Ah, college. A time to learn. A time to grow. And a time to live your entire life in close proximity with total strangers. From annoying jerks to total creeps, there is no limit to how awful a roommate one can get matched up with when they move into a campus dorm. If these stories don’t leave us wanting to live alone, nothing will! Here are the tales of 50 truly terrible college roommates.
1. That’s Life
I go to a school where the general population is a bit...weirder than the rest of the country. And within this weird and eccentric community, there are still those kids that we find weird. And even those kids did not like to hang out with my horrible freshman roommate. As best as I can describe, my roommate was like a child, in a bigger child's body (he was a grimy little thing), but technically the age of someone in college.
Don't get me wrong, the kid is brilliant. But he was terrible at life. I'll start the description with the first thing that I noticed about him when we met. He scratched. A LOT. Noisily and mainly his face. He also talked to himself. And I don’t mean the “muttering and confirming things I need to do” kind of talking to himself. I mean the Gollum to Smeagol kind of talking to himself.
We had these public bathrooms and showers for our entire hall to share. He was caught pleasuring himself in them on multiple occasions. How? Let's just say he was very vocal about it. He also developed a horrendous snoring problem the week of finals. On top of that, he was an incredibly intolerant person, and also hated women.
He frequently alluded to inappropriate topics in conversation. In general, I would describe him as creepy with a side of grime.
2. Candle In The Wind
I once accidentally walked in on my college roommate to find the room full of lit candles. What I saw still haunts my dreams to this very day. He was pleasuring himself furiously on a bed covered in rose petals. Apparently, some girl was supposed to come over and she did not show, so he resorted to this instead. It was the most awkward moment of my life.
3. All Bark, No Bite
My roommate was a typical Jersey guido type. He was very full of himself and acted like he was the coolest person in town. Before we actually arrived on campus and met each other in person, he told me over Facebook that he would be bringing a "sick speaker system" to our dorm room. Instead, he only brought a tiny little subwoofer.
4. We Are The Champions
I got along pretty well with my freshman roommate, but we were both really competitive and had a long-standing rivalry over who was the "champion of the room." Fast forward to the end of the year. I decided I needed to prove that I was the champion once and for all, so I went online and bought a trophy declaring myself champion of the room.
I told my roommate that I was definitively the champion, and he would soon find out why. He didn't believe me at first, but I could tell he was getting nervous. The day the trophy came, I quietly picked it up from the mailroom and left it on his desk while he was at class. I thought he’d find it funny. I was dead wrong. He didn't talk to me for about three days. A week or so later, he got annoyed at me for something.
I can't even remember what it was. But he decided he had to get back at me for it. Since he was a buffoon, he did what he knew best, and took a dump in my trophy. I could not believe my eyes when I saw that. I flipped my lid and made him wash it out with his bare hands. I still have the trophy to this day, and I am still the champion of the room.
5. Gaming The System
My roommate was very competitive but in completely uncool ways. For example, this roommate was the absolute best player at games like Farmville, Bejeweled, and Family Feud. That guy would spend hours sitting at his desk playing these games. Usually, he was under the influence of some kind of substance while doing so.
He didn't always smoke, but man when he joined that frat it was all downhill from there. Eventually, he got himself a medical use permission card and started distributing to his bros. He later got caught and charged with being a minor who was drinking in public. He had to go to 30 AA meetings. He ended up skipping a lot of those.
Plus, he was completely rocky with this girl he was into. The situation ended up really messing with him when they broke up, and he turned even more to weed. He was also really hateful when he was high. This one time, he ate an edible and got the munchies, so he decided he'd eat another edible to fix it. He passed out and, the next morning, woke up and looked at the juice next to my bed.
He literally blurted out: "That's expired. Oh yeah, and screw anyone who isn’t white." I was shocked. Then, he went back to sleep, leaving my other roommate and me speechless. He would also go on and on about how AIDS was a good thing because it affected people that he didn’t like. It was pretty infuriating to listen to. I don’t know what his problem was.
Last I heard, in his second year, he got into a bunch of fights with his bros and missed a couple of his finals. As a result, his parents pulled him from school for a quarter. I’ve always felt pretty sorry for him. The whole situation is very tragic really, when you think about it. The kid was pretty smart, just socially awkward and ignorant beyond all normal levels.
6. Not What You Were Expecting
My orientation and summer semester roommate was an anime fan and mild video game nerd. She played World of Warcraft, but that was the only game she was into. She told me from day one that she wasn't too big on drama or "fake hanging out group time." She also made clear that she liked to veg out on her own for most of her spare time.
Cool, I thought. We're going to get along great. Since our program had us placed with identical schedules, studying was going to be a breeze. The program was five weeks long. The first week went great. We hung out, shared notes, and studied together. We cracked geeky jokes, commented on the vanity of some of our classmates, and watched bad ghost-hunting TV shows.
All was well. But after a week and a half, I began to realize that our personalities were a little too well matched. You see, my roommate never left the room. Ever. We went out to dinner one night and lingered for half an hour every few days to get coffee on campus. But beyond that, she was pretty much a potted plant in the dorm room.
