If I find more to say, I'll update it.
You want roommate stories?
I used to live with someone for two years before I got the balls to get up and leave.
I had to find a new place at the end of my first year of college because everyone else was going out to hang with better friends. (Mutual. We all still hang out.)
So I found a fellow Nintendork to live with, along with 2 other guys.
Warning sign #1 I ignored: Fucking pigsty of a place.
Newspaper piles, dog hair and clothes scattered everywhere. I didn't mind. I cleaned it up over the course of a whole weekend and K1 was all too eager to have me join, plus I loved his dog.
Then shit fell apart.
K2 wanted to leave, but he'd already renewed on the new lease, so K1 wanted him to keep paying rent. K2 basically said he wouldn't sign me on, so K1 was forced to sign K2 off. Bad start, we already lost a 4th person.
So what happened? K1 had already supposedly filled out his checks for the lease term so he didn't want to rewrite or be cheap or some shit, so he wanted me to pay for K2's half since he just left and I'd have the room to myself. $500 versus his $250? I didn't want to, so the fellow NDork, M, agreed to help with my share $375, $375 and K paid $250. Already I'm a bit miffed.
(I do try to find a 4th person early on, but a day before J moves in, he knocks on our door at 3AM with a friend drunk as hell and they trash a bit of the place. We promptly explain we don't want that here. K was in his room the entire time, so he had no clue this happened and blames me for not letting him into the place.)
Right from about that point shit begins to hit the fan.
I'm trying to make amends with everybody and do my best to make the apartment hospitable. See, K never told me the apartment had FLEAS. He left out a lot of details. So basically over the course of my first 4 months there I spent hundreds on flea-killing products and one night I get so pissed I drive out to the store and buy a couple foggers MYSELF. (Does he offer to compensate me? Never has for anything)
We end up having to wash all the clothes. Scratch that.
I washed all the clothes and folded them myself. ALL of EVERYBODY'S clothes. I put min away. K's and M's sat on one of our couches for many months on and off. I'd throw them into a garbage bag and put them to the side. Coming back from class, I'd come back and see them spread out over the couch again. (Eventually I bagged them up and hid them inside the dog kennel and he was never the wiser.)
Oh, before I go further, I'll mention he has an LJ and a gaming clan he runs where he bitches about me intruding on his privacy (IE: me saying "Wanna go to Taco Bell?", "What's up" and "Scuse me, I need to reset the router. Connection died.") and other crap that are half truths and whole lies.
Back to the clothing, one day I notice that I have severely less towels than normal. When I first moved in, I had noticed some of my stuff had been touched, but was told it wasn't. I'm a trusting person. So I ask M if he's seen my towels. (Very distinct ones) He says K has been using them. I go into K's closet and sure enough I see 3 of my towels rolled up stacked in there. I promptly take them back into my room. That pissed me off, along with him eating all my leftovers, so I blew up at him and yelled a good amount to ASK before using anybody else's stuff. Of course an LJ post followed saying I blew up at him for "borrowing a towel and eating food I thought belonged to M" not minding the fact that M never bought the food I ate.
Food. Oh, food.
K has a Sam's Club Card. K and M shop together in bulk because it's cheap.
I like to have a variety of food not filling up the place, so I shop at Fred Meyer's. I go to Sam's ONE TIME with K and M and get a SINGLE BOX of Easy Mac. K wants me to pay for 1/3 of the entire purchase K, M and I made. I say NO and he backs down. I'm still questioning that to this day.
I say things to K that I regret, like "Mustard has 0 calories."
So that one time at Sam's he got a giant tub of mustard and slathered it on all the hot dogs he every ate. There'd be MOUNDS of mustard left on dishes in the sink because he did the dishes twice in the two years I was there. It stunk like all hell and pissed me off. I switched to disposable food to avoid dealing with those dishes. His reason for never doing them was because there were still clean ones available. How did I hear this? He told our mutual friend this and I eavesdropped.
