First Roommate
I finally finished reading every entry in this comm. :D I wanted to do that before writing about any of my roommates...
I was 18 or 19 (so about 11 or 12 years ago) and working my first job. My dad kicked me out of the house for some stupid reason. Only partially... I got to live in the sugar ant infested camper trailer in the driveway but I was not allowed in the house. Obviously this was a terrible place to live, so I started looking in the paper for shared accommodation.
I was working 30 minutes away from my parents house so I concentrated my search on that area. I found a guy looking for a roommate to share the basement suite of a house that was less than 5 minutes from my workplace. He wanted half of the monthly rent, only $265/mo for the large bedroom (he had the two small rooms that equaled the size of mine and used one as a bedroom and one as his tool room) plus half of the phone, cable and hydro bills, so my monthly rent was only $300. This was awesome! I was still working my way up to getting more hours at my job, but with this I would have enough left over to pay my car insurance, gas, groceries and save up to buy a computer.
Everything was going well at first. He had his own landscaping/odd-jobs thing that he did for money, but he had no car so he'd ride his bike that pulled a little trailer of sorts with his tools in it to jobsites. More often than not, I would give him rides. It was a smallish town so I didn't mind. Sometimes he'd give me a few bucks for gas. I've always been a bedroom-hermit so our paths other than that didn't cross much.
He kept tidy for the most part too. But after a couple of months he stopped doing his dishes. They would sit in the sink and on the counters for days and days. I would get sick of looking at them, so I'd wash them and leave them in the drying rack for him to put away. They would sit there for a while too... but then they started getting notes left on them to the tune of "If you can't do them right, don't do them at all!" ... Well, that is the nicest note I got about them. There was nothing wrong with the job I had done (and had only done to be nice) as he liked to eat canned pasta with tomato sauce in plastic containers. As we all know, the tomato sauce leaves a horrid orange stain behind when left for DAYS especially when the inside of the plastic is all scraped up. He made no attempts to wash his own dishes, but I kept washing them. I figured, if I am washing my own, I can do his too.
A little after that, he wheeled the living room TV into his bedroom. He already had one in his tool room and one in his bedroom. I didn't have a TV so he did it just so that I couldn't watch it. A little after that, he accused me of deleting the caller ID history on the phone (which I didn't do) and was furious because he never actually took the time to write his customers phone numbers down in a book and had relied on the caller ID to access the numbers. The apartment only had one phone jack. It was on the wall in the kitchen. He fiddled with it one day while I was at work and managed to get it facing into the room on the opposite side of the wall, which was his tool room... that he kept locked at all times. He said it was to "teach [me] a lesson" as if he was allowed to do that.
So now I had no access to the phone at all. A cell phone was not affordable at the time for me. I told my work that I had no phone access anymore, but no one listened to me and they would still call to try and give me additional shifts, which I wanted, but as I couldn't take the calls I wouldn't get the shifts. Or, in a couple of cases, the coworker that wanted me to cover for them would give me the shift anyway, but I wouldn't know... so then the next time I would come into work I would get written up for a no-call/no-show.
He had a daughter with a woman who came by periodically. The woman was on the larger side, like me, and I have a feeling that he was an abusive boyfriend and he was treating me the same way he would treat her... at least partially.
I also had a feeling that my roommate was going into my room when I wasn't home. I went out and bought a locking knob for the door. I even locked it when I was home, as he had taken to staring at me creepily when I would come home from work and walk to my room... My bedroom was at the very end of the apartment from the front entrance. One night I came home and he was on the phone at the kitchen table (right inside the front door) and I was laden with bags. I didn't want to stand in the kitchen while he was there, so I went to my room with all of my stuff. I fumbled around with my keys until I got into my room. As soon as I shut the door and locked it, I heard him laughing menacingly.
In the shuffle, I hadn't taken my keys out of the other side of the door (though I thought I had) and a few minutes later heard a very soft metal noise. Not realizing the error with my keys, I thought I was just hearing things. The next morning I discovered my keys still in the lock and the spare key (which had still been on the ring) was missing. He had stolen my key to get into my room, thinking I wouldn't know. Now I was scared. The next day I bought ANOTHER locking knob and switched them out, making sure that he didn't have access to a key. That night he was making noise to scare me and it worked...
