I learned a very profound lesson in the end from this experience, but at the time it did not seem like anything worthwhile was going to come of it. In fact, I lived in a constant state of “I can’t fucking believe this is actually happening… these kinda things are supposed to happen to other people!”.
It was my third year of university, and at 20 years old, I thought I had some experience in the world and with people. At least, I thought I had enough experience to make a judgement call as to an appropriate roommate, but clearly this was not the case. A guy I had gone to high school with (not a friend, just a guy) had moved to the city where I was going to Uni, and had become somewhat friends with some of my friends. They all went on and on about what a good guy he was, and he did seem quite nice,friendly and funny. He ended up staying with some of my closer friends for the summer, mostly sponging off them. Which they obviously complained about, but this never really affected me. So, when he asked if I would want to move in with him and a few other people when school started, I thought it wasn’t a bad idea. My other friends were mostly still living in residence and I wanted a change from that, as well as cheaper rent. So we found a relatively cheap house and moved in. Our other two roommates were a girl I also went to high school with, and another girl who I knew through horse riding. It was a strange situation, as they were all people I knew from different walks of life, but none of them were in university.
The roommate who I originally moved in with, started showing his true colors relatively soon after we moved our stuff into the house. He would eat other people’s food, then not accept responsiblity for it. He would take hours in our 1 bathroom. He would monopolize my computer, which was in the living room, and watch porn on it while I was at school. All of these things created tension in the house, combined with the fact that I went to bed at midnight in order to get up early for classes, but everyone else was up partying in the living room, which was adjacent to my bedroom, til all hours, I never wanted to come home to my own house anymore. My grade were slipping, because I wasn’t sleeping and because I always said I would study at the school, but that was much harder than anticipated.
Things got really bad when I went away to Mexico over Christmas break. I had told my roommate that “even if he was bleeding from the head, under no circumstances was he to use my car”. Obviously he did not listen. When I got back from Mexico, my room was ransacked. I questioned him about it and he told me that his friends had stayed over and crashed in my bed. This pissed me off as it was, ESPECIALLY because, as it turned out they had had sex in my bed and no one even changed the sheets.
BUT then it got even better when a friend of mine mentioned the subsequent day that she’d seen him driving my car. He had ransacked my room, taken my car keys and driven my car the entire time I was away in Mexico! GOD, I wished my friend had been able to call the cops and report “GRAND THEFT AUTO!” Then to top it off he drank the entire 1L bottle of Kahlua I brought back and I when I asked him to replace it, he couldn’t because he had no money. FURTHER, the asshole destroyed my fabulous slippers wearing them outside in the snow to go smoke his nasty cancer sticks :S
The money issues were well hidden from the other three of us, and never really came to light until later on. But as it turned out, in January, he lost his job. Which he neglected to mention to anyone until almost a month later, when he told us he couldn’t pay his portion of the rent. As it was his issue, we told him to talk to the landlord, and to give the landlord our money, so at least 3/4 was paid. We assumed when he “started working” again, as he told everyone, that he was therefore paying the landlord. Unfortuantely this was not so. We were in for a nasty shock, when our landlord called in April, one week before exams started, to inform us he had sold the house, because we were horrible tenants and hadn’t paid rent in 3 months, and we had 1 week to vacate the premises.
This obviously came as a HUGE shock to all of us, who had been paying our rent. HOW COULD WE BE 3 MONTHS BEHIND???? We assumed our landlord meant that he (the asshole) was 3 months behind, but as it turned out, through the grapevine we heard that it wasn’t only he who “hadn’t been paying rent”. In fact, what he had been doing was taking our cash to “pay the landlord”, keeping the cash for himself and writing the landlord a bad cheque. So we were really 3 months in arears. We got evicted the next week, but luckily for me I was able to stay at a good friend’s place for a week, and actually study there for my finals, which I managed to do well on and pull up my grades, but I will never forget what a sleezy, disgusting, manipulative human that little jackass was. I don’t even understand how he could or can live with himself. He clearly thinks (to this day) that he’s done nothing wrong.
Anonymous
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All stories are submitted anonymously and I post them, these are not my stories I merely pass them on.
Chick-Nag 