No amount of coaxing or invitation from myself or our friends could get her to go out. After a while, I began to feel the frustration of pent-up adult energy. She was a light sleeper, and even stealthy self-pleasuring was usually enough to wake her up. I tried in the shower, but being a not-so-crafty female, that usually didn't lead to much success.
Doing it in the dorm showers was not exactly my idea of a private setting. My only hope was to get this girl out of the room for any amount of time, but it was as if the girl was a sadist. Showers? Five minutes, like lightning. Bathroom trips? Usually three minutes. Food? Only went when I went. Otherwise, she ate from the boxes of food she'd brought with her.
Studying sessions? Again, only went out when I did. Otherwise, she studied alone or with me in the room. Finally, a friend and I plotted a master conspiracy to get her out. He was going to drag her to sushi for dinner, even if it involved her kicking and screaming, and I was going to pretend to have a study session with one of my friends in the room.
She did not like this person who we claimed was coming over. Everything was set until the morning of the day we'd planned to get her out. In one of our classes, we watched a video on assault and sociology. Our teacher made it very clear to us, in an almost uncomfortable way, that students who were bothered by the content in the video were free to walk out to take a minute and that there were on-campus support groups.
Sure enough, during a five-minute mid-class break, she turns to my friend and me and admits that she almost started crying. She then nonchalantly comments to me that she "wonder[s] if there are any support groups on campus." She then gets up to quietly speak with our professor. That’s when I made a chilling realization. In other words, she'd just informed me all but explicitly that she was a victim of the very thing we were learning about.
This whole time, I'd thought my roommate was sadistic and I didn't understand her blatant hints about needing "personal time." It turned out that I was with a traumatized victim who was terrified of being around people she didn't intimately trust. Needless to say, I wound up going the entire semester without a single successful moment alone, and my morality guilt-tripped me the entire time about being bitter to her about it.
7. When The Tables Turn
I was the awful freshman roommate in my case. I got absolutely hammered and peed all over my roommate’s desk the night before the end of the year. I woke up to him hanging up his money out to dry out. Sorry, dude. Years later, he ended up quite randomly as my boss, and ended up giving me a significant promotion. I guess he doesn't hold grudges.
8. Poking The Bear
My roommate during freshman year got completely hammered one night, then came back to the room at around 1:00 in the morning and accused me of swiping the pudding in her fridge. In reality, she had eaten that pudding an hour before she went out. She waited until I fell asleep and then jabbed me in the arm with one of those clicky pencils.
I had to go to the hospital to get it cleaned and stitched. She got kicked out of the room.
9. Smell Ya Later
Not my roommate, but a guy we shared a hall with. Moving in, I did the standard get-to-know-yous around the hall. Everyone seemed cool, except for this one guy. Very anti-social, greasy everything, and smelled awful. Since he was in a wheelchair, he had his own bathroom. So we didn't see much of him. After the first couple of weeks living in the dorm, everything is hunky-dory.
That's when the odor started. It quite literally smelled like poop. After some sniff searching, we came to the conclusion that it was coming from Smelly Wheelchair Guy's (SWG) room. We complained to the RA about the smell, and they installed an air freshener in the hallway. Naturally, it thinly masked the odor and changed it from poop to poop with flowers.
It got so bad that girls would refuse to come to our room because of the smell. That was the last straw and we demanded he be moved. Thankfully, after the winter break, SWG was gone and we finally found out about the source of the smell. It turns out the guy wore adult diapers. So he's got bowel issues. Not a big deal. Unless you do what he did.
Whereas a normal person would dispose of a soiled diaper, this kid put them in a duffle bag underneath the bed and kept them there. He accumulated quite a collection of these disgusting used diapers. Enough to fill multiple duffle bags by the time we found them. Once he moved out, they tore up the carpet, stripped and repainted the walls, and fumigated the room.
10. Sink Or Swim
I was the horrible roommate in this story. In our dorm, we each had our own rooms, but each pair of rooms shared a "sink room," with a sink, mirror, and two sets of shelves. My "sink mate" was a junior when I was a freshman, and already knew the ropes. Our very old building had a problem with the plumbing backing up and the pipes pushing greasy, nasty black water out into our sinks.
This happened several times throughout the year. The first time it happened was only a couple of days into school, before I had gotten to know my sink mate. I went into the sink room and found the sink coated with black grime. I assumed my sink mate had poured something nasty in the sink and not washed it out afterward.
I put a post-it note on the mirror that said "Could you please clean the sink?" The next time I looked, it had been cleaned. A couple of weeks later, it happened again and I again put a note on the mirror. The next time I looked, the sink was clean again and there was a note for me on the mirror that said, "I don't mind cleaning the sink, but just so you know, I'm not making the mess. It's the pipes backing up" with a little smiley face.
I felt like the biggest jerk. After that, I got to know her and we had a great friendship that year. It mostly consisted of her teaching me a lot of things that I had been sheltered from during my very traditional upbringing. She also spent a lot of time putting up with a lot of annoying questions and letting me hang out in her room with her friends since I didn't have any of my own.
