30 People In An Online Community Share Horror Stories Of Their Utterly Horrible Roommates

It's hard to deal with slobby and irresponsible roommates.

May

• Published in Interesting
• March 19, 2023

Through these challenging times, sharing a residence with a roommate is indeed beneficial. Aside from splitting up the bills and chores, you have a companion you can rely on.

But this isn't the case for everyone. For some people, the cons simply outweigh the pros because they have a horrible roommate who's just messy.

That's why it's important to set boundaries from the very beginning. Set clear expectations about how you want the living space to be maintained. You could create a cleaning schedule or list of chores that everyone is responsible for, or agree on certain standards for cleanliness that everyone should follow.

If at some point, an issue comes up, then you need to talk it out with your roomie and reestablish those boundaries. And if they remain stubborn, then maybe it's time to compromise by designating messy areas while others are kept clean.

Some people aren't willing to compromise. In that case, wait for the lease to end and move out.

Today's post looks at the different stories of people who realized that they were living with a horrible roommate. Over at the AskReddit community, a user named g_man2522 asked this question:

[Serious] What made your worst roommate ever such a bad roommate?

Don't promise to pet sit if you can't commit.

Had a weekend getaway planned, confirmed a couple of weeks in advance that she could take care of my cat while I was gone (side note: she had a cat too.) Before I left, re-confirmed that she would be around and could take care of them.

Wasn't uncommon for me to do all the kitty duties, which I didn't mind at all, but because I was used to being on top of it I wanted to make sure she had it under control.

Got back after 3 days and clearly no one had been in the apartment for at least a couple of days. Cats had no water or food and had been clawing at the door enough to chip a bunch of the paint off of it. I texted her and asked if she had watched the cats, she replied that she decided to stay with her boyfriend for the weekend, completely oblivious to the fact that she had abandoned two helpless animals.

I asked if she realized the cats hadn't had food or water in a few days, she replied "oh, they're just cats, they are fine." I asked her to move out and also if I could keep her cat because I was worried about her ability to take care of another creature, both of which she agreed to.

Some next level loser a*****e s**t to do that to creatures that are dependent upon you to survive.

Roommate stole not just one, but two items.

TLDR; My Alcoholic roommate stole money I had hidden in my room and drank a bottle of expensive scotch given to me by a deceased friend and lied about it.

When I was 21, I got a bottle of Macallan 18-Year Sherry Oak Scotch Whiskey (he came from a very well-off family) from my best friend of almost 15 years who was battling cancer. My friend and I made a pact when we were teens, that whenever either of us got married, we'd be each other's best man.

My friend had gotten married to a wonderful guy that he had met in college, and the two were my closest friends that helped me get through a lot of bad things in my life. When he gave me that bottle, he gave it to me not as a birthday present, but as a promise to be around to be my best man when I got married, like I was when he got married to his husband.

Sadly, the cancer spread and got out of control, and he passed away a few months after my birthday. After he passed, I planned to never open the bottle.

I tried to give the bottle to his husband, but he refused to take it and told me that my friend meant the bottle to be for me, not him. I kept the bottle tucked away in a steamer trunk in my closet.

I tell you that, to tell you this...

One day, I come home to find my drunken roommate passed out in his recliner. The bottle of Macallan next to him was on the table, completely empty!

I thought that maybe he bought himself a bottle. But with a gut feeling, I checked my room.

The trunk in my closet was wide open, the box the bottle came in was open, and the bottle missing. As was the envelope of cash hidden inside the trunk.

About $2,500 that I had saved up over the year from working a side bartender job on the weekends. I woke my roommate up, asked him if he took the bottle of out my trunk, and he said "No, I got this from the gas station."

He sat there, staring at me, expecting me to believe him. I was furious.

I told him that I was moving out. He didn't understand why.

I confronted him about the missing money and the bottle of scotch he clearly stole. He said "Bro, relax, it's not like you can't buy another bottle. You clearly have the money for it."

I left the apartment, went to the rental office, and informed them of the situation. They helped to get me off of the lease and even helped me find my own townhouse in one of the other property neighborhoods they had.

I returned to the apartment, packed up my belongings, and moved out the next day while he was at work.

Pet owner needs to properly train her a-hole cat.

She repeatedly peed on the floor right in front of me while making eye contact. She was also a cat. She had multiple clean litterboxes, but she apparently preferred to pee on the floor in front of the litterboxes.

My human roommate (her owner) did their best with her, but such is life.

This is what you call a monster roommate.

Hoarded/hid food and ate everyone else's, would leave dirty q-tips laying around, refused to do any dishes, and one time I caught him spitting on the floor. I backhanded him clean out of his shoes for that one.

When only one person follows cleaning assignments

We had a shared kitchen, the 3 of us, we had cleaning schedules but they never followed it, they just piled it up until it was my turn. After numerous complaints that i was the only one cleaning i stopped cleaning, 3weeks later there was rotten food and fungi all over the kitchen and even a cockroach infestation.

a cleaning company had to be hired, the costs of which spread over the people living there, i objected the bill on grounds of my earlier complaints, they didn’t argue and i did not have to pay, i even got compensation for eating out every night, they got kicked out a week later.

