There is nothing worse in life than a terrible roommate. Obnoxious, rude, inconsiderate, self-centered, narcissistic, and crazy are just a few of the traits that the people in these stories had to deal with. What can one do when they are stuck in a living situation that is hard to get out of but impossible to deal with? The answer is simple: get revenge. It's cathartic. Sure, it's mean, but these awful roommates deserve no sympathy, not after what they put people through.
Hair In The Shower
“One of my housemates in college kept complaining about people leaving hair in the shower. While this is a valid complaint, the hair was long and blonde, but everyone in the house had dark hair, except her, and myself and my buddy, who were the main targets of her complaining, had short hair.
Well, my friend decided he wanted revenge, and luckily, his mom owns a few hairdressing salons.
So, he told her his plan. He gathered up a bunch of cuttings from the salons, snuck the bags in while the girl was out, then waited until the following Friday, as she was the only one in the house over the weekend.
When she left for a class, we dumped these large bags of hair into the shower. It honestly looked like someone had shaved a bear.
We got back on the following Monday, but she didn’t say anything, and she never complained about hair being in the shower again.”
Dirty Revenge
“I had an ex roommate who’s girlfriend, slowly over time, started living at our house full time and refused to chip in on rent or utilities, even after multiple conversations about how it would be more beneficial to split things between us all (there were 3 of us living there before she started being a leach).
Each month the utility bills went up, which really made me mad because they were in my name. The house had one garage, but a double wide driveway. My roommates and I had it worked out for who parked where, according to who left for work, when, etc. The girlfriend started parking in my space leaving me to park in the street and throwing off the parking arrangements. She also ruined a few pots and pans my mother had given to me by using metal utensils and then leaving them in the sink to get rusty. After a while, she stopped socializing and sequestered herself in his room all the time and we got mice because she was keeping food in the bedroom she shared with my roommate. She was horrible.
The thing that really pushed me over the edge, though, was when I discovered that she had been using my cosmetics when she had her own. I ended up getting pink eye because she just wouldn’t stop using my makeup, even after I removed it all from the bathroom.
My other roommate and I spoke with our third roommate numerous times about his girlfriend, and nothing changed. When he gave her a key to the house, without her being in the lease, I brought the situation to the landlord’s attention. Our landlord and his wife were super nice people, renting the house out for the first time and I wanted them to know what was going on inside their property. They also lived way across town, so I had to drive all the way across town with one eye swollen shut and weeping infection because of the pink eye, which is what fueled the rage behind my decision for petty revenge.
My petty revenge was urinating in her shampoo. Not just a little squirt either, I made sure to get nice and hydrated and filled a Solo cup, then poured it into her bulk-sized shampoo bottle and shook it up. This happened years ago and it still gets me riled up like nothing else.
No regrets.
She committed a few other irritating offenses that were met with equal pettiness, for instance she started doing laundry at our place (small amounts but never checked the settings so she ended up wasting water and always ‘forgot’ to retrieve her clothes, so whenever I came across a thong of hers, I shot it across the basement into a gross cobwebby corner.
I also still have the ruined pots and pans and thought about giving them as an anonymous wedding gift for when her and my former roommate eventually got married, but didn’t. I should have, instead I ended up giving them a sweet cutting board & an adorable card wishing them the best.”
Become A Thief
“My roommate in college had only child syndrome and taped a piece of paper over her clock, because she didn’t want to ‘share it with me.’ Never mind that she couldn’t see the clock herself, she would rather no one see the clock then share the clock with my eyes.
So, from then on, I would steal one sock from a set once a week. It was slow enough that she didn’t realize it was me sabotaging her socks, but fast enough for her to be really annoyed and wondering that the heck was happening to all of her matching socks.”
Accidental Revenge
“I lived in a cheap apartment with roommates and we all worked in fast food. Money was tight. One roommate ended up unemployed for a few weeks and then got a job as a bank teller, making much better money. However, while unemployed she had missed a rent payment, which we had scraped together to cover for her.
Two weeks into the new job, she gets her first paycheck. Obviously, we are expecting immediate payback. Day 1 she says something along the lines of she couldn’t do personal business (cash her check) during work so she could pay us in a couple of days.
