Rotten Roommate Rant

By Michael H. on February 9, 2012

I feel like writing about anything but terrible roommates right now would be a horrible injustice. My roommate has to be one of the worst for cleanliness. He leaves bowls out on the coffee table along with their cup compatriots for days on end. He has decided to leave his favorite cereal at the foot of the coffee table because he is just too lazy to go get it out of the pantry in the morning. There are currently three blankets and a pillow strewn across the couch because he’s probably too lazy to make it back to bed late at night.

photo on flickr.com, uploaded by http://www.flickr.com/photos/editor/172690560/in/photostream/

Now, other than cleanliness, the guy is actually a good friend. However, when it comes to roommates the only playing field that you can operate on is cleaning. You are either neat enough to please your roommate, or both big enough slobs that you don’t care. I don’t mean this offensively, but everyone knows where he or she lies on that scale.

This becomes a problem when one of the people living in the apartment has a lower tolerance for living in filth that the other. My roommate refuses – and I use refuses here because I haven’t seen him do it since October – to take out the trash until it fills up the dining room. Recently he refuses to do dishes entirely. His solution to doing dishes was to pay for a friend’s movie tickets whenever they go to the theater in exchange for doing our dishes. I feel terrible whenever I see him doing our dishes and immediately get up to go help. He has never cleaned the bathroom. The last week, he’s had a cold, and the resulting pile of tissues, both on the table next to the couch and under the coffee table, has been disgusting. Pizza boxes will easily spend a week under the coffee table (with a couple slices of pizza in them) before getting piled up next to the trashcan unless I throw them out.

I left yesterday in order to go visit my girlfriend for the night before coming back to spend the weekend here. I was gone for hardly 24 hours. I cleaned every dirty dish that was in our sink and made sure the place was spotless. Just earlier this week I had entirely cleaned the stovetop. I got back to find out he’d made pasta, and all the pots were just sitting out with dried pasta sauce coating them. Half of the sink was filled with dishes, all of which hadn’t even been rinsed out. The stovetop had red circles from where he had spilled pasta sauce that had dried.

Of course, he did nothing to clean any of this. All of it coming into a terrible “perfect” storm as my girlfriend and I get back to my apartment from grocery shopping late and attempt to make dinner. All of the pots that we needed to use were dirty. He also decided to go grocery shopping earlier and not only did he buy bulk items, but he bought at least two of everything.

So, when we come home with groceries and actually have a variety of items to make dinner for the next couple days, we’re going to be a little pissed if we can fit any of it in the fridge because you decided to buy a gallon of orange juice – that you never drink, not to mention we already have one – and two more gallons of milk to top off the gallon we already had.

There are now two boxes of the 24-pack Cinnamon Toast Eggos. One of them is in the little side space I was using to store my alcohol. Now I literally have nothing but a pint of ice cream and a loaf of bread in my freezer. The rest of the space is filled with his little ready-to-eat items.

Think you have a roommate who is worse? Leave a comment below and we’ll talk!

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