Where do I even begin. This is going to be long.
So I (22/m) had the perfect roommate for about 4 years from being matched freshman year & moving out together to get our own apartment (which was a nightmare) but we finally found an amazing two bedroom & had a temporary third who we split everything equally with for about 3 months. Then it was just him & I and everything was bliss. Fast forward through 2017, we both graduate, he goes to law school & moves out, I really want to keep the apartment because it’s the most bang for your buck you can get in Staten Island, let alone NYC. So he moves out and his girlfriend (22/f) since freshman year moves in in his stead (at this point, I’ve basically lived with her for years too but she brings her own host of problems that we won’t even get into). However, she couldn’t afford to split just the two of us so we start looking for a third to keep things cheap while I transition to full time work & we both finish our masters (mine in accounting which means CPA prep). So a guy (21/m) I kinda wanted to live with from school reached out & he was my bestfriend’s mentee so I figured there would be little harm. The most I knew about him to the point of living space was that he was frugal so splitting household groceries and supplies more than likely wasn’t going to be a thing, fine.
Now let’s recap the last 4 months after he moves in at the end of August because she’s a completely different set of slightly more manageable issues.
The frugality: I am a fan of saving money where I can and often time make a lot of cutbacks & sacrifices with the intention of saving money. For the month I lived alone in the summer, I was sure to moderate my electricity use and how much I cooked, always making large batches of food at once to ensure I got the most bang for my buck. Now this kid (just realized I haven’t given him a name, let’s go with Toby, like Toby from the office and in all instances of our encounters I am Michael Scott), came in asking how could we keep the utilities at a minimum since he didn’t want to have to chuck out that much for bills. I told him what the minimum was based on two people living here & not really being here all the time. Cool. Fast forward and each month the bill more than doubles for gas & electric. So upon his asking why I keep charging more each month (since I continued my lease & just added them, everything financial funnels through me), I say that with the increase of people here that it might just be the bills catching up. Lies, fables, and lies. On the occasions when I have been home during the day and can see how he operates, I can tell you exactly how the bill keeps rising. When Toby cooks, no matter the time of day, he turns on two kitchen lights, and sets up three burners on our gas stove to make his food (did I mention that he cooks every single meal he eats, on the stove, everyday), at which point he will usually go to turn on the bathroom lights with the attached fan while he goes back to prepping his food, then he will start boiling some water, turn on the shower water (not a single light has been altered) and go to his room to pick out new clothes and text for however long he’s enthralled with his phone (averages 5-10 minutes), then go to the bathroom and take his shower (stoves still burning and no one is in the kitchen). *I’m aware I sound completely crazy tracking all of this but for background, I grew up with a military family & when I was younger, I was used to people breaking into he house (who both did & did not live there), so I have been used to tracking the sound of footsteps and appropriating them to people so I can know who is doing what/around and he has an off-cadence that is very distinct.
The cooking: as mentioned before, Toby cooks every single meal, every single day. This means that at least three times a day, there are three burners he occupies each time to create his food. He actually eats the exact same thing everyday: chicken breast, brown rice & mixed vegetables that come in the microwave bags. Now Toby and our female roommate don’t get along & one of his chief reasons for not liking her is that she eats crap food because she’ll eat a microwaveable meal or a bunch of cheap carbs or eat out which he finds so deplorable for someone to not care about what they eat. Did I mention Toby is frugal? So frugal that during his weekly grocery shopping he buys the lowest quality chicken breasts because they are the cheapest & everyone he complains to about her, mentions his low-grade eating habits. Also frugal enough to realize he eats crap food and switch the labels of regular produce & organic produce before heading to checkout, yes that happened. But for his crap chicken, he knows it tastes bad and what do you do when things taste bad, season it. I had a fully stocked kitchen with pans, utensils, ware and everything. Since he has been here, he has absolutely scorched my non-stick pan to the point that anything you put in it, will stick at some point because of all the sriracha and pre-mixed seasonings (he uses something called Flavor, like it’s the actual company name & I saw them on Instagram). Now do whatever you need to do to get yourself through some bad food but when I say scorched! Everytime he cooks, everyone (myself, my other roommate & our boyfriends) avoids the kitchen because there is a large air of smoke that chokes you, burns your lungs & nostrils and makes it unbearable to breathe. Not exaggerating in the slightest, even while he cooks, he will cough and sneeze (doesn’t really cover his mouth either which is just an issue in and of itself) throughout the entire time.
