How did he or she score on the test? Or what are your general complaints about your live-in companions?

Jeremy did pretty well on the test, except for the part about messiness. He's a big old slob and there's no getting around it, but he does clean the rain gutters, and according to the test, he'd be very respectful of my privacy if I wanted to bring home a date.

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2000

Answers

Okay, that was very stupid. The front page link has been screwed up all day. Here's the correct one. (And thanks to Heather for letting me know.)

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2000

Well, I don't have a roommate now, thank god, but the one I had my first year of college was really something.

She listened to that Bell Biv Devoe song "Poison" on constant repeat during all her waking hours (this was in 1989-1990), she smoked in our room (she'd lied on her housing application and said that she didn't smoke), and every Saturday morning at 8 a.m. (!) she had to watch "Soul Train" on the TV she kept in our room.

But the worst part about her was that once a month or so, she would straighten her hair. This involved first putting some greasy stuff on her hair which somehow would then end up getting on every surface of our room--especially the doorknobs and light switches--and then she would use this heated iron thing to do the actual straightening, which made our entire hallway reek of burnt hair.

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2000

I bet I can top you all with these stories... I always win with the "Roommate" stories.

It's my freshman year of college, and just for a little back story: I'm an ONLY child who never, until this time, shared a damn thing or a living space EVER in her life.

Enter, "Coco". From the get-go, I knew we weren't going to be friends, but we peacefully co-existed for the first couple of weeks UNTIL that fateful day that we ran out of toilet paper...

Coco had taken her shower first, came out, and she didn't mention anything so I thought everthing was copasetic, and well, she had no concerns about the lack of toilet paper.... I needed to use the bathroom so, being the resourceful woman that I am, bring a box of tissues into the bathroom. and go about my business. I then get ready to go into the shower, and just as I'm about to step into the tub, I see little pieces of EXCREMENT floating down the drain... I got so sick I had to skip my first class that day.

And, unfortunately, "Coco" can top that incident... She was a pre-med major, and well, for 6 weeks kept a sheep brain on her desk on a napkin, and from far away, it looked like something good to eat. SO my friends would come in and say: OOOOh, what's that, a dough----oOOOoh, nevermind, I don't want to eat anyway.

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2000

my roommate this year does really well - she's a total sweetheart and we're a good match. unfortunately, my roommate last year would have scored well on the test, but that doesn't stop her from being the roommate from hell. she was from the little town my school is in and she had a hometown boyfriend who was a complete jerk and always around, and - my least favorite thing - when she would go up to visit him on the weekends, she'd leave her alarm clock set for like, 8:30 am. always. it blew.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

I would have gladly taken "Coco" over my freshman year roommates -- one of them was a fanatical Deadhead -- I have nothing against the Grateful Dead, but this girl brought one tape to school with her, and she would play it over and over and over, for hours at a time. She smoked a whole lot of pot in the room, and when she didn't have any pot, she would sit on her bunk and cry about how much she hated school.

The other roommate, though, was a real treat. Stacy's first words to me when she walked in the door were "I'm a Jewish American Princess, and I'm proud of it, so I always get what I want. Just so you know." She also informed me that her goal for freshman year was to sleep with one guy for every letter of the alphabet -- and since my boyfriend's name was Andy, she intended to start with him. She would hit on him in front of me -- her method of flirting usually involved walking up behind him and yanking his pants down, or grabbing his crotch. He very quickly decided he was just never going to come near my room again.

She would go to frat parties and bars, get drunk, bring a guy home, have sex with him while other people were in the room. In the morning she would laugh about how she didn't even know the guy's name.

She and her best friend would sit around screaming "PENIS" at the top of their lungs and giggling, for hours on end.

And the most disgusting thing I've ever encountered -- on the rare occasions when she would use a condom, after the lucky guy would leave, she would fish the used condom out of the trash and hang it over her bed. She slept on the bottom bunk, beneath the Deadhead, and she would tuck the top of the condom under the top bunk's springs, so it would dangle there. I'm not kidding. And the housing office refused to let me change rooms, even though they knew a lot of this stuff was going on, and my parents had just divorced, so the added stress wasn't doing me any good.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

good grief! And I thought my youngest daughter had bad luck with roommates. The first one liked fresh air and left the windows open all the time (Chicago area). Her second one had quite a few problems which I don't quite remember except that she always had her huge TV on. The third dorm roommate had a boyfriend who lived on the next floor down...well, he was supposed to live there....actually he spent every night in her roommate's bed. The roommate also had a ferret who loved to get into everything...papers...cosmetics..the wastebasket..he always making a mess. And he didn't smell particularly good either. She did like this roommate though and was a good friend of the boyfriend's so she tolerated it all.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

On the test Stuart scored 35 out of 100.

