Cimarron Woods Apartments | Photo by Jamie Penwell | The Wright State Guardian
We’ve all heard stories about our friends, significant others and even had our own stories to tell about bad roommates. I asked Wright State students about their bad roommates:
Adrienne, 26
“The original girl who lived with me brought in this set of bunk beds that was from her family’s storage unit or something. We shared a room and my other roommate noticed that she had a rash. At first she thought they were mosquito bites. We didn’t think anything of it but then I got a rash. We called an exterminator and they found bed bugs. They were in our room in the corner where the new bunk bed had come in. We had to have our apartment fumigated and the majority of us basically ended up moving out. It gets to three weeks after we had started the fumigation and my roommate texts me. It’s the girl whose bed that we think gave us the bed bugs. Her room had the most bed bugs but she denied it and said that everyone else brought in the bed bugs. Everybody is living away from the apartment except for her. Anyway, she sends me a text message and she goes, ‘You need to start sleeping here again. There needs to be human bodies in here to draw them out of the walls,’ basically as live bait in order to get the bed bugs to come out so that the spray is effective. You need to come back and sleep here.’ I said, ‘Absolutely not. Not going to happen.’ She was severely peeved off because I would not sleep in my bed at home and let bed bugs eat me at night.”
Mary, 18
“She would stay up until seven in the morning everyday just partying and bringing random people over and one day I asked her, “Can you please be quiet? I have to go to school,” and then she said, “I get that you sleep, but NO.” And then I left.”
Mark, 19
“He doesn’t flush the toilet. He puts his trash in the toilet. He would randomly walk into our rooms sometimes and touch us weird ways. He sees us doing it to each other, but we’re friends. It’s weird when he does it. Between bros it’s fine, but if you don’t know the guy… He also has his girlfriend that lives with us pretty much. His girlfriend lives in his room.”
Isabelle, 18
“Every time I left the room to go to a class, literally an hour long class, I would come back and my bed would be made, all my stuff would be organized. It was so weird. She would have a guy over or a friend over and say, “Yeah my roommate’s such a slob.” She would put me down to make herself feel better. It didn’t matter when I left, every time I came back everything was in a different place.”
Kennedy, 21
“My roommate was incredibly messy and she would leave her Chipotle out for three days at a time and leave and then I would have to text her saying, ‘can I throw this away? It’s disgusting,’ and she would get mad at me for asking to throw away her chipotle. She was just nasty. She was a good person but some people just aren’t very clean.”
Sarah, 25
“I had this one that was really dirty. She kept like half-eaten bowls of food everywhere in the room and it stunk up the whole living room. I would go and close her door while she was gone and then I would spray Febreze when she wasn’t home.”
Adrienne, 26
“My fiance and I had a roommate with our newborn and I let this girl live with me because we were friends from high school and middle school. I was just helping her out because she needed help. It was rocky. In the beginning she didn’t pay rent for three months, so we were paying for all of her groceries and paying all the rent. While we were doing this, she decorated her room for Halloween. She would spend her money on things that were not necessary but we were paying for the rent and everything. She wouldn’t clean up. We were basically trying to deal with everything on our own and raise a newborn and deal with our roommate who was basically a child. I think the last straw was when she was running late for work one day. She didn’t make very much; she had spent a lot of time not paying rent. She worked a weird shift and she came out of her room and said, “Well I’m running late but I’m gonna make Chinese anyway because I want Chinese. I’m already late so I’ll just be later.” So she gets out this giant wok that she got from Goodwill and starts cooking Chinese food. She makes her meal, she eats her meal and then she goes to work and leaves out all of her stuff (cooking utensils, food scraps, left overs) on the counter and on the stove for me to clean up. Yeah she moved out after that and we were pretty happy.”
Mariama, 18
“For the first four weeks of being here, we’ve been cleaning the restroom. Every time it’s her turn, she doesn’t clean it. She leaves trash in the shower and won’t clean it, and she lets random people use our restroom.”
