My sister has had worse roommates than I have. I'll tell both our stories.
Veggie Girl - She was my roommate for a summer in my very first apartment. I knew she was a vegetarian when I moved in, even though I wasn’t. I figured we could work it out, and I didn’t eat that much meat anyway.
I was wrong.
She insisted that if I ate “flesh”, I cook it only when she was not home. I figured that wouldn’t be a big deal and if I wanted a hamburger, I’d eat it for lunch instead of dinner when she wasn’t in the house. Even if I left all the windows open, burned incense, and sprayed air freshener, she would freak out if she could smell cooked meat when she came home. If it was her turn to do the dishes, she would refuse to do any dishes that had any meat on them or were used to cook meat.
The weird thing about her was that she wasn’t a true vegetarian. She ate tuna fish, which I think is one of the most disgusting foods ever. I never complained about washing her tuna plates.
My Sister’s Story - My sister went to University of Oregon in Eugene, which is known for a rather liberal campus and a large population of hippies. My sister is a somewhat conservative girl, not in thinking, but rather in her actions. She isn’t a big party girl, nor a pot smoker. She started looking for a place to live during her third year, and ended up living in a small house off campus with a couple of girls she had met in her old dorm. I don’t know how she couldn’t have known, but she found out after they all moved in that the two other girls happened to be potheads.
My sister is a pretty tolerant person, so it didn’t bother her much if they smoked out on the weekends. Things were fine at first, then they started smoking and having people over late during the week. My sister was a member of the honor society because she was a studyholic, and it was so loud at her own house that she couldn’t even study in her room. She began spending more and more time out of the house and on campus in a quiet corner studying. That gave her roommates license to make things worse.
After about 5 months, my sister had enough, but since she was locked into a 9 month lease with these characters, she didn’t want to abandon her responsibility. So, she and the stoner girls found some hippie guy to move in and take over my sister’s part of the lease. My sister moved into a one bedroom apartment and the hippie guy moved into her room. He agreed to pay her back her part of the deposit and pay rent. My sister let the landlord know the new arrangement, and he agreed, but could not take her name off the lease. My sister didn’t like that, but figured that it was only for another 4 months.
A month and a half later, my sister got a phone call from her old landlord. Her old roomies had been evicted from the house. They had failed to pay the rent, so the landlord started the eviction process. One of the girls was able to get rent money from her grandparents, but it was too late and they were still going to be evicted because the landlord had found out about their stoner ways. So, they used the rent money to throw a keg party and trashed the place. The landlord was calling my sister to let her know that legal action was going to be taken, and her name was involved since she was still on the lease.
My sister consulted legal aid on campus, and was able to get the landlord to agree that if she cleaned up most of the mess, she would not be included in the lawsuit, although her deposit was forfeit. The landlord agreed because he liked my sister and knew that she had nothing to do with the keg party. So, my sister recruited my mom, my dad, and me to come down to Eugene on a Saturday to clean up the house.
It was disgusting. The empty keg was sitting in the middle of the living room floor. My dad and I loaded it into the back of his truck, and he took it back to the distributor stamped on it and got the deposit money for it. The kitchen had a huge stack of dirty dishes piled into the sink, which was clogged and filled with dirty water. There was mold growing on top of the water. The stove was covered in caked on food. There were piles of garbage everywhere, along with random clothes, books, and furniture. We put on the rubber gloves we had brought and opened up the big plastic garbage bags. We ended up taking 2 huge truckloads of garbage and broken furniture to the local dump. The process took the better part of the day.
My sister took both of the stoners to small claims court and won judgements against them. She got back about a third of her money and has since written off the entire ordeal as a bad experience. Currently, she lives alone.