11. Evil Twins
This was not my own freshman roommate, but my wife's. She was just my girlfriend at the time, but she's leveled up a few times since then. Anyway, the girl she lived with that year had no social life of her own outside of one friend who would corner you as soon as she saw you and would Never. Shut. Up. Having no social lives or dating lives of their own, they took it upon themselves to start stalking me online.
Suddenly, I was getting tons of hits on sites I'd put together from their dorm network. They didn't realize I could track that. And they were showing up and signing guest books on old Geocities sites I'd done in high school and other random stuff like that. One time, I forgot my laptop in their room. The roommate in question decided it would be hilarious to turn it on, go through my stuff, and then download a bunch of inappropriate content and set some of it as the background on my desktop.
Did I mention that this was all in the ten minutes it took me to get to my car, realize I didn't have my computer and walk back up to their room? She ended up downloading a vile cocktail of viruses along with all that inappropriate content, and I had to nuke the hard drive from orbit. As bad as this already is, there is still so much more.
Most roommates have the courtesy to knock on the door if it's late at night on a weekend and they know their roomie is in there with their significant other, but not these two. They would unlock the door as quickly as possible, burst in, and turn on the lights with smarmy grins on their faces like they were hoping to find us going at it. We never were, because we knew they were going to pull that kind of stuff.
The roommate would sit on my wife's bed eating food and watching TV, but not on her own bed. Her roommate would go through my wife's stuff when she didn't think she'd be around. One day, my wife came home to find that her hairbrush had been picked clean. Her roommate's friend had decided to clean it for her "to be nice." We never found out what happened to the hair, but I pray to whoever is out there that it just went into the trash and not into a hairdoll.
Now that I read back over all of this, I realize just how truly creepy those two actually were.
12. On Her Ninth Life
One of my roommates collected all the stray cats from campus and brought them back to her room. I came in one night from work, and there were at least 15 cats in our living room.
13. We’re Just Here To Bother You
I had roommates who stopped going to classes almost immediately, so they would just stay in the dorm all day and loudly watch TV. At 3:00 AM, they'd be laughing and yelling and watching "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" again and again. And they’d treat me like a jerk when I was like "Hey, can you guys calm it down so I can get some sleep?"
Like I was the one doing something messed up. One of their girlfriends also basically moved in with us, so it was like having an extra roommate who was also terrible.
14. Out In The Open
One roommate frequently took out her tampons right in front of us, because she was "afraid of toxic shock syndrome” and “in a hurry." So she just took them out in our room. Leaving them on the floor. When I freaked out after it had happened three times, she did not seem to understand why I was upset. I don't miss her.
15. All Pooped Out
My roommate freshman year pooped all over our private bathroom after an intoxicated night out with a few of her friends. Ironically, the only place that she didn't hit was the toilet itself. She didn't apologize for it or even clean it up properly afterward. The dorm cleaning crew came later and found more poop under the shower caddies.
16. Two For The Price Of One
Let’s see, I had a few. One roommate, who was trying to be a rebel, took some caffeine that he had purified from an organic chemistry lab and asked me if they added anything to it...because, apparently, he wanted to snort it. This same guy thought it would be funny to burn a smiley face into his arm with sulfuric acid. I’m told that he still has the scar to this day.
Another roommate, who was quite odd, used to play the video game Street Fighter well into the wee hours of the night. No big deal, right? Well, the later it got, the more violent he got towards the game. At one point, he woke me up at about 3:30 in the morning on a Tuesday shouting, "NO! NO! SCREW YOU!!!" I then heard a loud crash, as he proceeded to throw his controller out the window.
17. Planning For The Future
I noticed there was something off about my freshman roommate right at the beginning of the year. He would always tell me things like, "I have three AK-47s back at my house. If I fail a test, I'm going to bring them here and teach my professors a lesson." He would then just laugh it off and say he is kidding. Nevertheless, it always sounded serious when he said it.
He also once said, "If I were to try and end your life, I would do it with a knife because no one would ever be able to find out about it that way." Just a lot of really freaky stuff like that, which I would usually just laugh off. But then, one night, he decided to take down a cocktail of pills while crying and saying “Screw this place!” I ran out of the room and immediately went to the RA.
But when we got back to the room, he was gone. He ran off to a different friend's dorm room, and eventually went to the hospital. When he was at the hospital, the authorities searched the room and found three months’ worth of unconsumed medication for bipolar disorder, three dozen knives stashed around the room, and a diary that stated, "If my roommate wasn't such a nice kid, he would be coming down with me tonight." But the nightmare didn’t stop there.
Then, when he got out of the hospital, he started texting me things like, "Hello roommate, how are things at (insert home address here).” Another time, he texted, “I haven't heard from you in a long time. I think I'm going to have to come and pay you and your parents a visit at (insert home address here)." I was in a very messed up place mentally for about three months after this happened.