The Friday she was supposed to pay us she comes home with a big shopping bag and casually mentions she can’t pay back rent yet because she had to buy new work clothes. When roommates and I got upset, she started to complain about us and that we, ‘didn’t understand how to work a professional job because we were only food service.’ She basically told us we would get our money when she felt like it.
That weekend she misplaced her name tag required at work. She spent hours searching for it. At some point, I came across the name tag in a random spot. The entertainment center had a little drawer where we kept remotes, it was in there. I guess she had set it down by the tv and it got knocked into the drawer, but I said nothing about finding it. She kept searching for it all weekend and was panicked that she would look bad to her boss, etc. I never moved or took the name tag but the whole time I knew where it was. She never found it and had to get a new one. She also never paid the back rent, so we kicked her out a few weeks later.”
The Great Disrupter
“My roommate in college was a selfish pain in the butt. I have known him since preschool and we are still friends, but he is one of those people you cannot live with. He attended the local tech school that is supposed to be a pipeline into the main school that our third roommate and I attended. However, he barely went to class, and sat around getting high and playing Xbox. My Xbox specifically, which is where this story begins.
He used to have friends over all the time and mostly they’d get baked and play Xbox in the living room. I don’t like having a TV in my bedroom, so I set up my flatscreen and Xbox in the living room. I’d like to note that both he and third roommate had Xboxes as well, but they had theirs set up in their respective rooms. When the latest (at the time) Call Of Duty came out, we would spend hours playing together as a big squad. That is until our third roommate’s Xbox got the red ring of death (it was totally broken and unfixable). Shortly after, my Xbox got the red ring of death.
Well, we figure it’s all good because the moron roommate has the Xbox360, and it wasn’t prone to the same issue. We’ll just move his Xbox out to the living room so we can keep playing COD Zombies. The response my third roommate and I got was, and I quote, ‘nah, I don’t want people playing it all the time because it will probably break. Plus, what if you guys are playing it and I want to play by myself?’
We were livid. How could he spend all that time using my stuff and not extend the same courtesy?
At the time, I had supplied the router for the internet in the house, which meant I alone had the admin password. I also found out you can block specific MAC addresses. Well, guess who couldn’t connect to Xbox Live when he wanted to play online? I would turn it on and off sporadically over the next few weeks. I found out he spent like four hours calling both Time Warner Cable and Microsoft trying to get the issue resolved. Eventually he started to put two and two together about when it would go out and come back. You’d think I would stop, but instead, I adapted. I found out that you could open a port to remotely access your router from the internet – basically I could do the same thing, but while I was out.. Thus, I started turning off his access when I wasn’t even home. I was even away one weekend at our rival school and shut him down from three hours away.
To this day he still doesn’t know it was me. I still go over to his house and hang out on the weekends.”
Do NOT Mess With This Woman!
“I once lived with two roommates, one of which who bullied me. For example, she’d give me the silent treatment, comment on my weight while pretending that she didn’t know I was around, she would blast the tv or music while I was sleeping on her days off, tried to get one of my boyfriends to sleep with her and spread rumors about him when he didn’t, and never paid me in time for any of our bills, among other things while we lived together. It got so bad for me that I would cry on my way commute home. I was too broke to move and too anxious to spend another night in that apartment.
She worked at 9-5 while I worked nights. When I FINALLY was able to move out, I crafted my revenge.
Her bedroom door had no lock. The morning I moved was a weekday and she was working. I got several shrimp and taped a few to the inside of the air vents in her room. With some help, we lifted her bed and I removed the foot pads of her metal-tubing bed frame, and put several shrimp in before closing them back up.
Lastly, my (then) boyfriend surprised me with a box with some moth larvae. She was TERRIFIED of moths. After she spread rumors about him, I’m not surprised he wanted to get revenge also. He placed them in her closet, hidden in some sweaters.
Petty? You bet.
But after trying to fix our relationship several times, and over a year of stress, I don’t regret it one bit.
Years later, I saw our other roommate. Upon catching up, he told me, ‘you picked a great time to move out: shortly after you left we were dealing with this crazy moth infestation.’”
Well, It Worked – Sort Of
“I let me sister move in with me a few years back.