Jenna, 22
“Freshman year I got paired up with a random roommate and she always thought something was wrong with her. The ambulance would be there like every morning at 1 a.m. I finally decided to move out and I didn’t even ask the director of housing or anything. I packed up all my stuff and moved it to another girl’s room. Then I told them [housing department] and they moved me down another floor. So my friend and I were literally carrying my stuff across campus in carts and my clothes were trailing down in The Woods.”
Sean, 20
“I live in The Province. We were having a party and there were about 80 people in our place and there was another party going on. The other party came and joined our party and security told us that half of us had to leave. They went up to their place and they were jumping up and down and stuff and they actually split the foundation of the floor and it cost them 13 grand to fix.”
Katie, 21 and Skyler, 20
“We were pretty sure she was on some kind of drug. I don’t really know, but we called her ‘crackhead.’
The next night I got home at like 11:30. She was in the kitchen and ambushed me as soon as I walked in the door and told me her whole life story within 10 minutes. She was 42 and a Donato’s pizza delivery person, if that doesn’t tell you anything. She had been divorced three times, three kids. She wasn’t allowed to see her kids and she said it was because she had some beef with her ex husband but I think it’s because she’s crazy.
She had so much stuff and she could barely open the bathroom door. It was everywhere. I’m pretty sure she’s a hoarder. She had one little spot in her room to lay down in.
She was really weird. She would come out of room and stare around the doorframe at us with only half of her face showing. She would watch me do my homework. She literally got in my personal bubble. I thought maybe she would make food or something, but no. She would look over my shoulder and get in my face and watch me for an hour.
One time I was sitting in the living room with my friends, and she unlocked her room from the inside, comes out, puts the key in and locks it, goes over to the bathroom, unlocks it, goes into the bathroom, locks it, comes out, locks it, goes back over to her room, unlocks it, goes back in, locks it. I was pretty sure she was hiding crack in there.
Instead of just knocking on the door she would always yell through it. One time she came over to my door and she was like, ‘I just want to tell you that I’m a medical marijuana patient and I just really hope it’s okay,’ but then it started to smell really bad. It was smelling up the whole apartment.
Then she said that she had a disability. She showed me her disability, and I’m very compassionate, I work with a lot of kids, but she showed me that she was double jointed, and that was her disability. She claimed that she had to smoke medical marijuana to get out of bed, because her disability impacted her that much.
She thinks that her life is so crazy she was going to email someone in Hollywood and have her life told in a movie.
She would come into the living room and sigh super loud and I think she wanted us to feel bad for her and ask her what was wrong, All The Time.
She thought all these people were out to kill her and at the end she thought I was stealing her stuff.
Whenever we had people over she would act like she was a part of the group. I brought my boyfriend over to hang out one night and we were playing cards. She came out of her bedroom to see who it was and the entire time we were in the living room, she wouldn’t stop talking to us and saying “how adorable we were.” She would laugh at all the things I was saying to my boyfriend.
Other times I would be talking on the phone with someone in my room, and she would listen through the walls to my conversations. I know because she would laugh at jokes that I made.
She stole my command strips and then lied about it.
She would bring pizzas back sometimes. That was the only plus side to living with her.
One of the last issues we had was the crockpot incident.
She had our freezer duct taped, and it stunk so bad, because it wouldn’t shut all the way and all the food went bad. We asked her if we could clean it out, and she didn’t want to throw any of it away.
She put this chuck roast into the crockpot, finds all of the fruit that is frozen, puts it in the crockpot. I get up for class and it’s boiling at 9 a.m. I come home from class, and it’s still boiling. I come home from work at 9, it’s still boiling. At this point it smells so bad because it’s burnt. I wrote on a piece of paper, ‘so the stuff in the crock pot has been on for 12 hours, I do not want to be paying for the electricity used by having it on for 12 hours. It has been boiling since 9 a.m. when I woke up, so there is no use/excuse for the crockpot to be on with that stuff in it. Clean it up.’ She came home and found it and read it out loud. Then she proceeded to yell at me through my door. At that point I got in my car and left.”
