Oh, hell no. If I found that and the offender refused to clean up (with bleach), my reaction is what would be filed under the category, “No jury of my peers would ever convict me.”
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I’ve told this story before but my worst roommate story was sharing an adjoining kitchen to 4 studio apts. One person left uncooked chicken thawing on the counter or in the fridge and wouldn’t clean up the chicken ooze, would cook large batches of soup with said chicken and cabbage which would stink everything up.
Another was just lazy and never did his dishes and ate other people’s food. 3rd guy was actually a great person but had to deal with the other two.
Things came to a head when summer rolled around when the kitchen had been left with a pile of trash and unwashed dishes for weeks, which then got infested with roaches and a horrid dumpster smell. I was able to avoid responsibility by locking myself in my room along with all of my dishes.
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I once held a party in my own flat, and thoughtfully hid most of my crockery in a cupboard, you know, for safety.
I learned a few things, in no particular order.
The warm cupboard around the immersion heater is a terrible place to store certain things.
Wash all your crockery before you stash it.
Do not get so trashed you forget where your stuff is after 3 days.
You are not as smart as you think.
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A friend of mine told me about a couch-surfing guest who’d been staying with them for awhile; my friend had stepped out to do some shopping and when they came back, walked by the front of the house. The guest had left the front curtains open and was naked and humping the carpet enthusiastically. They were promptly asked to leave.
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I was considering getting a roommate next year. However, the list of things that might cause me to snap is growing with every comment I read…
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I’m currently renting a 2 bedroom place, my original roommate/friend moved out and i opted to not rent out the spare room because i value my sanity and things too much to have some rando around.
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This thread is making me wonder if there are ever charity gofundme campaigns for people who’ve had truly awful roommates to allow them to live alone long enough to decompress…
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Oh, I’ve been there friends.
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I would have opted for that after the guy who lived in the room right next to mine in our shared flat started working in is undies (programmer), left a burst frozen bottle of carrot juice in the freezer, collected dirty plates and cups in his room instead of putting them in the dishwasher (never mind ever emptying the thing), and then sub-let his room to a guy playing guitar at three in the morning (at least this one didn’t do all of the above). He basically vanished from one day to another, came back after three months then, claiming we stole his ID card. He left a small stash of things he “borrowed” ( at least we got them back) with a sticky note to each, with a name on it. One had a name of someone not sharing our flat, and unbeknownst to us. An empty toilet paper roll had a sticky note “to the flatmates”.
Next time I saw the guy he was wearing a beard and sunglasses at night in a bar. Totally ignored me.
Next time I saw him he was in open-door care at a psychiatric institution…
We never looked for a flatmate on the “open market” again, but only on friends recommendation…
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Jeez. What kind of parents raise that sort of person? 
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I’m shocked that there are so many people still making a go at couchsurfing.com and AirBnB with all these horror stories floating about.
I had some bad experiences with both sites in the distant past, but I’ve lately found myself with no alternative but to resort to AirBnB and it’s gone pretty smoothly. Perhaps their improved vetting processes have paid off.
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I have seen friends let a person stay in their house for a few days and have the days turn into weeks or months. The follow up is that the freeloader remembers getting kicked out more than the hospitality. the list of people that I will let stay over is somewhere between short and nonexistent.
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Yup, had a flatmate who did that. His entire bed and the wall it touched looked like that black, grimy patch you get on the headrest of a filthy bus or train.
His best trick, as I’ve said elsewhere, was attempting to clean a blackened, oily set of chainmail that had survived a car fire in our dishwasher; that left black specks on everything plastic for about two months.
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The one time I attempted to have a birthday party in college, tertiary friends and complete strangers showed up. Found my bedroom locked, and when I got it open, a friend of a friend had a couple of girls in there, rolling joints on the face of an oil painting he’d taken off the wall.
Another time, a roommate invited the Get Up Kids bandmembers/roadies to crash in our apartment after a show. I came home and walked into the kitchen to find a roadie shooting heroin(?) at my kitchen table.
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Ah, this thread is bringing back so many “happy” memories. Think I’m going to stop telling stories in case I reveal too much of my dumbass past. 
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And sometimes they make your crawlspace smell like owl shit and scare the fuck out of you when you finally get the endoscope up into their nest…
https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/shocking-discovery-of-strigiformes-from-planet-sol-iii
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Sounds like a teenager… or a cat.