Lets just say that if we were really only roommates, we would not get along very well.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Ah, roommates. My first year at boarding school, my roommate became sexually active. Being the smart, responsible woman that she was, she went to the doctor and got the pill. Then, she bought a big piece of posterboard, decorated it with hearts and flowers and these words, in big, bold, black letters: DON'T FORGET YOUR PILL. She added an arrow, pointing down and put the poster on her bureau so that the arrow lined up perfectly with her little round pill dispenser. She came home one night, stripped off her shirt, and showed me where her BF had been drawing on her with an ink pen. She was very busty, and he had drawn a caricature of a strongman, with her breasts as the ends of the barbells. My lord, she was a strange woman.

Strange she was, but mostly harmless. My roommate from hell was what I term an "emotional vampire." She created situations that provoked an emotional response. She told me once, while we were are at a party, that she had been diagnosed with leukemia. We sat up talking for most of the night. When I brought it up with her again a day or so later, she said "I made that up. I just wanted to see how you would react." Well.

I can put up with a lot of less than neat behavior (although Coco would have been too much for me too), but people who deliberately mess around with your emotions, for the fun of it? No way.

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

Hem. Well um, I'm guilty of repeat-song playing and I'm sure I'd annoy a roommate with that. I do that at work, but I use headphones when I feel like listening to a song over and over and over again.

I don't have any roomie horror stories. I only had a roomie once in college, during first-year. Jo and I didn't get along after the first few weeks -- mostly because she was extremely social and I wasn't.

I started staying over at my BF's place at a neighboring campus all the time as a result.

The worst that ever happened, was that our schedules flipped: she joined the crew team and started getting up at 5am and going to bed earlier, while I was still night owlish.

When we had papers due, she liked to work until 11pm or so and go to bed and get up early to finish and then print out, whereas I'd stay up all night and then try to sneak in a few hours of sleep between 5am and 8/9am. Since I'm a very light sleeper, she'd wake me up of course and hence I logged a number of almost completely sleepless nights when I hadn't intended to pull an all-nighter at all.

Oh yeah, she also crushed my bread with her beer. She got a full-sized fridge and said we could share it, but she was always getting beer for various social occasions and crushing my lunch meats and bread, which I depended upon since I had a little bit of a problem with the salty food from the dining hall.

Oh yeah, she snored too.

Sabs isn't too bad as live-ins go I guess -- he's messy and it takes a lot of prodding to get help with chores. He snores like crazy and he drops his clothes on the floor every night. He leaves the mail all over the kitchen table and puts off taking the trash out.

I leave my socks on the floor in the living room when I kick them off in the evening, if I forget to pick them up, so you know, I guess we've all got our bad habits that drive people nuts.

-- Anonymous, January 29, 2000

My roommate freshman year -- henceforth known as Dirty Lori -- was a freakish filthmonger who never left the room. I swear to Stee she once left a pizza box on her PILLOW for an entire weekend. She only listened to showtunes, and she liked 'em loud. She was obsessed with My Little Pony, and spent most of her time playing some My Little Pony game on her computer, or surfing My Little Pony websites. And, late at night when I dearly wished I was asleep, she'd do things under the covers that NO ONE should do when someone else is in the room. Ahem. Eww. Etc.

-- Anonymous, February 02, 2000

Current roommate situation:

I live with the freak, the jock and the princess.

The freak is a 40 year old man who lives in the basement, has no friends or family, does not encourage personal question, and only eats hummus, pita, pickled veggies, cheese, pasta with bottled sauce. He also works out incessantly. He is overall though a very nice guy except for the note I saw once "if you ever go through my stuff again, I'll stab you in the eye while you sleep". Dunno who it was directed to.

