For a true joke too late for April Fools and a horror story too early for Halloween, read below.

Now that I’m satisfied that the roommate transfer period has closed and that my room is not at risk of invasion again (also, we’re moving out in two weeks), I feel safe to tell my story. For the sake of this article, we’ll call them “Jane.” “Jane” was my first roommate—that’s the best thing to call them. Better to remember it in unemotional terms like that than relive the powerful emotions that they usually stir.

For example:

• Anger.
• Hatred.
• Disgust.
• Confusion.(A lot of confusion.)

I’ll start from the beginning. They moved in before me, I’m an exchange student from England, and the cheapest flights meant I’d move in the evening, not the morning. I honestly didn’t think it would be a problem. But that one choice triggered an entire set of awkward circumstances that continued for an entire painful semester.

The first warning sign I should have had was that their mother was in the room, and they themselves were sleeping. It was about seven o’clock, but I didn’t know where they’d come from yet, so it might have made sense. You might be wondering, did I never find out?

I’m afraid not.

They wouldn’t speak more than a sentence with me for the entire semester. Now, I’m a chatty person, so this bothered the hell out of me, but in retrospect, I could’ve dealt with the suffocating silence. It’s the cleanliness issue that really made me suicidal.

I don’t know if the housing department actually looks at the answers to the roommate questions as much as they claim to because I had quite clearly stated that I kept things relatively clean. I wanted a bit of leeway, y’know? Just in case I forgot to do my bed that morning or wash my dishes immediately. Who knows, that might have been the rope I almost used to hang myself?

I’ll list the offenses so that you can skip through if you’d like:

• Hair in the shower drain.
• Hair on the sink and floor.
• Toothbrush and toothpaste left on the side of the sink and bits left in the sink.
• Either refusing to or simply forgetting to replace the toilet roll.
• Blocking the toilet and refusing to tell me or call maintenance to fix it.
• Urine on the toilet seat.
• Urine on the side of the toilet.
• Urine somehow under the seat (which dried after a while and left an insane smell because I couldn’t initially fathom that you could get urine under a toilet seat).

Now, the hospitality issues:

• Alarms upon alarms ringing for minutes on end at ungodly times in the morning.
• Snoring incredibly loud (I actually cannot emphasize how loudly Jane snored and how immediately it started after she went to sleep – which was at 8 every night).
• Turning the lights on when I was still asleep.
• Leaving the lights on when she left, and I was still trying to sleep.
• Never speaking to me unless she had to ask me to do something for her, such as connect her laptop (all in a different language) to the WiFi or ask me to leave because her parents were coming around.
• Never looked at me when I tried to talk to her about the issues I was having.
• Using her excuse of being a self-professed “introvert” as a reason to not call Hartley when she blocked the toilet.

I could go on and on, but I think my rage may be endless. So I’ll use this as a warning to folks, get to your room early, establish dominance, and, for god’s sake, be a good roommate!

Silhouette via pxhere