18. Devoutly Annoying
During my freshman year, I lived with this very extremely religious girl who thought that everything I did or listened to was “demonic.” She would tell my other roommates about this too. She would also lock our door every evening so she could change her clothes in private. But at least once a week or more, she would "forget" to unlock it afterward and I'd have to sleep on the couch with none of my stuff.
Each of the four of us had a shelf in the pantry for our food. On her shelf was a series of pills and protein shake mixes. I never once saw her eat anything all year long. She would also walk around the house and talk in a creepy childish voice. On more than one occasion, she would awkwardly rub her belly and say "My baby is pregnant, y'all!"
I hated that nut.
19. Identity Crisis
My freshman roommate made and sold fake baptismal certificates that other students would use to get fake IDs. Sometimes, I'd be in the room alone when some complete stranger would knock on the door to ask if this was the place to buy fake IDs. By the end of the year, my roommate had made over $6,000 off this racket and never got busted.
20. Window Shopping
Me and my six housemates moved into an old house in a pretty empty and secluded area. On Google Maps, the address is still labeled as a mental health institution. Crazy, right? Anyway, it was Christmas and all but one of the housemates were gone. I had just arrived back myself, so there was only one other person in the house with me during this time.
When I returned, I had walked to my room and the housemate intercepted me. He asked me if I knew if anyone else was back. He said he’d heard sounds coming from the room downstairs. I laughed and said, "Nah man, must be the birds or something..." Then, we both went silent as we heard running in my room on the other side of the door, then running on the rooftops.
I walked in and the window was wide open. We both just looked at each other and said "Nope!"
We slept in the living room with the lights on for three whole nights before realizing that one of our other roommates may have snuck into his own house without wanting us to know.
21. Cat Got Your Tongue
Did I have a freshman roommate horror story? Well, aside from them letting their cats and ferret poop on the floor, not cleaning it up for months, leaving crusty pots and pans on the stove a week after cooking with them, and letting one of them vomit in their bed without cleaning it up for three days...hmm, yes, I do. And yes, they did sleep in the cat vomit like that for those three nights.
This is by far my worst memory of her. At one point, I was sitting in the living area trying to get some studying done, when this girl comes out from her room and burps directly in my face. To make matters worse, she had just been intimate with her boyfriend and her breath had his horrible stench on it. I think that was the cherry on top of every other awful thing she’s ever done around me.
22. The Song That Never Ends
The first place I lived on campus was in a suite with three other girls. My actual roommate was nice enough, but she constantly listened to this one playlist with about 20 awful country songs. Over and over and over again. Even while she slept. Also, if she ever listened to other music, she would flip out and run over to turn off the volume if a song with a "bad word" came on.
Then, she and the other two girls got angry with me because I wouldn't go to church or non-drinking parties with them. I had to move to the honors dorm where things were slightly more normal.
23. Slam Bunk
My roommate was incredibly overweight. She had the top bunk and I had the bottom bunk. Sometimes, her boyfriend would come over and they would have loud, nasty intercourse right above me. I always imagined that the bed would break, and that I would be impaled by slivers of the bunk bed and die because my obese roommate was romping around too much above me.
24. “V” For Vendetta
I had a bad roommate once. Let’s call her “V.” I knew we might have some issues the day after I started talking to her online. She made a joke about me fixing her computer when she found out I was a Computer Science major, and she seemed incapable of writing a full sentence. Her emails were in text speak and hard to follow.
We moved in and it was clear she had overpacked. Her mom also decorated our room and put away my roommate's stuff. V had so many shoes she had to take half of my closet space. She never asked and, by the time it became a problem, I was unable to do much about it. V and I were very different people. She was conservative and I don't think ever read in her life.
I was socialist, loved reading the news, and a huge bookworm. I'm not really sure how V even got into college because she seemed like a terrible student. She hated school and complained about it all the time. V hated feminists because they “messed up the world,” so she “has to go to school.” V felt that women should never be forced to work and that was a man's role.
She was very clear that she thought women should just cook and clean. Please remember this. It only took a month at most before V and I stopped talking. I tried to at least stay friendly to her, but I eventually just gave up. There is only so many times you can say hi to someone and have them not respond until you just stop caring.
I was also the only person on the floor who V didn't talk to. That was kind of rude. V loved to stay up late and talk to her boyfriend. I had 8:00 AM classes and she knew this. If her late had been midnight, I would have been fine with that. But her late was 2:00 to 4:00 AM every freaking night. Also, all her talking was in a non-conversational tone.
It was often shouting, screaming, general whiny noises, slamming books shut, microwave use, and banging on her desk. She also didn't use headphones, ever. I don't even think she owned a pair. Her boyfriend would whistle loudly to see if I woke up. V cleaned the dorm very rarely. If it had just been her side that was messy, I would not have cared.
But she had so much stuff, the only space I had in the room was my desk and lofted bed. There were weeks I couldn't sit on the futon because there was too much stuff on it. I was the only one who ever cleaned the bathroom too. I stopped cleaning it during the last semester and I often heard her complain about how dirty it was.
