A catalogue of psychos/wierdos/weak minded fools...
Housemates from hell… Where do I start, and more importantly are you sitting comfortably?

First year of Uni, “oh no” I thought, “I won’t go into Halls, I can cook for myself and not eat that school dinner pish they serve. No a much healthier and whatnot option would be to go self catered.” Lesson no 1: ALWAYS go into Uni halls for your first year at Uni kids. Anyway, moved in during fresher’s week, no-one about, end of the week the other 5 move in, dammit no other freshers. Ah well got on pretty good with everyone in the flat. Things went well for a bit then one guy turned out to have a serious beef with everyone in the flat (of 6 people) apart from muggins here and somehow we seem to be best mates. So there’s me stuck in the middle between a load of geeks and this psycho who ends up getting wasted, slashing his own arm up with a 7 inch kitchen knife and OD’ing after giving the foreign girl in our flat tons of abuse for weeks. I was woken up at 3am with a lot of noise outside my door only to open it and find 2 coppers outside. Nutcase had been found naked slumped over his bed by our flatmate and he was sectioned in hospital for a few weeks. He also punched a wall at a later date and broke several knuckles after knocking someone else out. Utter nut case. As you can imagine slightly awkward living there after that… I saw this guy a couple months back (4 years later) and he talks to me like nothing ever happened. Said he’d been diagnosed with epilepsy, and that explains him being a psycho how exactly? Run awaaaaayyyyyyy!!!

Second year, moved in with a mate from my course and some randoms, again a total of 6 people in a Uni flat. Turned out one girl was proper OCD. Wouldn’t let the cleaner clean her room (which we paid a small fortune extra for the privilege) but would clean her own room 2-4 times a day religiously at any hour of the damn day. It’s 3am! TURN THAT F***ING HOOVER OFF YOU CRAZY BITCH! Etc. At the end of the year she accused us all of stealing her food and leaving toast crumbs in the spread. WTF?! 2 words: Chicken oriental although to be fair she never was in the communal part of the flat apart from cooking occasionally so it wasn’t really that bad. Although thanks to another flatmate we seemed to frequently have drug addled stoners pop by and vegetate in our lounge for extended periods. No trouble or anything from them so not so bad.

Third year lived in the same Uni accommodation again, this time 2 more mates moved in plus 2 randoms. 1 random guy was ace, other guy (starting to see a pattern here?) was definitely a chromosome-ly challenged member of the window licking sunshine variety coach brigade, your typical maths student stereotype. Thin, dire dress sense, Deirdre Rashid from Coronation Street glasses, socially inept, enjoyed religiously watching snooker (I prefer to detach my own retinas with a snooker cue than watch it) and could not cook for shit. He lived on tinned beans with sausages in and those freeze dried pasta gloop things, how he didn’t get scurvy I don’t know. Anyway things got a bit weird, he locked his door when he was in the communal part of the flat with us. A bit odd at first but after we got to know him it continued so we felt a bit insulted. We heard multiple voices from his room a few times and after asking others no-one had seen or heard anyone else arrive we got a bit suspicious. After a while curiosity got the better of us, so 5 of us huddled around his door listening were a bit scared to say the least when we heard the following with 3 distinct voices ( he was categorically the ONLY person in his room):

Voice 1 (shouting): “I’m angry at you God, what have you done. Rarrrrgh!” *crashing sounds*
Voice 2 (almost crying, quite high pitched): “Why have you done this?!”
Voice 3: “You know what has to be done. I must destroy you.”

Cue 5 nervously exchanged glances and running to own rooms and locking of and piling furniture up against the doors and getting 999 ready on the speed dial. This went on the whole year, one of my mates was in the adjacent room (beds separated by a mere breeze block wall) and he was frequently woken at ungodly hours by wailing and shouting. This fruit loop was a genius at remembering statistics and numerical facts, like the last time Willie Thorn got 147 on a snooker break at the Embassy World Cup at Edgbaston in 1845 or when Garfield Sobers got 8 boundaries at the Oval against Namibia or something. At first I thought he was making it all up, but I started checking out his stats claims on Google and they were all dead right. I believe this is a recognised medical condition, but I have no sympathy after living with it for a year. I have my own explanation for it, it’s called don’t shag your own sister or mum or cousin. It may be legal in Cornwall/Plymouth area but if you must indulge, stay that bloody side of the Tamar. He had said at one point you could trace 10 generations of his family from a thumbprint sized area on a small scale OS map, so yeah no fucking wonder you’ve got 25 X-chromosomes and webbed toes. Lesson 2: Don’t inbreed kids, no matter how desperate you are/hot your sister/cousin/mother is, it’s wrong and you’ll end up mad as a bag of frogs. His mum even proclaimed to buy him the tins with the ring pull so he doesn’t have to use a can opener. My god that was a scary Saturday morning, groggily making my hungover way into the kitchen for provisions to find a whole family of yokels pointing in awe at the "refrigamerator" and the wonder of electricity.