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When I was in college, my landlord decided to sublet a spare room in my apartment without my permission. A woman moved in who shat all over the restroom on a regular basis and had “smudging sessions” where she’d wave burning sage all over the kitchen while screaming. When she moved out a dude took the place who was an angry alcoholic who kept stealing my stuff; when I asked him where my shirts were, he took armfuls of my dishes and started throwing them at me. I finally called the campus housing office and told them my story, and they said “we have a one-room apartment reserved for visiting professors. It’s yours.” It was gloriously 70s and gloriously all mine.
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People I do not know well or share at least some DNA with do not stay in our house, and any who are on the list have a short and limited stay. Too many hard lessons.
In the early 90s I lived on a boat. I went away (out to sea for work) for a few months, and asked a girl I knew to watch over it for me. On my return she was long gone and there were 2 guys living in it, not well.
There were literally hundreds of empty bottles on the deck. One of them had taken one of my blankets and screwed it into a bulkhead to give himself some ‘privacy’ from the other guy.
When I returned, tired and happy to be home after 3 months at sea, I stepped on to find a stranger wearing my clothes, reading a book of mine and smoking weed in my galley. I asked him who he was, and he told me to fuck off and get the fuck off his boat. Things deteriorated from there.
Out of respect for music his guitar didn’t end up in the water, but the rest of his stuff did, as did he. He then went into town and complained about the psycho dude who threw him out of his place. The other guy, who I knew a little but not well, did not deign to show up to collect his things.
Three months later I went out to sea again. We got stormed in a few days later, and I arrived at my boat around midnight in the pouring rain. I found the second guy inside my locked boat, smoking (!!) and hanging out. He said ‘I thought you were out of town’. He said a few more things as I threw his stuff out of the boat.
15 years later I ran into him. He was working as a security guard in a thrift store. We did not speak.
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Had a big new year’s party back when I lived in Philly and we had a friend of a friend show up with her roommate.
Philly has a pretty big feral cat problem and these two idiots “saved” a kitten on the way in. So they’re walking around the party with this deeply upset, stinky cat the whole time. We initially told them to let the damn thing go outside, which nearly caused a fight, but a neighbor with a thing for strays offered to store the cat in their bathroom until the guests left.
Now these two had driven up from DC without a place to stay. And we’re already shit house drunk when they turned up. The guy had apparently been dropped from an acting college down there and was working as a waiter at one of those dinner theaters where the performers are also the cast. And apparently a not very good one.
He spent the entire night asking everyone for “yayo” and “zannis”. Grossly hitting on straight women because it was “hilarious” and they’re “all in love with him”. He was gay, BTW, pretty obviously. He gropped a bunch of women too. Have no clue what that was all about.
He kept telling fucked up stories about “Gay Hollywood” vAccording to the girl who brought him, he dropped out of highschool and spent only a couple weeks couch surfing out there trying to get instantly famous. But it’s just about all he would talk about. Apparently Bryan Singer’s pool parties are “amazing” and you can’t be a famous homosexual without attending. Now everyone at the party was either in film school or worked in media. So he got a lot of “isn’t that guy a child molester”. Which he dismissed by saying it was OK because rich older guys would buy you things. He and the girl ended up in a screaming match with a friend who had a history of sexual abuse.
At a certain point he started offering people Adderall. He’d apparently stolen cash and a clearly labelled bottle of anti-depressants which he assumed were Adderall from my roommate’s girlfriend’s purse.
We kicked them out around that point. And insisted they take the cat. As we couldn’t find the cat we thought they had. Noone knew where they went as they never turned up at the place they were supposed to crash at. I heard later they slept in the stairwell and the building security guards chased them out. Noone could contact them for about 3 days after.
We found the cat in a box hidden in our utility closet. So I spent the next day trying to find an animal shelter open on New Year’s. Washing the stinky cat, finding food and borrowing a liter box. The cat was already litter trained weirdly. It also had a bad case of diarrhea, and worms. And it didn’t like the bath so it spent a lot of the day shitting and pissing in our shoes. I have no clue if they’d kidnapped some ones kitten and badly mistreated it or if they had found some ones lost pet. It’s not super odd for Philly strays to be litter trained a lot of people keep litter boxes and food outside their houses for the ferals.
The roommate’s girlfriend eventually adopted the cat.
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