Meme: Your Best/Worst Roommate

[canyonwalker]

I read an interesting discussion elsenet about people's best/worst roommate ever. That got me thinking about mine.

Back in college, students living in dorms filled out questionnaires so ResLife could pair them up with good matches. The idea was we'd get along best with roommates with similar academic interests and habits. Well, my profile as serious student in a rigorous program got me paired up with several students in similarly rigorous programs who were assholes and/or poorly socialized with weird/disgusting habits.

Curiously, my best roommate in undergrad years was the person with whom I had the least in common, on paper.

• I was in one of the toughest academic programs, Jim was in one of the easiest
• I was an A student, Jim struggled to make Cs
• I spent hours a day on studies, Jim spent hours a day on practice for a sports team
• I spent time with a few close friends; Jim had a parade of outgoing friends
• Almost all of my friends were guys, almost all of Jim's were gals
• My budget was tight, with part-time work, loans, and scrimping making up for what academic scholarships didn't cover. Jim's dad wrote a check for everything.

So, what worked about it?

Primarily, it was basic respect for each other as people. Jim took care not to bother me. He wouldn't try playing loud music when I was studying. He wouldn't invite friends into the room at 4am when I'd been asleep for 3 hours. (He'd hang out at their room or in a lounge when I was sleeping.) He never tried screwing with me just to see if he could. He only touched my possessions once, and immediately after he admitted it (he'd drank some of my booze) and promised to replace it.

It seem crazy when writing this out just how... basic... it all is. Like, why was this stuff hard for so many other people?

Post your best/worst roommate story, or comment here.

Comments

[darkswordesque]

My first roommate in the US used to use an electric burner at 6am to fry bacon (having a stove was not allowed in the dorms). The problem was that everything smelled of bacon -- my clothes, the bedsheets, etc. I tried reasoning with him but he thought it was his right to fry bacon in the room (please note that the cafeteria always had bacon for breakfast). Finally after a month of dealing with this, I gave up and called the RA on him for the stove. Soon after he moved to another dorm, where he got in trouble for the same thing and got booted.

[canyonwalker]

"Rat someone out to authority" isn't usually my first course of action, but in a case like that I doubt I'd let it go daily for a month before escalating the issue. Frying fatty meats is not only smelly but messy and dangerous. Grease spatters everywhere, damaging property and risking fire. Those risks are presumably the reason for the prohibition. If it were an electric tea kettle instead? Yeah, I'd probably ignore that violation of the rules. But not some clown frying meat every day.