom doors and freeze. Not an attractive choice.</p>
<p>I never had a really bad roommate - a few issues with them, but nothing that I couldn't deal with - but my soph year roommate could have thought I was the roommate from H or Heaven, depending on how she viewed our first meeting. She hadn't shown up on move-in day before bedtime. My bf at the time had brought three German exchange students with him, just to spend the night on campus, and they were to return to his house the next day. Anyway, his new roommate refused to let them stay in their room that night, so I said the guys could sleep in mine. Well, my bf figured he should sleep in my room too, since there would be three German guys in their with me. Guess what happened? Around 3 in the morning, my roommate showed up, and found her room occupied by me and 4 very tall, blonde, handsome guys. You should have seen her face! It was so funny - and luckily she was understanding about the whole thing.</p>
<p>There once was a young man named Norm
Who spent the night with Jane in the the dorm.
Empassioned with love,
They slept up above.
While I, below, tried to ignore 'em. </p>
<p>Too funny, momrath!!!!!!!!!!!!</p>
<p>My freshman year roommate made it clear that I was some person who was living in HER room. A classic: our room had a towel rack on the inside of the closet door. She took the top rail--naturally, and of course she also had the front of the closet--but she would never fold her towels, so that they hung down over mine and made mine damp. One day, when I took my towel off the rack hers fell off, so I picked them up, folded them neatly, and put them back. When she got back to the room, she actually went from door to door in our hall, knocking and saying, "Is my roommate there?" (You know, like I didn't have a name and/or none of these people knew me?) When she finally found me--I was cowering on a friend's bed by that time--she demanded to know why I had folded her towels! Oh, right, that was definitely worth knocking on five doors to find out. Luckily, when I came back from Christmas vacation I found that she had moved out and I had a single. I'm sure I was a pain at times too, but everyone considered her the strangest freshman in our dorm.</p>
<p>So my freshman year roommate horror story goes in a very different direction. She found Christ after a couple of weeks and every night there were candlelight bible studies and prayer services in our room. I could not turn a light on to study or talk to anyone else. I switched rooms at the end of the semester.</p>
<p>Freshman year triple with one very spoiled grass and pill dealer, and one straight roommate who thought we two would be arrested for dealer's activities. Straight's mom insisted we rotate beds every 2 months. Dealer's mom must never have noticed the incredible income her kid obtained. She left behind a very nice blue towel that was 'just from Penny's' that I still have ;)</p>
<p>I am still friends with my freshman year roommate, although I was a hippie from CA and she a field hockey playing preppie from Texas. She was so sweet that I would have had to be a crazy not to develop love for her.</p>
<p>My freshman roommate had the same (unusual) name as a friend of mine. When she called my mother answered the phone and talked with her as if she was my friend, not a stranger who was assigned to be my roommate. It was the start of a very odd relationship. The second night as roommates, I met my second roommate (aka her BF). He didn't attend the school, he just spent all his time in our room - day and night. Roommate wanted to use poles to make our beds into a bunk-bed. I refused thinking that it would be no better on the top or the bottom with my 2 roommates on the other bed. She then put her bed up on the poles without the benefit of being stabilized by a bottom bed. Then each night - thump, thump, thump as the bed hit the closet. It was impossible to sleep! </p>
<p>Roommate then started skipping classes and watching soaps all day on my tv. I found a much better roommate for the next term. Turns out it was unnecessary - roommate flunked out! Big surprise, huh?</p>