Was a win for me eventually but a horrible time before that.

That's nasty!

Called me at a friend’s house and told me that my father had died - he hadn’t and was perfectly healthy.

It's all the landlord's fault.

The landlord didn’t tell us there was already someone renting one of the rooms, so surprise roommate to begin with. This surprise roommate was schizophrenic and also tended to smoke inside.

It was awful.

This is what's like to have an entitled, rotten, and spoiled roommate.

It was five of us in a house and rooms were rented out on an individual basis. One guy was pretty awful.

He claimed he used to be in the national guard at some point and had this weird sense of entitlement about it. Like, he genuinely believed he shouldn't have to do any communal chores or clean up his own messes because of that.

He was also the biggest victim I've ever met. Nothing could ever be his fault and he'd deny any wrongdoing, even with the evidence literally in front of his face.

The entire time he lived in the house, he was supposed to be looking for a job but all he did was smoke weed, cook instant ramen (which again, he never cleaned up) and watch Netflix on his phone. We'd hear him getting in loud arguments with his parents about why he was still unemployed and it was always some new excuse that they clearly weren't buying.

He eventually left because his parents stopped paying his rent. The worst part of it all is that this dude was 41 at the time but had all the maturity of a spoiled rotten 10 year old.

Does this person have common sense?

She would brush her long hair, and clean out the brush. Then to dispose of the hair she would stuff it in the *sink drain.*

Normal people throw it in the trash. She clogged the sink constantly.

Roommate turns residence into a sauna.

In the middle of a 100F heatwave in August, not only turned off the AC, but turned the heat on

To **90F**

Even at the coldest days of winter, has no one turned the heat to freaking 90

Came home to a sauna, and she didn't even stay after she did that

Thieves don't even need to make an effort to break in with this roommate.

My favorite: She would come in drunk at 2am, turn on all the lights, leaving either her keys in the front door lock, or just leave the door wide open and then pass out in the living room. Good times!

What a creep!

Found out the dude was keeping his webcam running when he was out. Being secretly filmed was kinda f’d up.

Do they want to get sick?

They left beans in the fridge so long it became a sentient life form. Then got mad that I threw it out because "they were going to still eat that".

Having a roommate who's a mistress isn't fun.

I wasn’t allowed out of my bedroom when she was with married men :/ still mad I allowed it to happen.

How can people be this messy?

I once scrubbed down the whole apartment because the landlady came by. It took literally all night long.

He didn't help in any way. I scrubbed pots that had more culture than a classical concert. 5 minutes after the ladylady left he went into the kitchen, created lots of noise, and when I awoke from my coma and went in there it looked exactly the same minus the mold.

This roommate is horrible in every way.

She would invite people over with no notice even during covid shutdown or when we were sick (I didn’t have an issue with people coming over I just didn’t want to be surprised by it)

She would meal prep for the week always on the day that I had deep cleaned the kitchen

She never cleaned any shared spaces and rarely cleaned her room

Found dishes with moldy food in her room often

She would leave and not come home for days at a time leaving her meal prepped food in the fridge for us to clean (made even worse by the fact that we were vegetarian and she always cooked with meat)

Found coffee that had been in the fridge for so long that it actually had moving organisms in it

Brought home a fish that she didn’t know how to take care of. It was bloated and we had to nurse it back to health with no help from her

Brought home a kitten from a stranger at a jack in the box without talking to us about it or taking into account that we already had a cat and a dog that don’t do well with other animals

Then after I told her that a kitten requires a lot of attention and she actually needed to be home at the very least 60% of the week, she followed that advice for approximately one week before deciding that she could go back to her old habits of not coming home for 4-5 days at a time

So consequently that cat became horrible. It constantly attacked the other cat and dog, ripped up the carpet in our apartment that I had paid a deposit for by myself when we moved in and caused me to lose that deposit (though she did eventually pay me back for that so I guess that earned her some points)

And then when we moved out left a ton of her stuff in the apartment for us to get rid of. Also told me that she cleaned her room before moving out when she clearly hadn’t.

I spent three hours cleaning her room after so we wouldn’t get charged a cleaning fee

She also complained multiple times that the apartment didn’t feel like her home and blamed me for that. I tried multiple times to get to know her better and hang out with her and she was never interested.

When we moved in she refused to put any of her decor in any shared space even though I asked multiple times if she was sure. And when we was actually home she shut herself in her room and wouldn’t come out

A disgusting roommate

He was so drunk one morning, making a gigantic mess in the kitchen in his underwear rambling to me while grabbed a cup of coffee on my way out the door.

He then p****d himself and didn't notice until he slipped on it...

Fast forward a couple months and he bailed out with two months left on the lease and never paid anything for those months and changed his number. Fortunately the landlord worked with myself and my other roommate.

I never had a roommate after that.

Why'd she ask for an advice when she won't follow it.