It was autumn and getting a bit chilly out and she kept turning the furnace on without asking anyone. We always took it to a house vote to make sure everyone was on the same page, as five of us lived there at the time.
I warned her multiple times to stop changing the temperature or I would make her mad, but she kept turning it on. So I waited until it got down to about freezing one night and I told all my roommates, except her, to use an extra blanket and bust out a space heater for the night, because it was gonna get cold!
I flipped the breaker for the furnace.
My sister woke up at about 3:00 am with numb toes and freezing. She told me in the morning that we needed to get the furnace fixed and I told her it was working just fine. She got angry. I got phone calls from Mom and Dad shortly after and my sister moved out about three weeks later.”
Petty But Effective
“My now ex-gf cheated on me with one of my housemates. This particular housemate had early morning classes and showered in the mornings. In the pursuit to be a better person I started getting up early every morning and fixing my sleep cycle…and what better way to wake up in the morning than to take a nice long shower?
This housemate was late to every class for about six weeks.”
Subtle But Effective
“I had two friends in college. They shared a dorm room.
One had very early work-study and had to get up around 6:00 AM and in the early morning. He would turn on all the lights and the radio and be a general loud pain to his roommate who was trying to sleep. He could’ve used the bathroom, but used the mirror in the dorm room to loudly get ready. Roommate Number 2 had enough and began to mess with his alarm clock.
It was a clock radio. He used to move the needle slightly off the station, so it would just be static. White noise. Roommate Number 1 would wake up late each time. Some days Number 1 would mess with the AM and PM and occasionally the AM and FM. He kept it random.
He would lay there quietly enjoying this other guy waking up late for work over and over.
Karma.”
Everything Petty Thing The Roommate Did Backfired On Her
“My roommate in college was disgustingly messy and a raging witch. I did a couple things to get revenge on her childish pettiness.
She one time told me she had never agreed to paying for cable, only internet. She said that if I wanted cable, I would have to pay the entire bill. Honestly, I could’ve just cancelled the cable because I don’t watch it much. But she DID watch a ton of TV. So I bought a cheap lockbox and I would lock the remotes in it when I wasn’t home or when I was asleep. When I was home and watching TV, I put a parental guidance password on the box, so she couldn’t change the channel. She could only watch what I wanted. Which, coincidentally or not, were all the shows she hated. She said it was childish. Which I mean…yeah, it was, but I told her I was paying for it, it was my cable. Her using it without me present or my permission was theft.
After about two weeks of this, she begrudgingly agreed to start paying again.
The funniest and best though, was when I had the flu once, I had left a blanket and sweatshirt in the living room to keep warm. I woke up the next morning to a text along the lines of ‘You’re a disgusting pig. The apartment is a disaster. Get all of your belongings out of the living area or we’re going to have a problem!’
Honestly, if she had nicely asked then fine. And if she weren’t insanely messy then fine. But she had to go full out rage mood. She had forgotten that I had provided all of the furniture for our apartment. Couch, table, TV… all of it. They were all ‘my belongings.’ So, while she was in class, I called up some friends on the football team that occasionally helped people move for spare cash. We loaded up every single piece of furniture onto their truck and parked it a few blocks away on the street.
My roommate came home to an empty apartment. She started creaming at me and calling me names. I told her I was following her orders and I moved out ‘all of my belongings.’ She was dumbfounded and really had nothing to say.
Obviously, I brought the furniture back hours later, but it certainly proved my point.”
Don’t Mess With A Man’s Hygiene!
“During my freshman year of college, I was paired with who I consider the sloppiest roommate ever. He spent most of his time in his girlfriend’s room, leaving his piles of clothes, trash, and dishes scattered around our small dorm. The worst of his nasty habits must have been the collection of dip spit cups. There were at least a dozen scattered around the room at all times.
One day when brushing my teeth, I noticed the ever growing litter of whisker trimmings in our sink. Being particularly ticked off that day, I took his toothbrush and rubbed as many trimmings into those bristles as possible. I wanted to see if I could send a message. Maybe he would notice that his shaving left whiskers everywhere and they somehow managed to get into his toothbrush.
He didn’t notice, but I winced every time I saw him brush his teeth
I probably just added some extra floss to his hygiene.”