The jock- is a 37 year old real estate sales man who is a millionaire but lives with us. He has no consideration for roommates and is really really really LOUD. He is also prone to anger fits where he stomps around the house swearing loudly and slamming all the doors. He also makes himself dinner and doesn't eat it... i.e. Will heat up soup, pour it, put it on the table, eat two spoonfuls and walk away. He thinks he is Wayne Gretzky as he has recently taken up hockey. He has about 50 hockey sticks that 'gave up thier lives for many a goal'- his words not mine. He takes "athletic enhancement drugs " as he calls them.

The princess- is the jocks girlfriend who doens't officically live with us but has spent every night there for the last 2 years. She is up to her eyeballs in debt (ie makes about $28,000 per year and owes $25,000 on her credit cards). She wants the jock to marry her and says things like "i guess i figure that if I cook and clean he'll marry me" which is really really pathetic so I cant' help but feel sorry for her I suppose. She only wears t-shirts and shorts in the house and therefore likes to keep the house at 85-90F. And doesn't like it when we turn the heat down. She also does a bizillion loads of laundry a week so everytime I need to do laundry she is doing it.

The jock and the princess like to leave pots about the place growing things.

Oh yeah..my living situation is a WHOLE lot of fun. None of them are all that bad and for most part, I can deal..but Im moving in May.

-- Anonymous, February 04, 2000

Dear Annamari,

You have fewer roommate skills than anyone else I've ever lived with, of any species. Sharing a convenience apartment with you has been one of the endurance tests of my career as a graduate student. Now that you're moving out anyway, here's some constructive feedback that might make your next living situation a little easier:

1. When putting your stuff in the refrigerator for the first time, don't decide to clean out your roommate's part of the fridge for her, so that she comes home to find most of her food sitting in a box on the nice warm floor.

2. If you do clean out the refrigerator, get it right. Don't throw out yogurt that has a date in the future on it. Realize that heavily marinated biryani spices take years to go bad.

3. If a cupboard or clothesrack appears to be divided down the middle, 50-50, that means you get half of it. You get a half that is bounded and simply connected, as the mathematicians say. You don't get to randomly stick your stuff in the middle of your roommate's when you're in a bad mood.

4. In fact, don't mess with your roommate's stuff, period. Just don't.

5. Do your dishes regularly, rather than only when you have no more clean dishes, bowls, plates, and cups. I suspect the reason for the dirty dishes was not actually laziness, but territoriality. You wanted to leave your mark on the total area of our airplane-galley sized kitchen, the same way you left your shoes strewn across the front hall, your dirty Q-tips all over the bathroom sink, and piles of cleaning rags in various places.

6. Don't play thumpa-thumpa music on Sunday mornings with your door open when you know how thin the wall between us is. At least close the door.

7. The cupboards in the kitchen are also closable, incidentally. Many people think cupboards look better closed.

8. Speaking of opening and closing things, there are two ways to open a door, by turning the handle and by pulling it. First way quiet, second way noisy (it springs the latch). Don't do it the noisy way a couple of times a day to keep me on my toes.

9. If I ask you to turn down the thumpa thumpa music or close your door, don't shriek at me that I should go somewhere else or move out if I want quiet. I've been here for three years. We both have leases that enjoin us to "maintain a reasonable atmosphere for study." There is nowhere else to go in our neighborhood on Sunday mornings. I already spend 60 hours a week in my office getting away from you.

10. The kitchen garbage, which is the only garbage, is less than 20 feet from any point in the apartment. That means you can put your used Q-tips there without exerting yourself. You can even put empty toilet paper rolls there, when you're the one who changes the toilet paper, instead of stacking them in the cart you moved into the bathroom to hold your different flavored shower gelees.

11. While you're at it, you could also pick up the candy wrapper that has been sitting on the threshold of your bedroom all week and put that in the garbage. I guarantee you it isn't mine; I've never eaten Fisherman's Friends. I also guarantee you that I'm not your mother and I won't pick it up, any more than I picked up the last one.

12. We are drowning in free newspapers and advertising circulars. Since you ripped down my extremely effective "No advertisements" sign the first day you moved in (and when I asked about it you said you wanted the local newspaper, so I wrote "except the local newspaper" and put it back up, and then you took it down again) you could take the initiative for recycling the garbage that now piles up inside the door, which you never look at.

12. Having made this kind of impression on your roommate, don't be surprised when she doesn't want to listen to you or be your friend when you're all stressed out.

Luv, Diana

PS Speaking of Fisherman's Friends, don't ever volunteer to go to sea if you want to come back alive. At least not with me.

-- Anonymous, February 21, 2000