Best friend had his girlfriend come live with us. She was constantly coming into my room to ask me to explain some sort of emotional bit about my best friend.

Id give her advise and she would never take it. Then she started started fights with him, tried to get me involved.

I eventually had to start climbing out my window to go pee because she was such a nut case. Then after he dumped her she started calling my mom to try and force him to talk to her.

Yeah she was aweful.

She apparently has cancer now. And has tried to contact me. I dont feel bad saying Ive blocked her, cause i dont believe for a second she has cancer

Roommate plays the victim card.

She made us Patient Zero in a campus wide bedbug infestation.

And this wouldn't have been that bad, everyone makes mistakes, but the reason why it was campus wide was because she saw 3 separate doctors over a period of 3 months, who all said the same thing, and then she ignored medical advice repeatedly before finally checking, at which point, she'd been all over campus.

Then she had the nerve to sit all 8 of us down for a roommate meeting where she told us that we all needed to be "serious" about the bedbug protocol, and get to the laundromat to clean our clothes and stuff, because she just couldn't take anymore stress and she needed this situation resolved.

MONTHS

I'm still really irritated by it, because she really presented it as though she was the victim, like someone had broken in and put bedbugs in her bed. But she has absolutely no sympathy or empathy for anyone else on campus dealing with this, nor for any of us, her roommates, who were forced to grapple and deal with it out of our own pockets. She had no apologies or even kind words for us.

She wasn't a great roommate to start with, but she was living in the same room as two girls who were dating, so I gave her some leeway. This just took everything over the edge.

Can't she keep the bunny in a cage?

She let her bunny s**t all over her room including her bed and then wondered why she got a rash

Living with this person will give anyone a headache.

Made his own low-grade wine in the bathroom (which created a stench) and had bi-weekly mental breakdowns in the living room because he was convinced he had contracted AIDS.

Roommate tried to solve her mess using a wet sock.

One day I get a text from her that there were ants on the floor due to some Doritos or something she ate. I text back okay and move on and think that's the end of that.

Welp. Low and behold it's time to move our a couple months later from our dorm room and she had left so I was stuck cleaning things to not get charged. I find a wet sock covering the crushed Doritos and a whole colony of ants...

Clearly it was too much to assume she picked up her Doritos and her way of dealing with it was to cover them with a stocking wet sock.

Imagine living with a slob after being used a clean house.

Disrespect for standards of living. I kept a clean house, and before I agreed to let them live with me we talked about it. While I held my tongue about their room and bathroom, the constant mess in the kitchen and other common spaces was too much.

"Chef" causes infestations at a residence

I had a roommate in college in an apartment setting who worked as a fry cook or something similar at a chain restaurant (can't remember which one, maybe Applebees or Chilis). He fancied himself a real chef but apparently didn't understand the whole cleaning up after himself thing.

Anytime he would make eggs or cook something where you trim off pieces or whatever, he would throw the refuse in a grocery bag he hung from the handle of the oven. That wouldn't have been a big deal had he ever actually thrown that bag away.

Multiple, multiple times we had fruit fly infestations because he would leave that bag sitting there with rotting food scraps for days. I've dealt with fruit fly-causing roommates a couple of times in my life and thinking about it just makes my skin crawl.

Dishwasher problem

He was filthy. He would make spaghetti, eat it, and then put his dirty dishes in the dishwasher.

He wouldn't scrape anything off. But he would never run the dishwasher unless it was *completely* full, so I would open it for once after three days and see mouldy spaghetti on hos dishes. It smelled awful.

When I would point it out, he would be like "Huh? What happened? I don't understand what is wrong 🧐". Bruh

Bonus, he would play the same level of the same PS2 game in the living room every single day and laugh very loudly at the same lines.

Very irresponsible.

Whenever he ironed his clothes, he would leave the iron on the table. Without turning it off. Next to hanging towels. 4 times in a 2 week span.

This couple need to move out.

His girlfriend basically moved in immediately after he did. She was nice enough but adding another person to a tiny 2 bed apartment sucks.

If only this roommate were careful with the butter.

Not only did he use my butter, but he scraped it lengthwise so he marred the whole stick AND left crumbs all over whole thing.

Pretty good roommate butter aside.

It's tough having this kind of roommate.

He had severe undiagnosed OCD. He had a laundry list of rituals that would consume his entire day and p**s me off.

One of his rituals was to play a movie and music at the same time on his laptop and then go take a 2 hour shower. We shared a room so I would close his laptop when he left the room and after his shower he’d come out and ask me, “Why did you touch my laptop?”

I would tell him because the noise was really distracting and he would tell me to just use headphones. This happened every Tuesday and Thursday night.

Siblings can be horrible sometimes.

As a child I had to share a room with my brother. If I was snoring, he'd hit me in the face with a pillow from the top bunk.

Whether it's a slobby or an irresponsible roommate, living with them can make your life hard. That's because you can't just leave their mess.

Before you think about moving out, try reporting your roommate to the landlord. And if that doesn't work, don't try to endure the situation.

It's best just to leave.

May