Room Raiders: what’s mine is yours

In 5 years at college I had 18 different roommates-and I lived alone my freshman year. I chose to live in a single to avoid roommate conflicts. Throughout the year I patted myself on the back for my smart choice when I heard people arguing with their roommates. Little did I know what lay ahead. Though luckily I always had an individual room so I just had suite mates or apartment mates.

Why so many you ask? Good question. I had a lot of crazy rooming situations. Of course with that many changes you have to ask if I was the one with a problem. And I’ll admit to my fair share of normal rooming squabbles. Things like who was/wasn’t doing the dishes, who’s mystery meat was in the bottom of the fridge, who was taking out the trash and cleaning the bathroom-the usual. But I had a fair number of situations that are so bizarre that I cannot claim credit for them.

Let’s start with sophomore year. After my freshman year there were a group of 4 of us from my freshman hall that wanted to room together. But rooming at my college was done by a lottery system and none of us pulled a very good number. We had the option of the last possible quad which had two doubles in it. Since all 4 of us had come from singles we thought maybe our chances would be better going in with rooms that were missing a fourth person-3 people we wouldn’t know, but we’d have singles. It meant the newer dorms for most of us as well. How bad could things be if we had our own room right? Wrong.

I ended up in a room with 2 juniors and a random sophomore transfer. The other sophomore, Rita wasn’t bad other than the screaming matches she had with her parents and the revolving door or random men she brought home. (The best story is the one night a guy left her room to go to the bathroom and returned to the wrong room, where my other roommate was awakened by him pounding on her door to let him in. She tried to tell him he had the wrong girl-go back to the other room. But he just kept yelling angrily what was wrong with her and why wouldn’t she let him back in? The two girls looked nothing like each other so his not realizing it wasn’t the girl he was with is a little frightening…)

When I found out who I was living with I’d asked one of my friends who was a junior if she knew the girls and she told me the one girl was on her freshman hall and there were rumors she stole from her roommate and other girls on the hall. The items in question were hair styling products from the bathroom and her roommate’s underwear…I can buy a new hair dryer, but underwear is not something I want to be sharing…So I kept my door lock, but it turned out all of us had the same key. Safety at it’s finest. Or maybe they just figured if you were living together you trusted your roommates-wrong assumption in my opinion. Things went fine for about a week until I returned home one night to the campus police on my step talking to my other roommate. She told me she would come talk to me in a minute. Apparently she had discovered some of her clothes were missing. She was suspicious of Susan since she knew the rumors about her stealing before. But when she confronted Susan, Susan said she hadn’t taken anything. But then she found some of her clothes in Susan’s room. Susan said they must have bought the same thing…But guess who’s name was labeled in the clothes? Not Susan’s…So she’d called the campus police to come change her lock since campus maintenance was closed for the night. I changed my lock as soon as the maintenance office was open, I’m not sure if Rita ever changed her lock-when I informed her of the situation she said “I’m not worried, my clothes are too small for her.” We had a roommate meeting with our RA about the incident. I thought Susan would be defensive and deny having taken them. But when we said our locks were changed due to someone stealing clothes she just nodded along. In retrospect that was one of the least traumatic of all of my rooming experiences. After the lock change there wasn’t a problem. Not very homey, but nothing was stolen.