rather odd fellow
Currently studying a postgrad qualification, so I'm counting a fellow student as a 'work colleague'. It's a 9-5 / Mon-Fri course with a job at the end, none of the 3-hour weeks and going out on Tuesday nights typically associated with being a student, so I reckon it should count.

Anyway, I live in on-campus accommodation with this gentleman who shall remain nameless - the upshot of which is that I have to put with the twunt in lectures all day and then in my spare time during the evenings.

What's wrong with him, you may wonder? It's hard to sum it up in a single sentence - there's no single thing that stands out, but after a while his endless capacity for social faux-pas and unwittingly obnoxious behaviour becomes quite wearing.

Firstly, despite living in the same building where our classes and lectures take place, he somehow manages to arrive up to 20 minutes late every day for the first lesson. To get from our accommodation area to the classrooms involves a two minute (or less) walk down a few flights of stairs, yet somehow the guy manages to get beaten in the promptness stakes every morning by people who commute in from an hour away.

His best excuse, after a week of consistent lateness, was that he underestimated how long the lift journey would take. Another time, when asked why he was running stupidly late, he said: "I'm sorry, but I've only just got out of bed." Then said nothing else, as though somehow that were a satisfactory explanation.

He gets away with stuff like this all the time, because his excuses are so pathetic that staff have given up trying to get him to turn up on time. Yet whenever anyone quite reasonably and politely asks him to try and make more of an effort he runs off to the college counsellor, or anyone who will listen, and whinges about how he is being bullied and victimised by everyone else on the course.

Despite failing to arrive on time more or less every morning, however, this didn't stop him complaining to the higher-ups that he felt he wasn't getting enough tuition from lecturers.

When it was pointed out that he missed over an hour a week by his lateness, he got indignant and spent an evening chewing everyone else's ears off about how the college was victimising him and failing to support him adequately.

The same gentleman takes appalling care of himself outside of the course - I've never once seen him wash, and in his room there's barely any carpet visible for all the used laundry scattered over the floor. Normally I wouldn't object to how people conduct themselves in their personal lives, except that this little hygienic lapse means our entire corridor smells like dead cats and unwashed feet.

This is just the tip of the iceberg - I haven't got time to go into detail about the late-night suicide threats, his seemingly exclusive diet of plain rice and Red Bull, and his ability to ramble on about entirely irrelevant subjects (railway service providers in the North-East being a particular favourite) until you genuinely want to kill yourself.

Apologies for length etc. etc. etc.
(A Nonny Mouse, Wed 30 Jan 2008, 18:19, Reply)