Room Raiders3: revolving doors

My senior year had the least to report. We did go through two other roommates that only stayed a semester, but those partings were for other reasons-other than crazy. But my super-senior year was a dozy. I decided to rent my first off campus apartment-a 5 bedroom with only 3 other  people I didn’t know. The landlord was going to give us a deal to only pay as if it were a quad. Well one guy I knew through a friend, and then he knew the other 2. I met the others all once. A guy and a girl.  Shortly after meeting the two girls I was informed by a friend of mine that she thought the girl might be into some illegal substances. Not wanting to be a part of any of that I confronted the roommate I new best. He vouched for the girl and said he was sure she wasn’t into anything. So I let it go at that.

Then everyone else moved in over the summer except for me. And when I went to visit there was an extra girl staying there. Apparently a 2nd girl had signed on unbeknownst to me. The total rent went up but our individual bills went down. About a month after the move in I got a call from my friend saying he feared he was wrong and that they were using in our apt. He confronted them and what followed was a mess and eventually they were kicked out.

By then of course we were committed to a lease of 5 bedrooms with only 3 occupants (The nice landlord said by adding the 5th person we had raised the rent so he would not cut it back down to 4 people even though he knew we were kicking them out due to drugs).

So we put an ad on the campus site and found one guy fairly quickly. Then we found the women’s head volleyball coach. She was in her 30’s and wanted a place closer to campus where she could stay after late practices. It felt strange to me having a real adult in the apartment, but for the first month of the semester I never saw her. Then sometime during the second month or so she told us she had won the custody battle she was having with her ex and now had to stay at home with her kids and could no longer live by the campus. We told her she needed to find a replacement. She suggested the assistant volleyball coach, a man named Stew who was also in his 30s. Stew came and saw the apartment, said he’d sign on, set up a meeting for the following day to sign the lease, and then disappeared. After a week of searching we found out he was in the hospital with a ruptured colon. I don’t even want to know how that happens. But that was the end of Stew moving in. And also the end of Amanda the head coach who though she hadn’t found the agreed upon replacement had also been fired from the coaching job and didn’t have the money for the apartment. And of course we were still paying the 5 person rate.

The rest of the fall semester with the 3 boys was less eventful. We had separate bathrooms-they insisted, not me. Which was great because we didn’t argue about who had to clean it-mine was cleaned regularly (by yours truly) and theirs was not… Though one of them did shave in my sink one day and failed to rinse the hairs down the drain. Seriously dude? Hide the evidence. When I vomited in their toilet once when I was sick I cleaned it after! But I guess that wouldn’t hide the evidence since the toilet was then cleaner than when I found it. Would it have killed them to load or unload the dishwasher? We never found out. I was used to borrowing clothes from my female roommates and with these guys that just wasn’t an option. Asking them to do my makeup before a night out wasn’t an option either. But also none of them stole my clothes and pretended they were their own, and they just didn’t do the dishes period instead of getting into fights about who should do it.

In the spring one of my friends from freshman year (ironically one of the girls I tried to room with in that original lottery sophomore year) moved in and she stayed the whole semester. She out girled me in a minute. Put pretty frilly things in the bathroom and lent me clothes and makeup-just what I needed. We had some great nights finishing off chocolate cakes, left over fondu and an endless box of chocolate covered pretzels.

So there it is: the big 18, 19 if you count Stew and his colon. And I hope you agree that living with me couldn’t have caused someone to become a klepto, shit on the floor, rupture their colon,  do drugs (that was even before I moved in), or win a custody battle and be fired from the university. I mean maybe I could have screened people better, but some of that was the university’s lottery process, and who can predict a ruptured colon (actually, can you?)

Room Raiders2: spread out some newspaper

Junior year my friend and I decided we would try to find 2 girls to live with us. We found two girls we didn’t know the day before the lottery. One of the girls ended up being one of my best friends…and the other one moved out and dropped out of school after one semester. It was a whole semester of drama that boiled down to a disposed post-it note in the end…

But the better story is after she left when halfway through the year we got a random roommate assigned who was returning from study abroad. “Random” being the operative word. Amy was a senior who had been in Puerto Rico for a semester and had been kicked out of her sorority so was assigned to us. I never found out why she was kicked out, but I always was curious. She seemed nice when we met her…but Amy had some problems. As in I don’t think she was house trained. You may think I’m kidding, or that I mean she was just messy…but I’m not. She went to a bar the first Thursday she was there. The next morning when my other roommates and I woke up there was a trail on the floor of something disgusting leading to the bathroom. We never found out if it was vomit…or something worse. But Amy did not clean the tracks up or mention them. We cleaned. We were inclined to let one incident go since we were too uncomfortable to ask her what had happened.

But a week or so later we woke up one morning to…well to put it politely-shit all over the bathroom. This time we felt we had to say something. Twice in a row? What was going on?  I was elected to speak to her. When she came home I said we needed to talk about the bathroom situation. She gave me a blank look and said “sure what’s up?” so I said that we felt that the bathroom should be kept to a certain level of cleanliness and that if someone had a situation in the bathroom they should clean it up afterwards. She gave me a vaguely puzzled look and said “do you mean a rotation on cleaning it?” I realized subtly wasn’t getting through so I went for more blunt: “Um, no I mean more specifically when you do whatever you did in the bathroom again you need to clean it up after.” She looked at me and said “So do you want me to like get some cleaning supplies or something for us to use?” She didn’t seem to have any idea about what I was talking about.

Maybe you could write it off as two crazy college nights-but Amy was always like this. Always vaguely blank and confused when you talked to her. She asked me one night which cups were microwave safe. I explained that the mugs were for the microwave, the cups were not. The next day my other roomate caught her with a plastic travel mug in the microwave-I guess I hadn’t been specific. She set off the fire alarm once for setting a fire in the oven. One time she and her friend had tea and I overheard her telling her friend she didn’t want decaf tea since she didnt want it to make her fall asleep.

It felt kind of like we had a new puppy. I’d come home in dread of what she had gotten into and what kind of mess she made. Also when training a puppy you are supposed to rub their nose in the mistakes they made or else they don’t know what they are being punished for. Should I have rubbed her nose in the mess in the bathroom? The stuff on the floor? The fire in the oven? We never saw her again after that year, but I know she hadn’t taken enough credits to graduate. I wonder who is cleaning up after her now-luckily it’s no longer me.

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.