Oh, K is an extreme introvert. He doesn't like to talk to anyone except about Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft, etc. If I ever walked into his room to talk, (His computer faces a corner, so I rarely saw his face) he wouldn't respond. I'd have to walk back to my room and talk to him on AIM. There's lots of things that go on that he never tells us. I have to SPY on him to find out about.
Money. Remember the $250,375,375 split? Yeah, his other reasoning was that he couldn't afford paying 1/3, I brought up that he had TWO Dark Age of Camelot accounts. (So his healer follows his tanker. It pisses off a shitload of people because both have to be in parties and it means one less person to actually be involved in raids.) That comes from EXTRA money made from his website / selling PHP scripts (That other people have said were horrible and unmanaged.). I check his forum one day and he bitched about how I blew up at him over that. Turns out every person at the forum agreed with him, but they always do. If they don't, he bans them. I still don't understand. If he goes homeless, he'd use his extra money to pay for a DAoC account and not food? Where does he draw the line? Simple, where it's convenient and cheap for him.
Oh, nearly forgot. This last year, he stopped paying rent himself. Instead his grandmother (Funding his school. Doesn't even KNOW who his dad is) sends the check each month. Why? K said it is because he usually forgets to write the check.
He also never EVER paid for :
Soap bars
Laundry Detergent
Napkins
Dish washing detergent
Toilet Paper
Paper Towels (actually, he bought them 1 time)
Light bulbs
Ink for his printer (Yes, I paid for ink for his printer, being told I could use it. Turns out, as soon as he got ink again, he blew it in a week printing out full black images of DAOC maps that covered one of his walls.)
Heck, there was a leak in his shower door, so he went out and bought (*GASP*) a shower curtain. Let me remind you, he has a personal-sized shower with the closing door. A shower curtain only makes it more cramped. Of course, after purchasing it, he realized it didn't come with rings or a pole to support it, so he fished around, found M's swim trunks, CUT THEM and took out the waist string from it. Needless to say, M was pissed.
See, K looks for the easy way out of things. Like one of our door hinges was a bit loose. I mention it to him and he says he was going to call the office. I said fuck that. I got a screwdriver and fixed it in 3 seconds. K also never empties the lint filter, EVER. So it's clogged up the dryer and broke the timer inside. Instead he just calls the apartment repair guy to fix it every other week or so. I feel so sad for the repair guy.
Food again. He orders Papa John's Pizza. Mainly because he can do it online without talking to anyone. He'll usually get 4 Large Pepperoni pizzas, 2 2-liters of Mountain Dew and that's just for him. How does he store these, you ask? He leaves them out. A good Papa John's order will last about 5 days and by then the pizzas look rancid. It stinks up the place with the mustard and the copious amounts of dog hair. But he doesn't notice, why? Because he grew up next to a Shell refinery back home.
Senses.
He can't smell. We've established that. He thinks I'm crazy for buying Glade plug-ins and opening windows. A window can never stay open in this house. He says it gets too cold and then bitches on his LJ about how he woke up and it was 40F inside the apartment. (It's 62F. He turns it up to 75F or above and only wears boxers and wife beaters) What really encouraged me to move out was that it was costing too much. Before the split, the electric bill (Which is our heating, no gas) was $140 a month. (Hell, he had the heat on in AUGUST and even my mother who was visiting bitched at K for having the heat on.) My new roommate (N) and I had begun turning the power off to the heater in the fusebox. It worked for a bit, somehow he got smart enough to figure it out. (I also made the mistake of telling K how to open the vents in the apartment.
