Roommate Stories

This morning as I walked to the train, thoughts of my impending move led to reminiscence of roommates past. A situation I hadn't thought of for years popped up, and I actually burst out laughing on the street. It goes a little something like this:

After having moved out of the house where two of the girls had turned into crazy tyrannical dictators, bringing misery into the lives of me and the other two girls living there (one of my fellow oppressed housemates had literally cut a bitch before, and she was still cowed by the two dictators), I jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire by moving in with my crazy boyfriend.

We (he) decided to temporarily move into a flop house of sorts with a few other strangers. A nice Asian girl; an Indian guy who kept to himself; a Filipino dude who was always smiling; and the white girl who liked to party hard and stay up late yelling into her cell phone--we shared a wall with this girl of course, except the wall was actually a door and thus we could hear every part of her late night drunk dials to her boyfriend. This lead to some loud arguments between her and my boyfriend pretty quickly, and I soon joined in since at the time I was working the 6:30 shift at the faculty club and any sleep I could grab was precious. There was definitely no love lost between us and our new neighbor.

The girl ended up having another great trait: she enjoyed taking massive shits, clogging up the toilet, and then disappearing for a couple of days and leaving the other housemates to clean up the mess. Although this was new to us, it had apparently happened a few times. Even the landlord knew about it. When we called for the plumber, he gave us her number, too, and in my anger I listed her in my phone as Dirty Fucking Slob.

After being acutely embarrassed by my ex confronting her about "learning to use a goddamned plunger you piece of garbage," the bathroom surprises stopped. She was also quieter at night (she probably feared for her life). I even had a conversation with her and she turned out to be a nice person; I'm fairly sure both the abandoned ginormous poops and the loud talking were linked to a little problem called drugs.

After a tentative truce had been established between us, she came running into my room one day.

"I lost my phone! Can I use yours to call it please? I'm sorry!"

Without thinking, I tossed it to her; she looked so distressed I didn't give it a second thought. I continued reading as she dialed her phone, and then a friend's phone, and then gave me a terse "Thanks" as she practically ran from the room. As I checked the top two entries, three horrible words stared back at me: Dirty Fucking Slob.

I felt horrible. Imagine dialing your number into a virtual stranger's phone and seeing that pop up? I apologized, which she accepted without looking at me. I felt bad, but after she left, I couldn't help but laugh. I would say the moral of the story is don't write bad things in your cell phone about people who might use it, but I think the larger moral is don't be a fucking slob.