She cleaned it once instead of studying for her exams. End of the year, she left me a little note that said I needed to clean the room because her dad took down my loft. V liked to have people over. I would have been fine with that if I had gotten a heads up. I never did. I had 30 people stay the night over the course of the year.
Once, there were four guests who stayed the night in my room the night before an exam. They all got hammered and came home around 3:00 AM. Wasted morons are not quiet, particularly when they order McDonalds and watch a movie. There was also the week V's boyfriend stayed the night. This was the same week I only got four hours of sleep a night because I was working on a huge CS project and a huge research paper.
V was also fond of really late night action movies. If I asked them to turn the movie down, I either got no response or they turned up the volume. The one time I tried to watch a TV show, V attempted to force me to turn it off and was super furious at me. I was watching Frontline when she came home. Not wanting to annoy her but really wanting to finish the show, I turned the volume down kind of quiet.
She wanted to talk to her boyfriend. She didn't ask or anything, just turned on Skype and started crying about how she was failing three of her classes. I turned up the TV and she yelled at me to turn it down. I watched TV for another hour and just got into a volume war with her. She liked to complain about how poor she was.
Yet she went on two vacations to Florida that year. She was really poor. Luckily, V was rarely around during the last two months of school. Unluckily, she lived out of suitcases that she left in the middle of our walkway. Asking her to pick them up never did anything. She also brought back about ten new shirts every time she came back to the dorm.
If I ever see her again, I might have to punch her in the face.
25. All About Herself
Ohhhh, the joy of freshman roommates. We shall call her Sally. I met Sally on a class of 2014 Facebook site, and we messaged back and forth. She seemed cool. We agreed to be roommates. I didn't really know her, or anyone else for that matter. I just wanted to make sure they were normal, and she seemed normal. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Cue to a few weeks before school started. All summer long she posted on my Facebook wall, blew my phone up, and just kept writing stuff like "herpdy-derp, soooo excited for school!!!!!!" It was obvious that she had decided that we were to be best friends. Okay. I can handle that. Now, it is time for her description: short, maybe 5'1/5'2, curvy, crazy curly black hair, and a Cleveland accent.
It was moving in day. I had arrived before her, and when she walked through the door I approached her, saying something like, "Yay, we've finally met!" I go in for a hug. Instead of reciprocating, she looks at my fingernail polish, which was burgundy, and my toenail polish, which was pink, and she says, "Ew. Your fingernail and toenail polish don't match. I don't like that." THE HECK?
That entire first week, she dominated every darn conversation had with anyone in the dorm, telling them how she modeled for a hair magazine. Of course, she brought copies of it to school and displayed them on her desk. She told everyone how she's allergic to apples, how she never works out but has the “perfect” body, and every other boring, uninteresting fact about herself.
Within the first two days, she spied a boy down the hall and was all over him. Dear Lord! They started dating. She then only ever hung out with him, for hours every day. Just sitting on her bed, or his bed, or just together. And I was friends with him and his roomie, so it was chill. Until one night, when he stayed over in her room.
First of all, his room was right down the hall, so...really? And they decided to loudly sleep together while I was there. Our beds were set up so that they touched. MY BED WAS MOVING. I promptly got up at 3:30 AM and crashed on one of my other friend's futons. She absolutely dropped everyone else who she had tried to force a friendship on.
Then, she would get emotional when she was excluded from things. She was a little fun sucker with everything we did. She didn't drink, which is totally cool, I respect that. But she would join the people on the floor who went out plastered, and become distant and angry with everyone, especially her boyfriend. With whom she fell "in love" within the first few weeks of dating.
Oh, and she cried. Constantly. About her boyfriend, about me, about anything at all. She cried about three times a week, at least. Her boyfriend and her began to fight; SCREAMING, crying, angry fights all IN MY ROOM. Now, I'm very involved at my school. I also studied a lot at the library, had a job, and had a lot of friends in the same dorm, so I rarely was in my room at all.
But it realllly gets annoying when at least two times a week for a few hours at a time, you have to stay away from your own room. But, I understood, couples fight, and they're in a dorm, where else are they supposed to do that? Throughout the entire year, I don't think she studied at all. The TV that she brought was. Never. Off. She watched TV constantly.
As soon as she woke up, the TV was on. If I returned after she had fallen asleep, the TV was still on. All day, every day. And it wasn't even good channels. It was a very diverse mixture of ET, MTV, or BRAVO. And if she had already seen the episode, she WOULD STILL WATCH IT AGAIN. It honestly was appalling seeing that much blatant inactivity.
I mean, sometimes she would go outside the dorm. She had a job that she worked about ten to fifteen hours a week, an understandable amount as a college student. You don't want to become overwhelmed. But then she quit because she didn't like working on Sundays, since that was the day her boyfriend got brunch with his friends, and she didn't want to miss out on spending time with him. LIKE, WHAT??
This summer, they—as you probably guessed—broke up. She went into crazy depressive mode and BLEW EVERYONE'S PHONES UP. She apologized to me about how she should have known that boys would leave before friends. Like, yeah, everyone knows that. She is now on everyone's back trying to repair the friendships that she actually never cultivated. So there's nothing there to repair.