From then on, he'd open them ALL so we could get blasted with that heat 24/7.) Understand this made the apartment smelly AND stuffy because we couldn't get fresh air in. Friends stopped hanging out here because it was a smelly box. K also can't hear. Remember that EXTRA money? It also bought him a pair of noise-canceling headphones that he uses when he plays Counter-Strike 24/7 instead of sleeping or going to class. (I recently found out he sleeps less than once a day. Sitting in that same chair for hours at a time has changed his body's physiology) So we can't actually approach him anymore because he can't hear us and we don't want to be rude and touch him. Of course, headphones aren't his only way of hearing. He also uses WinMX and later BitTorrent (P2P later) to download movies a day or two after release and watch about 40 times in a row. When, you ask? When he sleeps. He literally will begin playing something like Kill Bill V1 or Gangs of New York (In a shitty quality) when he goes to bed AT FULL BLAST. Routinely during the credits of Gangs of New York, there's a heavy bass, so for many weeks at 3AM, M, who was in the room with K would have to turn off the volume, which K would wake up later in the night and turn it back up. They got MANY noise complaints for that. He also would play music, too, with a thumping bass (On a shitty speaker system, too) 24/7 that kept everyone up. His alarm clock is loud, too. Of course, since he's a deep sleeper, sometimes he does things without remembering them as he goes back to bed after hitting snooze. towards the end, he actually complained to us that we were shutting off his alarm clock. We weren't. We didn't know HOW. He would basically wake up, shut it off, go back to sleep and blame us. (During Black Friday, his alarm went off for 3 hours before he turned it off. His door was locked so we couldn't do it the one time we wanted to.)
His LJ.
I only found his LJ this February. I never bothered reading it because it was full of stupid crap. Basically going through it was eye opening. I realized not only did he actually hate ME, but he was even dumber than I thought. Back before he failed this one math class 3 times in a row, we had the same math classes together. Every once in a while, the homework would be graded and put in the school office, so I'd go in and pick up K's and mine. Turns out he bitched in his LJ I was only doing it to see how bad he was doing. (Right, if I wanted to do that, I'd just look and put it back in the pile or CHECK ONLINE FOR THE SCORES.) Of course, he never mentioned this to me. K only mentioned it in his Livejournal.
K and I also ended up on a programming team together at school with 4 other people. We have weekly meetings on Saturday from Noon to 3. He used to bitch in his LJ about ME every time he overslept and missed it because I didn't wake him up. I did try. I'm not going to try too hard, though, it doesn't phase me when he fucks up. K also bitched that I stopped driving him to school when we had similar classes. (Now he's so far behind in school he's on academic probation and 3 semesters behind) It's true. I did stop taking him. Why? Because I have a strict rule. I leave 10 minutes before class begins. (Sure, school's close, but it rains a lot in Redmond and rain isn't fun.) K would usually be ready about 1 minute before to 5 minutes AFTER class began. He couldn't be on time if he tried. Of course, I'm the douche bag for not wanting me to be late, too, right?
Also, he's paranoid about locking the door. Every time someone leaves the house, he locks the door. I go out to get the mail and I come back and it's locked. Joke? No. He's serious. Why? Oh, it could be because I've left the door open a bit twice and the dog took that as a chance to runaway. He was found both times, but K doesn't seem to like that.
Dog.
The dog is 9 years old now. He's a purebred and un-neutered. He humps a ton of stuff. K lets him and PRIDES himself on never training the dog saying stuff like "Look how good he behaves. I never took him to classes and he still acts well."
No he doesn't. The dog barks at EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. They've gotten noise complaints for the dog many times over. The dog doesn't know how to go on walks. It's always choking himself when he does. But of course, that shouldn't be surprising. K never walks the dog. He just puts the dog on a metal leash and throws him out behind our patio (1st floor) for him to run around and poop in the bushes. The signal to come back in is for the dog to bark. Thereby signaling K to yell "I'm coming" and proceed to walk out 10-30 minutes later after the dog's been barking for that good amount of time. The dog is often ignored and K buys the dog food at Sam's Club. He always buys the biggest bag of the cheapest shit possible and regularly forgets to give the dog food and water when the bowl is empty.
My hand with the dog. K left in August in 2004 to go home for a bit. It was my turn to show him I could handle the dog and maybe turn things to a more positive side. I threw out the cardboard box/garbage combo that made up the dog's food bowl and got rid of the moldy bits of food and the moldy box. I bought the dog a new food bowl and leash, along with Little Champions food packets and a bunch of snacks. (I have a dog back home in California.) N and I took turns walking the dog everyday.