Toby brags: this is less irritating but still just something I want off my chest. We’re not friends, we’re cool but we are not friends. I have had the same boyfriend since February, our roommate has her boyfriend & Toby is single. Now Toby was seeing a girl from a school up the road, in which she would come over late night, he would cook and eat in front of her (never once heard him offer her anything) and whenever she wanted to go out, he would bring up to me that he had a date in a bragging kind of way as if I cared immediately followed by my advice on when to start asking the girl to pay for meals and the like. Didn’t really have advice there. Next chick that pops up, flys all the way from Florida but that’s none of my business. They screw, he needs new sheets, he tells me, I’m proud for him, he tried for a solid two weeks to give me full details as if I cared, avoiding that became a Long spiral of not coming out my room while he was home.
Cleaning (or lack thereof): now before Toby moved in, he asked how clean we are. I told him just standard, not too over the top, cleanup your mess, keep it organized, keep it moving. I grew up as the first boy, raised by women in Maryland, I have a particular standard of clean that I can maintain for myself and from my previous roommate, realized no one else had that sense. I don’t eat starches or sugary carbs, so that eliminates a lot of foods that one would keep in the house such as grains and most shelf-stables carbs. I occupy one of three levels of the refrigerator and barely use the freezer with my meal preps, which I do weekly on Sunday. Immediately after I clean my dishes and wipe down the kitchen and maintain doing any dishes I accumulate on Wednesday and Friday of the week. Not too crazy, just enough to keep the house looking decent. Now he (who pays less in rent than both I and our female roommate, is here the most & the one I can source most billing increases to) has this philosophy that if it is not his mess, he is not going to clean it. Fair! This goes as far as I having a fork in the sink, hearing him cook and clean his dishes (a good percent that were mine & here when he moved in) and that fork still just sitting in the sink. And then looking over at his wet dishes on top of the dishes that are cleaned and dry since the day before because he didn’t want to put anything up and occasionally, it’ll all start to develop an odor from him just piling wet dishes on top of dry ones and starting that process over again. But that is all slightly what the fuck ever to this next one. On the first day of both of them having been moved in, we discussed who would clean what areas and what that cleaning process should involve as well as how often to clean, they both picked their areas and agreed on the cleanliness and operations of common areas at which point TOBY pointed out that making a mess in the kitchen or bathroom should not be left for the cleaning person but to whoever created the mess. We all agreed, I had it typed out and not only emailed it to them, texted them reminders throughout the month of things we agreed upon. You look at this past weekend, right before Christmas and my boyfriend and I are alone in the house, cleaning everything from top to bottom because I could not stand waiting, and hinting and all the shit anymore of expecting grown ass adults to be responsible. So we cleaned and we scrubbed, and you know what we found? A bunch of hot sauce stains, seasoning, rice and oatmeal everywhere in the kitchen. Not to mention, this is the second mass cleaning I’ve had to do for my sanity and the first time I found puke next to the toilet, on the floor that belonged to one of his pledge brothers that I publicly detest. Separate store of how he didn’t even say anything about it when I brought it up or even clean it, sat for a good week before I cleaned. But I digress, we clean up, can pretty much put everything on each of them of where certain messes come from. Quick digression, our female roommate tends to leave her hair in the drain on the occasion that she showers here in which case it is very easy to just grab something, wipe it up, throw it in the trash and shower. He gets the big clumps out of the drain and sits it on the ledge of the tub so that it doesn’t clog the drain and then never touches it again. I don’t even want to go through half of the heart ache of describing what we found while cleaning anymore.
That is all and thank you for reading if you made it all the way through. I have a plan to talk to him about most of it but I wanted to do it while they were together but she’s not back for 2 weeks, he just came back this morning & quite frankly, I can’t wait that long for people to grow up. Hope it goes well.
Tl/dr: my roommate is frugal, sloppy and annoying and I cannot picture living with him under these conditions for the next 8 months.
Submitted December 28, 2017 at 09:56PM by Bloodysecrets http://ift.tt/2C5vMrp badroommates