Our circle of friends, by which I mean her ex-boyfriend's and my friends, absolutely despise her. And I just sit back and chuckle to myself. I'm excited for this year to start.
26. Taking Out The Trash
My roommate got extremely intoxicated one night, came home, and peed in our trash can even though the restroom was right down the hall. If I wasn't up at the time and hadn't yelled at her to at least leave the trash can outside, she admitted that she would have left it in the room to fester all night long. I can only imagine how that would have smelled…
27. Memento
I was in a triple during my freshman year. One roommate was an absolutely filthy girl, but I remember this incident the best. She hooked up with a really big guy this one time, who apparently left his bodily fluids all over her bed. A couple of days later, I heard her talking to a friend on the phone. She proceeded to brag about the fact that she hadn't washed her sheets and that the stains were still there.
28. Bleeding Heart
My roommate freshman year started to get really depressed as the first semester wore on and as the second semester began. She never left the dorm, was often still in bed when I got back from class, and, while all of that made me feel really bad for her, I could not overlook, or over-smell, one thing: She rarely showered since she rarely got out of bed, and when it was her time of the month, you could smell the blood from the other side of the room. It was revolting.
29. Credit Where Credit Is Due
My roommate took my credit card, and spent over $600 on it. He was dumb enough to return the card to my wallet after using it, which really narrowed down the list of potential suspects. I was extremely angry when I found out and I never trusted him again. I'd shared my Coke and Cheez-Its with the guy! How ungrateful can you be??
30. Pretty In Pink
My roommate was up all night, every night. Until two in the morning at least. Having full-on sobbing fights with her fiancé, all for the stupidest reason. It was about hypothetical pink vests that he said he wouldn't wear for the wedding. Even though she didn't actually want pink vests in the wedding. It was just: "Why wouldn't you wear the pink vests if I wanted you to?! No, I don't want pink vests, but if I did, why wouldn't you wear them for me?!?!?!"
31. Buying And Smelling
I had a roommate whose room stank like nothing else. I could even smell it from the hallway as I passed his closed door. It was like being smacked in the face by a wall of cheese. I figured it was BO or perhaps the ethnic foods he ate, so I didn't say anything to avoid sounding rude. Well, he left two months later and a new roommate moved in.
Upon cleaning the room, we discovered that he hadn't thrown out the garbage the entire time he was there! He just kept all the rotting trash in a wooden chest and overflowing garbage bins. Not only that, but he washed his laundry once every six weeks or so, which undoubtedly contributed to the rank smell. Eeuuggghh. Shivers.
32. Beyond The Grave
I have a video somewhere of my freshman year college roommate saying that he would be very interested in sleeping with a deceased person so long as said person was “a hot female” and has only been deceased for a little while. He was completely sober at the time while saying this. It was a very weird situation to be in, to say the least.
33. A Close Shave, Literally
I woke up a few times to find my roommate standing over me and watching me sleep while shaving with his electric razor. He shaved that way every morning, for over an hour. It was freakin' terrifying.
34. Not-So-Secret Identity
Let’s just call him Paul. Paul was his actual name, by the way. But I really don't give a hoot. He needs to see this. Paul had a variety of unfortunate habits. They included loud, obnoxious singing that went on virtually all day. Also, constantly working out in the small two-person bedroom that made the entire apartment smell like a gym.
But it didn't stop there. You see, Paul was also very fond of other members of his gender. No biggie, right? Diversity is part of the college experience. But I'm pretty sure the college experience isn't supposed to include waking up in the middle of the night to find your roommate stroking your arm. Nor should it include having CDs slid covertly under the bathroom door while you are getting in and out of the shower.
No Paul, those things are not supposed to happen.
35. A Shell Of A Woman
Month one: College roommate moves in. Month two: College roommate locks door, unofficially moves in with boyfriend. Month three: College roommate's turtle passes in the room. Month eight: RA finally contacts college roommate to have her remove the rotting, stinking turtle corpse. Let’s just say I wasn’t too fond of that roommate by the end of it...
36. A Hair-Raising Story
I had a roommate during my freshman year of college who was jealous of my hair...and cut it off while I slept during our first week.
37. Going Out With A Bang
I lived in a dorm setting for my first year of graduate school. One night, we heard a loud BANG from down the hall. It kind of sounded like someone blew up a brown bag and popped it. In the minutes that followed, a foul, rotten odor ran up and down the hallways. Really awful. Like if you didn't cover your mouth and nose, you'd vomit awful.
A bunch of people walked out into the hallway looking around. The scene looked like a warzone with everyone covering their breathing. Then we found out the disgusting story behind it. It turned out that a guy living on the floor had filled his thermos with hot chocolate about a month beforehand, drank about 3/4ths of it, forgot about it, somehow knocked it behind his nightstand, thus further forgetting about it.
The resultant fermenting concoction inside had essentially created a pressure bomb. The elevators carried the stench to all the floors, and everyone had to evacuate while it was cleaned.