K returns. The dog goes ecstatic to see K again. (I don't know why. He abuses the dog. I had to put all my Nerf guns away in the closet because K would routinely shoot multiple rounds at the dog just to piss the dog off.) So K instantly thinks the dog wants to go outside, so he chains him up and lets him out back. The dog instantly barks. After this routine goes on for about 5 minutes, N and I explain to K that the dog wants to be walked so he can be seen with you again outside. (K doesn't go outside much.) Sure enough, that IS what the dog wanted.
P2P. I download and upload a lot. It's a simple system. I'll upload a shit huge amount and if someone is about to play a game, just shout that you are and I'll kill it. It might be a slight inconvenience, but that way we both enjoy what we want from the connection. Unfortunately I forgot to factor in two things. K is stupid and K plays games 24/7. So I never really uploaded much at this place. For a while he blocked SuprNova.org on our router. (It was MY router, but in HIS room) I made the mistake of telling him how to use the router. So he'd turn off port forwarding and do crap to make my life miserable. Later on I became adept at guessing his passwords because they were either easy (Like death, locker, etc.) or written down on post-it notes in his room. So I'd go in there while he was at school (rarely) and figure out which one was new. After a while he realized that SuprNova also had .tk and operated off of mirrors, so his ban didn't affect a damn thing. He just started unplugging my connection and locking his door as he went to sleep for the night. He'd of course post on his LJ about how he'd hope I wouldn't notice. I don't know what he was thinking. By this point I'd already given up hope on talking to him. See, K would blame me for EVERYTHING that would ever happen to our network in the apartment. He was also bitter at me because I posted online about how I knew more about the Internet than him. (I do. More on his stupidity later) It's funny. He runs about 5-6 Battle.net and IRC bots for his clan and at one point was running a Counter-Strike server on his laptop. (Which was empty due to a bug that kicked people if your MOTD was too long. But K never found that out. N and I did because we wanted to trying playing on the server to see who was on.) Basically he'd bitch in his LJ about how I crashed the network all the time.
Fun fact: During the month of August, I completed a 24GB torrent spanning 9 DVDs. N never complained once and I only had to reset the router twice in that period of time. K comes back September 2nd, 2 days earlier than we thought and within 5 MINUTES of first turning on his computer, the router needed a reset. (To my lurker roommate reading this: I think the connection has greatly improved now. It might be related to AIM connections.)
Roommates
Yeah, it's own subsection. See, remember how K2 left? K made it a personal conquest to find a 4th person. That + introvertedness = trouble. He'd basically take ANYONE. His first guy was a 30-year-old guy named Jose who didn't know if he was bringing up his computer or not. (I go to a computer school. NO ONE comes without a computer. We were all under 21 at this point. Having a 30-year-old guy just wasn't something M and I wanted. Then one day I see K walking to the office. To reserve a parking space for the 4th guy. Turns out this guy never showed up either. Anyways, about 18 months later he finally finds N. N emails me and M and it's all good. N and I are good pals, that's the only positive thing K has done ever.
On top of that, another thing I regret mentioning to him was that 2bed2bath apartments can have 5 people, legally, so he adds another update to our school's roommate finder saying we can take a 5th person, provided he doesn't mind sleeping in the living room.
Lesse, food, money, dog, p2p,roommates. What's left to cover? Stupidity and Theft.
Theft first. I want to leave this on a laugh.
K had a girlfriend. They've never met, but they'd bitch and whine to each other all the time online and on the phone. K would never send gifts to M for any holiday or b-day whatsoever. I don't know if he knows what a relationship is.
Anyways, one day K walks in and says M wants to talk to me. I don't mind. It's just a phone call. She basically says K stole a password off my computer to use Trillian Pro. That's right. A day before I dropped into K's room to ask what's up and he was trying out a password cracker. I showed him how to use it. (He's dumb, remember?) and thought nothing of it at the time. Turns out it was used on me. He took the password from my Outlook Express (I use Thunderbird now) and basically tried that in Trillian Pro. (I have separate passwords now for important things) (Not to mention it's better to find a crack for Trillian Pro than ruining a roommate's trust.)