Going All Walter White
“In college, I lived with the same girl for all three years after moving out of the dorms. I knew the third year was going to be a mistake before signing the lease, but I really didn’t want to move just to move again in a year. Right before graduating, we had been getting in a lot of arguments and the living situation was pretty hostile. My roommate was an on and off dancer at an adult club all through college and always had stupid stuff laying around the house and a lot of blow. Graduation rolls up and I am cleaning the house like a mad woman since I will have a lot of family and friends in out throughout the weekend. I ask her to keep the house clean. A reasonable request, I felt. Well, the night of my ceremony I came home pretty blitzed, luckily not with the family members who were to sleep on our couch. There was junk everywhere. The vacuum was unraveled, lamps were tipped over, and best of all, her mirror and coke lines sitting on the coffee table. In a bout of rage I threw the mirror out the front door which shattered on our sidewalk. The idiot she was, called the police on me at 3:00 am. After explaining that it was BLOW I threw out, they still arrested ME for destruction of property. Great balls of fury, I was livid!
For the rest of graduation weekend (after they released me from JAIL), I stayed with friends and tried to keep my mind together so my family wouldn’t find out what happened. The week after, I get a group of people together and they come over to help me out during a three-hour block I knew for sure she wouldn’t be home and I moved out. Mind you, everything in the apartment was mine including our kitchen table, couches, bowls, silverware, the WiFi router. Even the freaking shower curtain. All mine. And I packed every bit of it up, called the landlord to return my keys, and I was out. It looked like the house had been robbed.
A few hours later, I get texts of her freaking out on me. I don’t respond to anything because at this point I am already walking on thin ice legally with the arrest. She texts me every day for weeks, telling me I owe her this and that and utility money, yada yada. I finally get the word from the city that I am legally clear and the way the police handled the situation was ridiculous, and they’re not going to press charges. Conveniently this same day, my ex-roommate texts me threatening to take me to small claims court.
Little back story: her parents are psycho and controlling and know nothing about her. They have no idea she’s been stripping all through school and sleeping around and doing and selling substances. If they ever found out, they would quit paying for her school, which is ironic in this case because she was about to go to a very expensive out-of-state LAW school. Well, when I get this text I collect every single blackmail picture I have of her stripping, doing blow, crazy spring breaks, the works. I obtain her mothers phone number through her sister and the sister tells her this. I respond to my ex-roommate with a simple, ‘if you don’t do the smart thing, and leave me alone, I will 100% ruin your life.’
I haven’t heard from her since.”
Revenge Served Cold
“I had a roommate who would always turn the AC down to like 60° overnight, which is way too cold for most folks. I tried getting up in the middle of the night and setting it to something more reasonable like 65°. He’d always set it back. I tried to talk to him about it multiple times. He would never compromise.
We all had private bathrooms in this house. My other roommate would always wake up early and shower before me. My bad roommate was the type to sleep in as late as possible and shower at the last minute before jetting out the door for work
One morning, I realized that if I left the bathroom door open into my bedroom, the heat from our super-hot water would actually heat my entire room and make the temperature tolerable. Once I figured that out, I would run my shower at max-hot for like 30 minutes to heat my room, turning it off right before I left for work, leaving my roommate with ice cold water for his showers.
I did this for months and he never could bother to just wake up earlier.”
Not Kosher
“Several of my friends in college were members of the campus Jewish fraternity. The house had two kitchens, a regular kitchen where most of the food was made, and a kosher kitchen for special events and feeding the brothers that kept kosher. There were only a few brothers that had keys to the kosher kitchen, because if it was contaminated, it had to be re-koshered in a lengthy process by whoever made the violation.
One of the older brothers, who had kosher kitchen access, started to become possessive of the house GameCube, which the other guys were pretty much constantly using. In order to be able to play whenever he wanted, he started locking the GameCube away in the kosher kitchen, to the dismay of the rest of the house. This petty and egregious power trip ticked off my friends, who decided to get back at him by hiding a strip of bacon in the GameCube’s CD tray. Sure enough, he put the GameCube away in the kosher kitchen, bacon and all, inadvertently breaking kosher and forcing him to clean the whole room.
The GameCube issues stopped the next day.”