38. Sugar Mountain
In my first year of university, I was paired with a roommate who was a large idiot. He lived solely on pizza and anything else that could be delivered to our apartment. He had the single room while the other four of us were two to a room. He would order takeout, waddle out of his room to the door, grab the entire pizza, walk back past us, and just go back into his room.
And not come back out. Neither would the pizza boxes, or chicken bones, or...well, who knows what else. Over time, his room started to stink! Bugs would crawl out from under the door. Eventually, he went home for a weekend and one of my other roommates decided to report the guy to our advisor. She opened the door, and an actual avalanche of garbage spilled out into the hall.
It smelt even worse inside. It is the most disgusting thing I can ever remember seeing, smelling, or tasting. Yes, the smell was actually bad enough to taste in the air. Idiot.
39. Dropping The Ball
My roommate set up a webcam to record me typing in my university password. He then used that password to drop me from all of my classes. Twice.
40. Having A Ball
My roommate moved out while I was in class and took my disco ball. He left a note saying that he was taking the disco ball, but that I could have the refrigerator. The refrigerator was already mine. So he pretty much just stole my disco ball…
41. Not Hitting It Off
Oh man. My second year was full of weird roommates. I had one roommate who I probably exchanged words with maybe twice the whole year. Two years later, I found out he also was a senior environmental science major like me. There were only like 70 of us, so that basically means we were around each other all the time and didn’t even realize it.
Roommate Two was an all-night gamer who slept from like 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM and just played computer games and chatted with friends online all night as I tried to sleep. I once invited him out to a party with us. He proceeded to drink like a madman, then got back to our room and vomited all over my desk and shoes. Job well done!
42. Disappearing Act
I spent the second semester of my freshman year of college at UAF in Fairbanks, AK. My roommate was from a small village not too far from Fairbanks. When I first got there, I tried to get to know her better by asking her questions about UAF and her family. She spoke a total of three words to me the entire semester. It was extremely uncomfortable.
And she would bring guys back to our dorm room and make out with them, so I would have to pretend I was asleep. It was weird. Then, about halfway through the semester, she just stopped living there. I would see Facebook updates from her, but I think I saw her a total of two times between March and May of that year.
43. Leaving Little To The Imagination
One of our old flatmates would wear nothing but briefs around the flat. Like I'm talking disgracefully tighty-whities. It was made worse by the fact that he was 6'6” tall. There was one night where we heard him come back after a day of drinking. He fell down in the corridor of the flat, peed himself, and tried to do the backstroke to his room.
Oh, but it got so much worse the next morning. That’s when we found that he had taken a poop in the corner of his room, but blamed it on us because, "Why the heck would I take a poop in my own room?" Some people, eh?
44. You Get All Kinds
I have three: My second semester, I had a roommate who was steadily going insane. He spoke to himself in different voices, and would occasionally call our answering machine to leave himself angry threats. My third semester, I had a creepy dealer who, as far as I could tell, didn't sleep for weeks at a time. But neither of those was the worst.
The one that takes the cake was the roommate my first semester, who got kicked off campus right when finals week started. The reason why was so disturbing, it’s impossible to forget. It was because the university finally realized he wasn't actually a student there and had just secretly snuck into the room registration process. Can you imagine how ridiculous that was to find out about?
45. A Bad Thing To Do
Well, I once had a roommate who stood on top of a large dresser, took physical advantage of another roommate's girlfriend who was sleeping on the top bunk of their bed, and pleasured himself while doing so. It was not a pretty scene when we caught him in the act. So, yeah, I’ve had lots of bad roommates but I'd say the assaulter was the worst.
46. From Besties To Worsties
During college, I had moved into an apartment with the girl I was dating. She broke up with me when he had only months left on the lease, and couldn't find anyone to sublet. It was bad at first, but then she started trying to bring random bar hookups back to the apartment while I was home and it got a whole lot worse from there. She quickly became my worst roommate.
47. Leaving A Memorable Impression
I once walked in on my roommate getting spanked on his bare butt by his parents. Yes folks, you read that right. I walked in on my college-age roommate getting spanked on his bare butt by his parents for not having his stuff packed up on move-out day. Here’s the full story: It was move-out day and my roommate was working on a paper last minute.
I was packing my stuff. His parents walked in and were absolutely enraged that he wasn't packed yet. They immediately started scolding him while I was still in the room, but thankfully I had a final to go to and figured I'd dodge the storm. I said my goodbyes, assuming they'd be gone by the time I got back from my two-hour final and went on my way.
As it happened, my final only took 20 minutes, so I got back much sooner than they'd have expected. I opened the door and saw my roommate bent over his bed with his bare behind showing, just as his mom wound up for a spank. I slammed the door shut as quickly as I possibly could. I went over to a friend's dorm and helped her pack for a while until I felt safe enough to return. I never brought it up to him after that.