So I confront him about it and he says he's been going through some tough times and to forgive him. I do, but I don't FORGET it. (Time line wise, this is about 2 months after I first moved in. The 2nd warning sign, sort of) I also notice one day he stole code from my computer for a class project. I left my code on my computer as a shared folder. Why? I don't know, but I didn't expect complete theft. Luckily it was just a framework a friend made, but he passed the class due to stupid graders. (The final assignment in that class was to make a pinball bounce around in a 5-sided box with a tilted ellipse, circle and square inside it with accurate bounce reflections. K's assignment was a single-buffer flickery ball encased in a 5-sided box that went down and to the right really slowly and he got full credit.)
Stupidity. I'll end this section with quotes from him for you to enjoy. Thank you for reading this far.
Anyways, he's a terrible coder. Someone at my school that is assumed to be the dumbest person in our year comes over to help K on assignments. K thought multiplying matrices by the Identity matrix inverted them. K basically uses nested if and else statements for all his coding assignments.
When our apartment had an ant infestation, he said Country Time Lemonade doesn't have a lot of sugar. (It's 97% sugar. Check the box)
During the 2004 November election, he came out and said "Did you guys know there's more than two people running in the election?"
One day out of nowhere he comes out and says "Did you guys know if you don't max out your upload, you can download faster?" (This was in relation to not choking our connection, so the torrent speed picked up. We'd been telling K this since I moved in about it.)
Even after correcting him multiple times, he still pronounces "queue" as "kway." Read: "Yeah, I've been in this one kway on Winmx forever."
We took a networking class together our Sophomore year. I don't know how he passed. The only person that failed was said dumbest-person I mentioned above. Anyways, he turns off the TCP port forwarding on our router because UDP is more efficient. (To the people that don't understand, that's like disabling OpenGL on the computer, because Direct3D is more efficient, because the programmer NOT THE USER chooses which method to implement.)
He's also convinced no food can ever go bad. (He gets sick a lot)
That's all for now. There's more I can bitch about, but my memory is so full of bitching complaints that there's no way I can mention it all.
Oh, one final memory.
In February, the apartment people sent us a notice our lease was expiring. When they send notices of any kind, they attach one next to the door and send one in the mail. K never checks the door notices, I don't know why. Anyways, so N and I read the door notice and see the lease is up soon. We're ecstatic. It means we can leave! They also mention the rent'll be going up a bit, but we didn't care.
K gets the letter in the mail a few days later and we give him the letter by our usual method. (Leaving it on the table and waiting for him to pick it up.) That night he sends us both an IM (That's how he talks, remember?) saying rent has gone up and a lease renewal is coming up. (He doesn't read the door notices and we don't talk to him, so he doesn't know we knew ahead of time. This was our final test. I'll post the exact IM below.)
(Note: At this time, M had left for home, so K was in his own room, the MUCH bigger room and N and I shared the smaller one.)
the lease renewal should be ready by tomorrow to sign, if you are planning on staying on the lease, it's 1025 instead of 1000 when this one runs out so until i can find a 4th guy it'd be 342 342 341 , i'll go ahead and be one of the ppl paying a buck more cause it dont matter to me
This was the same guy who wanted me to pay for half of the rent. Fuck him.
So N and I go into the room together to talk to him. I explain I already worked out where he could go and got the stuff ready so it'd be easy to do. Either HE goes or WE do. He insisted on staying because he wants his $1300 deposit back. (He isn't getting it back. The carpet is trashed. There's holes in the wall. There's marks on the wooden paneling. There's dead fleas all over. There's ruined vinyl flooring. The dryer is broken. Etc.)
So of course he posted in his LJ about it.
Someone asked why N and I wanted to leave.
K responded with "that's a good question, and if they would answer me when i ask them i could tell you"
Edit:
Newspaper:
He's a very thrifty man. See, he's dumb, as I've proved, and cheap. N and I can easily guess what he's going to say for things. In fact, we have whole conversations mapped out ahead of time for fun.
