Being assigned a roommate is like playing Russian roulette. More often times than not, you’ll be perfectly fine, but there’s always that one chance that something very, very bad could happen.
Each year, thousands of college students find themselves paired up with strangers that can make their lives amazing or can turn them into a living hell, as in the movie “The Roommate.”
Here at Witt, a handful of students had their own stories to tell about the most intimate of love/hate relationships –the person sharing your room. A roommate’s lack of consideration or in some cases, lack of intelligence, can make your life a nightmare.
Most of the stories told by students with roommates who annoyed (or in some cases continue to annoy) them started the same way: “She seemed normal at first but…”
One student, a female freshman, talked about a roommate she had for only a week. She said, “The first thing she said to me was, ‘I like to sleep in a meat locker.’” She wasn’t kidding. The roommate (who we’ll call “Amy”) turned the air-conditioner up as high as possible every time she left the room or went to sleep, which required that the roommate crawl over her in the middle of the night.
And that was just the beginning. Welcome to hell week. As the days went on, Amy grew more and more frustrating to live with, proving not only to be annoying but lacking in any real form of intelligence, asking her roommate to help figure out how to put together a coffee pot with picture instructions and then having to have her show her how to heat water in it. By the middle of the week, the housing freeze had her counting down the days until she could move out. When the weekend came, Amy’s parents came to visit her and began to move the entire room around, which the student telling the story consented to, as long as they didn’t move her stuff, which they did anyways. After she had had enough and decided that she couldn’t stand another week with her, she moved into a friend’s dorm room in another hall.
Another freshman, a history major we’ll call “Brittney,” talked about a roommate who seemed able to annoy her in every way possible. The roommate would steal her clothes and food, create giant messes that she wouldn’t clean and talked about her behind her back, but that wasn’t what really bothered Brittney.
It was the sex.
When she would go home on some weekends, her roommate would have her boyfriend over, which didn’t bother her. “At first I let it go because I was gone and that was one of the rules,” she said. It soon began to bother her though, as she came back and was told by people that lived in the nearby rooms that they had heard sounds coming from the room, she shrugged it off but she went in to her room, she found her bed had been moved. She decided, with substantial proof, that her roommate had pushed the beds together so that her and her boyfriend could have a larger bed to have sex. Her roommate denied it but Brittney spent some time afterword cleaning her bed anyways, completely disgusted.
Many times, you have very few options in dealing with annoying roommates. The most obvious one is to just move. However, this isn’t always possible to do, as in the case of the student who lived with Amy, who suggested just ignore them and try to move on.
“It’s rude for me just not to acknowledge her presence in the room,” she said, “but that is my way of coping. That is my last resort.”
As these stories above illustrate, roommates can drive you insane. They may not want to kill you like Rebecca in “The Roommate,” but they can make life seem like a nightmare that replays itself over and over again. Unfortunately, sometimes all you can do is hope, dream and pray that one day, your roommate from hell will be out of your room— and life—for good.
(Jake Lallo / hs.jlallo@wittenberg.edu)
