Picture this: It’s a Tuesday night and you’re comfortably asleep on the top bunk ready to take on your early class the next day. But you’re awoken around 4am to the bed shaking, and to your surprise, your roommate is mid-hook-up with a boy on the bed below you.
After hearing about incidents like these from friends, I made a survey to get as many bad roommate stories as possible. And may I say, WOW. From sex, to stealing, to moldy food left out, to walking in and seeing your roommate naked, living with another person is all sorts of difficult. Some of these stories made me laugh, and others I just feel straight-up bad for the people who had to experiences these things.
Here are some snippets of my favorite survey responses. (I couldn’t include them all because there were lots of responses, but thank you to everyone who took the time to respond. (Your roommate pain will not be forgotten.)
“My roommate sleeps butt naked with the blinds open.”
“When I finally looked up from my laptop and paused my music, I realized that while I had been writing about Marxist theory, my roommate was sucking her boyfriend’s d**k right in front of me.”
“She called my need to work 2 jobs to pay for college ‘cute.’ BYE!”
When you have to pay for your own education though, the struggle is real.
“My third roommate was as silent as could be, she never even responded to my emails over the summer. What made it even worse was that she never left her bed, unless it was to turn her desk lamp on and get back into bed when the overhead light got turned off at night”.
“She let a pumpkin rot in our room for like 2 months before she even remembered where she had put it.”
“A friend of mine was in a triple, and his two roommates started dating. Not sure where they are now, but I can’t imagine ‘roomcest’ often works out.” And I thought that floorcest was a bad idea.
“My current roommate leaves bags of chips and cookies open and/or on the floor. One night, I saw a mouse run across the room and between her bookshelf and desk. I moved the bookshelf and saw the carpet was full of popcorn pieces, mouse droppings, and other miscellaneous crumbs. I look into the bag next to her bookshelf and there are at least 3 packages of oreos that had been opened by little mouse teeth. She came back after 2 hours of me trying to catch the mouse and admitted she ‘thought’ she saw it the other day but wasn’t so sure. I was FURIOUS! I spent 2 hours trying to catch this mouse when I had an exam the next day and she didn’t even help AND it was her fault. I hate gross people.”
“She had sex on my desk (where I do my homework!!) because my desk was clean and hers was messy.”
Whoever you are, I feel for you, your entire submission sounded like roommate hell.
“Late one Saturday night my roommate and her boyfriend stumbled in. We live in a triple so I am on the top bunk and she is on the bottom bunk. Her boyfriend lays down on her bed. A few minutes go by, and then I hear a terrible retching noise. He threw up all over her bed.”
“My roommate (who never spoke to me in the first place) once threw a water bottle at me in the middle of the night because I was snoring. He never addressed it after that.”
“She said her boyfriend had to crash that night since it was snowing. I allowed it. Late at night, I was woken up by a loud suction sound. In the morning, I found a butt plug on her desk. Turns out they tried to get frisky late at night while I was within earshot. I moved out.”
“Used tampons on the floor. Never showered or did laundry. Literally sprayed febreeze on her side of the room when she wasn’t there to get rid of ‘the smell.’”
“It was horrifying to see someone I was so close with accuse me on the last day of living together that we were never friends in the first place.”
“My junior year I lived with eight roommates and one just went crazy on us. She wouldn’t let anyone in her room the entire time we lived together. It turns out she had been stealing from us. She has our clothes, dishes and even pictures of me and my friends from back home which now have been burned. If that wasn’t bad enough, one day I came home to find an eviction notice on our door. She hadn’t been paying her rent for the entire year. We kicked her out and talked our landlord into not evicting us. When she moved all her stuff out the only thing that was left in her room were pieces of burnt pictures.”
“Me and my roommate were really good friends and we got along really well. And then one day I walked in the room and all of her stuff was gone. She had moved out without telling me and has not spoken to me since. It’s been two months.”
“Caught my roommate having sex with my girlfriend AND my ex at the same time.”
“She threw away my shower caddy.”
“My roommate showed me a picture of his d**k and a sex tape he made with his ex-girlfriend on the first day I met him.”
“Roommate came in EVERY Saturday at 4:30AM, vomited in or on something and left it for me to clean up.”
Moral of the story: your roommate might be bad, but they could be way worse.