48. Hitting Back Where It Hurts
I had two freshman roommates that kept eating all of my food. Within the first week, when classes hadn't even started yet, I went to make myself a peanut butter sandwich. My first peanut butter sandwich in this dorm. A special moment. But when I arrived at the kitchen to prepare it, the entire tub of peanut butter was completely gone. They also left the empty tub in my cupboard.
Anyway, I flipped the heck out, because who on earth eats a whole tub of someone else’s peanut butter by themselves, without even bothering to introduce themselves first? These girls would literally scarf down all my food, yet complain if they thought anyone was touching theirs. So I came up with a plan for revenge.
I started buying really fattening food, lots of chips and doughnuts, etc. I was trying to teach them self-restraint, but these idiots would go through these bags and boxes within two days. So I kept buying doughnuts. And then, one day, they started complaining about how they couldn't fit into their jeans anymore. Success.
I also put laxatives in my peanut butter. That’ll teach ‘em to mess with me and my food!
49. You Can’t Take It With You
My roommate in freshman year was a total jerk. From the moment we first met, I knew I was doomed. On move-in day, as she berated her doctor father, she accused the help of swiping her jewelry. "You don't take other people’s things, do you?" was her first greeting to me. After our families left, she quickly responded to her psychiatrist's email.
She asked me when I planned on dropping out so that she could use my bed as a couch. She was rude and was always loudly talking on the phone with her boyfriend. I woke up one night and they were having racy phone "chats". Her side of the room was also disgusting, and she told everyone on my floor that I was crazy and jealous of her because I was poor.
My first few weeks of college were tough enough in and of themselves, and having to deal with her on top of all that was wearing me down. I coped the only way I knew how. I wrote about my troubles in what I thought to be an anonymous online journal. I wrote about the phone stuff, the entitlement she had, and how miserable it all was making me.
Somehow, she found the journal and used an out-of-school email address to threaten me with bodily harm as payback for it. I brought it to the resident director and she asked to see what I had written as well. At the end of the day, I was told that I had a problem with depression and anger and needed to get mandatory counseling.
I then had to sign a "safety contract," promising that I would not hurt myself or others. But there was an unexpected bright side. It was all worth it because I was finally allowed to move into a single room. The idiot ended up going completely crazy by the end of that year. She locked herself in her room and never went to classes. She soon dropped out and had a kid.
I graduated, so I guess I win.
50. When Parents Don’t Know Best
I walked into the room for the first time freshman year, and was greeted by a chilling sight. My future roommate was standing in the middle of the room and screaming at his dad. He was yelling about not wanting to go, and how he blamed his mom for writing his college essay and filling out the application. The dad kept calling my roommate, who I shall name Eduardo, an "ungrateful piece of poop." Except he didn’t say poop.
The dad then started threatening to beat the heck out of him if he tried to leave. It was right after he finished speaking that they realized I was in the room. They both pretended nothing had happened, shook my hand, and introduced themselves. Luckily, my parents had not walked in with me, so they didn't have to see that and be worried.
Eventually, my parents met his parents as they helped me set up the room, and they all talked about how proud of us they were. Eduardo's dad kept saying things like "It's either college or the street, cause I'm not paying to support a failure." My parents, of course, thought he was joking. Every day, this kid told me how much he hated school.
He would never go to class. He would drink in the room all day with the door wide open, despite the fact that we were a dry campus and drinking was strictly prohibited. He would scream at everyone, party all night, and generally just be a jerk. He used to watch VH1 every night until close to 4:00 in the morning, with the volume cranked up so loud you couldn't hear anything else.
When I asked him to turn it down because I couldn't hear anything else, he said he would do so on the condition that I wrestled him. Turns out he was serious. He wanted to wrestle me, because of me asking him to turn down that Bret Michaels Rock of Love show. I declined and went to bed. The next day, he called his mom and asked her to come get him.
She agreed to do so and said she was getting in the car. I thought my nightmare was over—but I was so wrong. She never came. He LOST HIS MIND. He broke everything he owned. Punched a hole through his TV, slammed his Guitar Hero controllers on the ground repeatedly, threw his Xbox out the window, cracked his cell phone in half, ripped his bedsheets, you name it. He basically totaled his side of the room.
I left the room during all this, assuming he was just blowing off steam. I had no idea he was actually breaking his stuff. I walked back into an absolute warzone. He was standing in the middle of the room, crying, drinking laundry detergent, and yelling about how he didn’t want to live. He claimed he had taken a whole bottle of Advil after he broke his stuff.
I ran to get the RA. Meanwhile, he ran and took the broken glass and plastic shards from his computer monitor and started cutting his wrists. The RA and I re-entered the room to see this kid throwing up detergent and bleeding. The authorities were called. They fed him charcoal to prevent him from dying due to the detergent and pills.
Apparently, they do this instead of ipecac syrup. He left that night. Woke me up to say goodbye on his way out. Last thing he said to me? "Goodbye buddy, sorry about ruining your birthday!" I have no idea what he was referring to there. I swear on my life, this story is 100% true. And so is the part where he tried to sneak back in and kill me a few months later.
Sources: Reddit,