share stories about your worst (or best) experiences with roommates/apt mates/cellmates/etc
my favorite is actually not my own but from one of my friends after first year in uni. this friend of mine, let's call him A, shared an apartment with someone else - let's call him S - through my school's roommate finder program, so they didn't actually meet until they moved in and only knew about eachother through probably phone calls and internet conversations.
so A is a neat freak. moreso than your average neat freak. not OCD about it, just wants things to be clean. S is not. in fact, S doesn't care about anything being clean, not even himself. a real quote from S is the following, "i don't believe in hygeine." he never took showers, never brushed his teeth, never wiped, etc. he was a bit overweight and while he was a nice guy, he was just hard to be around because of this.
so you can imagine, A and S started not getting along so well. i visited their apartment a few times and witnessed it for myself. A cleaned up after S all the time, and when S was too lazy to go across the street to get his junk food from the 7/11, he would steal A's food. A somehow kept the entire apartment clean except for S's room. S's room only had a bed and a computer desk , but around his computer chair was literally a circle-shaped mountain of garbage, rotting food and dirty bowls. he was addicted to runescape and his entire existence was pretty much centered around that.
because of this, he failed his first year and didn't come back. A could tell this story a lot more thoroughly and passionately than i ever could, but that is the basic jist of it.
i was a lot luckier.. i lived with a lot of people at one point but it wasn't that bad. although moving out and finding rotting thing and unexplainable stains was a common occurrence.
one time i shared a hotel with this one dude i'd never met for a few days for a con. having never met him before, i didn't know what to expect, and had no idea if he'd be weird or whatever, but i was prepared for anything. he always seemed like a cool guy, but my family was all paranoid about it etc
turned out he was totally chill and everything went well. oddly enough, from that experience, i found out that i talk in my sleep, so i ended up being the weird one in the end! i felt kind of bad about this, but apparently he slept through it so it ended up being ok
My freshman year of college, some teachers gave advice about roommates, most notably that one should not room with one's friends, as this will most certainly ruin the friendship. My first roommate was my best friend.
I was very neurotic and paranoid about this, and secretly freaked out.
Long story short, my roommate and I are bester friends than ever.
At freshman year, I was rooming with this guy who was one of those types who was always bragging about doing drugs. Also, that he would play one shitty song he liked on repeat for a hour or two when he was in the room, but I mostly remember the drugs thing. Late in the first semester, he bragged about getting ahold of some crap that I think was called 'liquid xtc' and trying it in the room? Idk, but long story short, he comes back next semester after being gone for the first two weeks. He shows up with a buzz-cut, moves all his crap out of the room, and says he's heading off to the marine corps; I spend the rest of my freshman year sans roommate.
i worked 5 weeks on an alaskan fishing boat that roomed 4 to 8 to a room, luckily i got to bunk with the engineers which was 4 to a room with a half broken television for entertainment B-),,, weellll the homie i slept on top of apparently wanked every morning right before i woke for breakfeast and at one point has a story that he got paid by a dude to blow him once, sounds like a sweet gig ; -);; and oh yea one of the other roomate had gone to prison thrice or twice,, but was one of the chillest white d00dz ive ever come to know
i had a roommate my freshman year who was extremely overweight and disgusting. i'm not a clean-freak, but i like to be able to have a sense of where everything is without shuffling through everything or smelling rotting stuff.
her diet consisted of milk, celery, and i shit you not, an entire wheel of cheese. she'd bring one home like every three days and just eat it throughout the next two days. anyways, she'd usually misplace the last bits of a cheese wheel, glass of milk, or whatever, and it'd start rotting somewhere. i cleaned up whatever i could find. she dropped out halfway through the year for whatever reason.
Where do I begin?
I lived with some people who played shitty mainstream rap garbage extremely loudly at 2:30 AM when I had to leave for work at 6:30AM. The pair didn't care about anybody but themselves, and kept getting free money from their daddies while I had to pay rent with my paychecks, which I spot them on sometimes since their money "vanished" sometimes, probably for drugs or whatever.
Here's a lesson for you all. LIVE with your parents until you finish college. It might not be the "cool" thing to do, but it'll let you focus a lot more on school rather than wasting hours of your life at a crappy $7 an hour soul crushing job in fast food. That'll also allow you to get money the fun way: Freelancing.
i did for the first 2 years but the commute really started to grate on me. i just worked in the summer to pay the rent, and the rent was really low cuz we stuffed the apartments as full as we could.
I've actually had a pretty decent time with roommates. I got paired with someone I didn't know freshman year, but we ended up being good friends super fast. Then I roomed with MarcK, then Gregly this year. So yeah, I guess I don't have any interesting shit to dish about on the subject. :duckseason:
Same as Ix. When it came to sharing a room in halls, I knew who I wanted to share with and we had the best term together ever. We lived out together for a year with three other guys we barely saw around the house.
Then I had to move in with someone I didn't meet until the day he moved in (cause he was from Finland) - and he turned out to be one of the best housemates ever. I guess our only problem is that one of us would usually be very hungover at the weekends/3 weeks of nothing, but that's not really that bad at all. I got nothing.
I've been lucky enough to not have had a roommate ever, but I have two very similar and not that interesting neighbor stories
-When I was in dorms freshmen year, I got to experience my neighbor break up with his long-distant girlfriend via skype through a series of arguments over the course of a week or so. He always had headphones so it sounded like was yelling in an empty room
-This year, I now living in an apartment, got to experience basically the same thing again. My [male] neighbor and his girlfriend got into a fight, around 10:00-11:00pm, and literally argued until around 5:00am. It was almost comical (or rather, it was comical) to hear them go from yelling at each other to mellowing out and trying to approach it more calmly. Long story short, things were thrown, I got not sleep and heard many things I would have rather not heard...
I wonder if my loose presence causes people to drift apart.