That was a quality year though, football and Frisbee up and down the corridor, managed to trip the lights out in the entire building one evening. “Err it just fell off the wall, honest guv’nor…”

So 3 years, 3 mental flatmates. I wonder if I can sue the University for mental anguish…

Fourth year, moved into a 2 bedroom flat with a mate, who soon after moving in got addicted to Final Fantasy 25 or something. Utterly addicted, took over his life, ruined a perfectly good (fully government funded) Masters degree and a good friendship. At first I thought he was working really hard staying up late and getting up early, when I could hear the tap-tap-tap of his computer keyboard. After a while I realised he had got into a nocturnal cycle to be online when the Japs and Yanks were online too. In less than a year (that’s 365 days for those who are a bit slow off the mark) he racked up a little over 100 days cumulatively playing that effing game. Yes that’s 1 in every 3 hours of existence playing a sodding GAME with giant fucking chickens in it and even sacrificed his MSc degree by not submitting a dissertation. Best possible result was a Postgraduate Diploma which is worth crap all. Other than that the usual general laziness, never cleaned the flat (well twice in 16 months to be fair) or ever put bins out etc. Although he always did the washing up and at least washed himself. We moved out and shortly after I had a phone call from the landlord asking what we had left in the flat. Turns out I’d forgotten a coffee maker and a pressure cooker/boiler thing in the kitchen but cleared everything else out. Landlord continued to ask what was left behind but I didn’t know what he was on about. Apparently some “magazines” had been left in the other bedroom. I didn’t enquire as to the nature of these…

The following month, actually moved back into the same flat after landing a job at the Uni. Different flatmate, all good for a year! Hooray! Maybe I’m not mad. Oh apart from his other half practically living in the flat (well not living exactly, but sleeping, showering and then eating evening meals at) and not contributing to any bills. Still owed £50 he agreed to contribute to bills, doubt I’ll ever see that despite his considerable and undeclared to the tax man earnings. I didn’t think it was unreasonable, an hour and a half’s heated discussion revealed he thought otherwise.

This year, I moved into a house of 5, couple of mates, a friend of a friend and a random we found on the internet. All good for a bit, then some minor disagreement turned into a massive fallout between 2 of them. Everyone was still talking to me, since I hadn’t mortally offended anyone so me being stuck in the middle, again. Woo, possibly yay and indeed hoopla. They were just as stubborn as each other, if they’d sat down and talked it over they probably would have been fine, but no, just had a big silent dispute (one acting like a self righteous spoilt child-can’t think why that is…) for a few months and the friend of a friend moved out, mainly because she was well paranoid from too much smoking and being a bit of a basket case anyway. Oddly enough the person we found on the internet is awesome :) The replacement for mental-girl is sound too so now it's a good house :D

I’m no OCD merchant but for once in a fucking while I wish any one of them would do their own washing up within say a calendar month, put the bin bags or recycling out, lazy twunts. I reckon we would still be on our first towering rotting bin bag after 7 months if I hadn’t put them out every Monday morning, and FFS the council DO NOT recycle those Tetra-Pak cartons that are impregnated with foil, so STOP putting them in the damn green bin and letting it pile up until someone else (ie me) puts it outside. Anyway I’m not bitter, just glad it’s a fairly stable house. I can cope with doing a bit extra just to keep things a bit sweet having previously lived with complete psychos, but since the dishwasher packed in nothing has been washed up, so I spent 3 hours on Saturday single handedly washing practically every single item of cutlery and crockery. Has anyone said thank you? Have they fuck, merely left another neat pile of dirty dishes which will no doubt be left indefinitely, or until the dishwasher is fixed.

Click “I like this” if you think the madness is actually all in my head and everyone else is perfectly sane and not a lazy bunch of twunts… Oh sorry about the length, the end is in a different time zone but you love it, in fact this might be the longest QOTW answer ever!
(Stanlington Jobsworthy Smythe Last skived off work on, Tue 10 Apr 2007, 17:19, Reply)