» Housemates from hell

Pfft
Everyone's lived with the mucky buggers who don't clean up, but it isn't until you've shared with someone who turns out to practise her archery indoors and have her own sword collection that you've truly experienced pants-wetting horror of your own housemate. Turned out that straitjacket she wore to that fancy dress gig? Was her own. Came home one day to find the kitchen window shut and the gas left on. Packed my bags and headed over to my boyfriend's place that night and moved out shortly afterwards.

However, no housemate can compare to the frustration visited upon me and my housemates (who became 2 of my best friends) when living in a rather nice house in Ealing a few years ago. The landlord's inability to recognise that renting the house meant he had to check before he could come over was the source of quite a few problems - especially as we rapidly decided that he was bonking our cleaner as well. He couldn't cope with women in careers - I (a research and data analyst, studying for a law degree) was referred to as "secretary", whereas the OT was a "nurse". He couldn't get his head around our friend, who's a senior engineer for Network Rail. In the time I lived there (about three years) we had an endless series of problems with the central heating (12 radiators blew, and there were only 11 in the house, so 2 had gone twice as I never turned mine on after the first four) causing at least six major floods, several of which were two storey beasts flooding through ceilings, and one exceptionally impressive effort which started in the second floor bathroom, cascaded through the first floor bedroom and down into the garage.

Things were taken (by him and the cleaner) from our rooms and on one particularly gruesome occasion, when one of the things taken happened to be some concert tickets from the OT's bedroom, her enraged phone call to him led us to the discovery that he was taking all of our bin bags home with him.

He and his wife would make as much effort to come by when we weren't there as possible, and go through our things, and blame us for anything that went wrong - which was inevitably the result of poor maintenance by them, and not due to our carelessness at all. On one occasion a light fitting fell from the ceiling onto my head during dinner. Our catch cry was, "It's not normal!"

I've never been so pleased to leave a place in my life.
(Tue 10th Apr 2007, 18:10, More)