My Worst Housemate Story: Flea Fumigation and a Squatter Boyfriend
By Riley Rinehard
It was Fall 2022 and I was thrilled for my first semester at SVU. I was nervous; however, to be living with other people. I had just transferred from a college where I had an entire apartment to myself and although I had my own room at SVU, I was not too pleased to be sharing living spaces with others. But I sucked it up and decided to make the best of it.
I lived in the Carriage Townhouses with three other girls and one of those girls, we’ll call her S, had a dog. In my mind, I was already not off to a great start; I don’t like dogs and this one was a little chihuahua that never shut up. The dog looked much like the one pictured above.
Other than the dog, everything was going smoothly… until the first month of school passed. S turned out not to be a great person to live with. She never cleaned her dishes and they would pile up in the sink, she took up all the room in the fridge and freezer, she never did her part for the cleaning checks, and she would leave her laundry in the washer and dryer for DAYS. Also, her boyfriend, who wasn’t even a student, was always over and S and him would argue very loudly all the time.
These were all things that annoyed me, but I could live with it — even the dog. That is until I got the following text at 7:17 pm on Tuesday, October 18, 2022:
My bedroom was downstairs next to the kitchen, but everyone else lived upstairs. Turns out all my housemates who were upstairs were waking up with flea bites on their legs.
So the day comes and the house is fumigated. A couple of hours pass by and everyone is allowed back in the house and the cleaning starts. But S is nowhere to be found. She had taken the dog and the dog’s bed (which she wasn’t supposed to take the bed), and left for I don’t even know how long and did NONE of the cleaning. So now everyone is facing the consequences of living with her dog and she’s not even helping to clean! My two other housemates and I were fuming in silence.
That is until I received this text on Wednesday, November 9, 2022 at 4:32 pm:
Now I was even more upset and so were my other housemates. So we went through the whole cleaning process, except not in silence this time. One of my housemates set up a housemate meeting with the RA and Housing Coordinator on Monday, November 14, 2022. We all showed up to the meeting except for S. Are you kidding me? Well, the meeting commences and my two other housemates and I just start going off about everything that has been happening. After hearing our complaints about the dog and the cleaning, Housing started apologizing for S’s… boyfriend? They said that he wasn’t allowed on campus anymore. No one had complained about the boyfriend, yet. It was at this point I realized I missed something big.
Once the meeting was over, I asked my other two housemates what had been going on. Come to find out, the boyfriend that I said practically lived with us was actually living with us! He was using our kitchen, washer and dryer, bathroom, and had been sleeping in S’s bedroom every night.
Two weeks prior to our meeting, my two housemates had turned in S and her boyfriend. One morning security came in and told my housemates to stay in their room. Security knocked on S’s door. Naturally, my housemates start eavesdropping.
S steps out of her room and when asked to let security in, she refuses. Finally, after a few minutes of S protesting, security gets in and, lo and behold, S’s boyfriend is there. Security asked him to leave, and he refused. Finally, he gets up and leaves and security starts searching the room. They find a bong and alcohol.
After I heard this, everything started to make sense. All the food and dishes and laundry… there was so much of it because it was the result of two people, not just one!
You might be wondering, what happened to S? Nothing. She stayed until the end of the semester, she still didn’t clean or take care of her stuff, and then, at the end of the semester, she transferred schools.
Do you have a terrible housemate or roommate story?