Anyways, when I first moved in, K was just talking to me and mentioned contact lenses, as I used them on and off. He mentioned he was out of fluid and had been using tap water. In my cleanin I found a HUGE box of cleaner buried under a pile of newspapers. I showed it to him, he didn't even say thank you.
For a while he also used the newspaper as toilet paper because there was so much.
Vaccumming:
K has two upright vaccuums. One has a broken moter, but the hose attachment still works, so he won't throw it out. (He never used the hose a single time in 2 years.) I used the working vaccuum to vaccuum up the dog hair about once every other week. It was a LOT of hair. I mean bags full. Anyway, around February 2005, I stopped vaccuuming because there's no point. I'll be gone soon enough. So it begins to build up.
So, guess what happens when it comes time for me to leave? This december, M answered the door to the Seattle Times guy and got us free newspaper 6 days a week. Whatever. As soon as I heard, I went to Target and bought a bin for it to go into. I didn't need a messy pile.
Of course, as we began moving our stuff out, we needs bins, tubs and boxes to hold my toys, so I emptied out the bin onto the ground and it spilled everywhere. (6 newspapers a week times 20 weeks) We intended on cleaning it up before we took everything out of the apartment that was ours, but never did, because we were pissed off at him. Anyways, I thought it was hilarious how the house ended up looking the exact same way that we left it as it did when I arrived. Some form of karma there for K.
Edit 2!
The Can Opener!
Oh, this is good. See, this was in November. Remember how K only shops at Sam's Club? His diet pretty much consists of Papa John's and big fucking can/tubs of Tuna/Mayo and Beef Stew that both get all over the fucking place. Around this time I'd been trying to actually cook more, so I hadn't used the microwave. (Also it seemed like K just tried as hard as he could to splatter stuff inside of it, so it would get dirty a day after I cleaned it) One day I walk into the kitchen and notice the top of the can opener is gone. You know the part you press down on? It just ain't there. Knowing it comes off fairly easily, I think it might have been thrown away, so I check the kitchen trash bag. I actually went through the ENTIRE bag looking for it, down to where the last cans or so were cut with it. Nothing. So, having done that, I go ask M and K. I ask M first, he just glares at me. He barely uses that thing and it was pretty much an insult, so he says to ask K. So I take a deep breath and go to ask K. K instantly gets unusually enthusiastic and basically tels me how he noticed it was gone, too! Like he had a whole speech planned out. I thought it was hilarious he took the top to the can opener. I don't
know he did, but if anyone accidentally threw it away, it ONLY could have been him, anyway. I tell that story to my aunt and for Xmas she got me a new one.
Racism
There was something else I remembered. Oh, K's racist. Everytime he comes back from Illinois (Home state) he has a horridly foul mouth where the N word is used like a comma. K is white.
Pranks
One time I decided to have fun with K, back when we were still not enemies. I switched 123 and 789 on his numpad and put tape underneath his optical mouse. I thought it'd be funny. I explain it to him as he comes home. He doesn't seem to enjoy the joke. The next day the batteries were stolen out of my mouse.
P2p Addendum
Movies.
K went to go see saw with a bunch of people. He missed the first 5 minutes or so, so when he came home he downloaded the whole thing online and choked our bandwidth for 2 days.
Wow. I guess there's a lot more. I'll post 'em as I remember 'em.
EDIT 3!
Quick one:
In one of our classes, we got an extra credit assignment to do over Spring Break. K assumed that meant there would be no more new assignments, so he stopped going to class. Needless to say, he failed.
Edit Fizzity FOUR
K has a habit of starting projects he won't finish. For some reason unbeknownst to the world, he wanted to make a DBZ mod for WC3. Keep in mind, he knew NOTHING about DBZ, but he found an unlocked map file and wanted to improve on it. So what he did was begin to download realmedia files of the show and watch them.
One day N, M and I are playing Four Swords and joking about going Super Saiyijin when you got enough Force Gems. Later on when we're playing K walks by and sees it. Sure enough he comments and says that's like in DBZ when "They go all powerful."
We all shake our heads and roll our eyes. Remember, he was supposed to be making a mod and supposedly learning about the series.
