Finding a roommate can be a challenge. For some it means rounding up old friends and hoping it won’t be an awkward living experience, but for others it means turning to something less secure and more terrifying: The random roommate.
Meeting a random roommate can be stressful enough but the stress multiplies when your first interaction is unexpected. Lea Dungo, bioenvironmental sciences senior, said she got to know her roommate all too well the first time they met.
“It was our second day living together, [she] had just moved into the apartment and I unlock the door that opened directly into the kitchen and she was butt naked making tea,” Dungo said. “Her boyfriend walked out of her room and was like ‘sorry she does that a lot’… and she did that a couple more times.”
Joshua Gillespie, communication junior, said his roommate showed up unannounced for the first time three weeks after school started at his former college and tested the boundaries right off the bat by sitting on his bed and peeling the skin off of his feet while ignoring Gillespie’s greeting.
“He had a pile of skin sitting in front of him on his bed,” Gillespie said. “Then things get weirder… He would just lay on his bed and scream. Like speaking in tongues almost. I would walk in on him going nuts. I thought he was possessed, one time I brought the campus priest in and told him ‘Dude, you might have to perform an exorcism on my roommate.’ So I introduced them but of course he was acting normal [around the priest]. “
Garrett Northcutt, urban and regional planning senior, said during his first year in college at OU before he transferred to A&M he had to call a roommate meeting to discuss a problem of toilet paper overuse.
“The first week of school we started noticing that we had already gone through like a whole entire package of toilet paper and we bought the really large package and so we were like ‘What the heck we’re not using that much toilet paper’ so we had a little roommate meeting talking about all of us using the toilet paper and Allen [the random roommate] didn’t say anything,” Northcutt said.
After the first meeting the problem persisted and the roommates called another meeting.
“So the next time around we went through another thing of toilet paper in like a week so we started writing our names on the toilet paper rolls and stacking them up to see who’d been using which ones and it came to the second week and me and [my other roommate] had used like four or five rolls and then the rest — probably like 20 — were from Allen,” Northcutt said.
Northcutt said as the problem progressed both he and his other roommate were curious as to how Allen was using so much toilet paper.
“My roommate set up a camera to watch who was using the toilet paper and the camera caught Allen eating the toilet paper and it was the weirdest thing,” Northcutt said. “The conflict was never resolved because we were too embarrassed and laughed so hard at it that we couldn’t like confront him about it so we just let him eat the toilet paper.”
Toni Nittolo, biochemistry junior, said her roommate experience became troubling after her roommate started dating someone she met on the dating app OkCupid.
“She meets this boy and he lives in Navasota and says that the registration on his car is out so whenever they want to hang out she has to go to him or bring him back to College Station,” Nittolo said. “About two and a half weeks go by of crazy roommate being with him and then one day at work his father shows up and is drugged up on some stimulant and starts shouting at [him] and his response is to assault his father.”
Nittolo said the situation only deteriorated after that.
“He loses his job immediately and can’t necessarily go back to his father because his dad is threatening to press charges on him,” Nittolo said. “This is when things get really interesting. This is when we found out that crazy roommate’s boyfriend was being searched for by the police for an evading arrest charge in Navasota.”
Nittolo said things only worsened from there after her roommate allowed her boyfriend to stay at their house without addressing the matter to either of the other roommates.
“She was essentially housing a felon under our roof,” Nittolo said. “I come back from vacation, because this is over the summer, and other roommate is home but crazy roommate is not. Other roommate essentially tells me that crazy roommate’s boyfriend is no longer in the picture in College Station.”
Dahniella Alcaraz, telecommunication media studies senior, said after her roommate horror story she would advise anyone having a bad roommate experience to confront any problems they are having.
“Honestly if something is bothering you with your roommates be honest but be polite about it,” Alcaraz said. “If you say something confrontational someone else might take it the wrong way and it’ll cause a whole mess of problems. And even if it is a little thing speak up about it because that will save you a lot of conflict in the end.”