What steals your clothes, eats your food and keeps you awake at night? A bad roommate.
Most people will have had to live with someone else at some point in their lives. Whether it’s college or an apartment, having another person living with you is almost unavoidable. While some people are able to live with someone stress-free, others are not so lucky.
“My freshman year of college I lived in a suite-style apartment,” said Teyana Morrow, a nursing major. “I stayed with three other girls, and their mess was too hard to deal with. I decided to get color-coded sticky notes, write their names on them and attach it to anything dirty that was theirs. They caught onto it eventually. I don’t think they liked it, but it did change my living situation for the better.”
Aside from messy roomies, you also have to deal with the pesky food snatchers. Ka’Derious Rhyan, 20, caught his roommate red handed.
“Every time I would go home for the weekend and come back, my food would look a little scarce. I got suspicious, so I decided to place my things in weird arrangements and take pictures.”
“Well,” said Rhyan, “turns out he was taking my things. When I confronted him about it, though, he blamed it on his brother, who I still to this day have not met.”
Imagine being able to decode what someone was saying. That was the case for biology major Phalon Marshall.
“My roommate my junior year was Latina. We got along fine, or so I thought. She spoke Spanish and almost every day she would get on the phone and chat with her loved ones,” Marshall said. “What she didn’t know, however, was that I too spoke Spanish. One day I overheard her talking about me. I didn’t say anything though — I just let her assume that I was clueless.”
Jaden Harris, 19, had a very unpleasant experience via Zoom last semester.
“My roommate was in the room while I was on video chat with my class. Long story short, I forgot that I wasn’t muted and she passed gas very loudly for the entire class to hear. I didn’t know what to do, so I just turned off my camera and typed in the chat, ‘OMG, that was NOT me.’”
Not all roommates do things to each other out of spite. Some have a little friendly “get-back.” Kendric Stephen and his roommate had prank wars.
“It all started at the beginning of the semester when I tricked him into thinking the campus was giving away free books. He got so excited thinking he was going to save some money. After he found out that I tricked him that’s when the games began,” said Stephen. “We started hiding each other’s things, embarrassing one another in public and so much more.”
A lot of young people probably wish they could avoid having to share their space with another human, but we can’t all get what we want. All we can do is roll with what life brings us. When in doubt, just buy a pack of sticky notes.
Students may find living with roommates challenging, but with a little bit of work – some have found a way to make it work.