I had a kitten and a hamster at the time, so I packed them up and a bag for myself and climbed out of my window (the window was right at ground level) and went to my parents house. They suggested I go to the local police and see if I can file a harassment complaint against him or something for all the things he's done. The officer I talked to listened, but said that there was nothing they could do for me, especially about the phone since it was in his name and he could do whatever he wanted.
The roommate knew I had been to the station though. I think he had been following me. He sent me a note, mocking me about it also telling me that he was kicking me out because I "hadn't paid the rent" and it was almost halfway through the month. I had actually gone down to the bank and deposited my half directly into the landlords bank account since I didn't trust him. I had left him a receipt and paid for my part of the hydro though.
I get revenge though...
A couple of days later, my stepdad had helped me come up with a plan.
While I was sure the roommate was not at home, my dad helped me move out the majority of my things into the big motorcycle trailer he had. We left behind a couple of things that wouldn't fit, but were going to come back for them. As the roommate had threatened to change the locks (even though he had no right), I left my bedroom window open a smidge, so little that it looked like it was closed.
We came back a little later to discover my last remaining things on the lawn and the door open a bit. As I had left my bedroom door locked so I was wondering how he got my things. As my dad and I were walking up to the door, it slammed shut and I heard the lock thrown... my key didn't work in it. As the other part of our plan required us to be in the apartment, I said to my dad "Oh don't worry I left my window open a little, I can get in that way." The roommate must have been listening because we heard scrambling. When we got around to the other side of the house, my window was now all the way shut and locked.
My dad had no objections to kicking in the window. I didn't mind losing my miniscule security deposit for my revenge. I climbed in (cutting myself a little) and saw right away how roommate had gotten into my room... When the owner of the house made the basement into a suite, they had thrown up walls to make bedrooms with really thin paneling... like on those cheap hollow doors. There were two layers with a hollow space between. No wonder I had been able to hear roommate and his whore of the night as well as if I had been in the same room. Anyway, roommate had torn down part of this wall to get into my room and it was still down. After he slammed my window closed, he ran into his tool room and locked himself in.
Anyway, we hung out in the house until all of my dads friends started arriving. All of his biker friends. There are quite a few that showed up. At least twenty. They all roared onto the property on their Harleys, in their leather, they brought beer, snacks and a stereo. A loud, biker party then happened. Roommate opened his door and told everyone to leave. They laughed at him. He hid again and used the phone to call 911.
Police showed up ... and promptly told him that as I lived there I had a legal right to have guests over and since they weren't doing anything illegal, there was nothing they could do about it and left. My parents friends jeered and taunted roommate through his door, but made no attempt to get in or anything.
We had a great party and everyone went home around 2am. I never went back there again. I phoned the landlord the next day to tell her what had happened and that I broke my window (and earlier in the year I had spilled pink cream soda on the carpet and couldn't get the stain out) and that roommate had torn down part of the wall between our rooms. I said that I would not be going back to the house, but if she needed any additional money from me to repair the damage I had done, what my parents address was.
I was then informed that she had told roommate a couple of months earlier that she had gotten in trouble with the city for the basement apartment (it wasn't a legal suite I found out) so she had given him notice to be out by Jan 15th... and it was just before Christmas when I was talking to her.
Roommate hadn't told me. I didn't know we had to move anyway. I was just going to get a rude awakening mid-January and would have had nowhere to go! The landlord forgave the damage and gave me back my deposit and two weeks of rent.
I never saw roommate again, but my dad said that he saw him a few times after that and when roommate would see my dad in return, he'd go white as a sheet and run in the opposite direction.
I was 18 or 19 (so about 11 or 12 years ago) and working my first job. My dad kicked me out of the house for some stupid reason. Only partially... I got to live in the sugar ant infested camper trailer in the driveway but I was not allowed in the house. Obviously this was a terrible place to live, so I started looking in the paper for shared accommodation.
I was working 30 minutes away from my parents house so I concentrated my search on that area. I found a guy looking for a roommate to share the basement suite of a house that was less than 5 minutes from my workplace. He wanted half of the monthly rent, only $265/mo for the large bedroom (he had the two small rooms that equaled the size of mine and used one as a bedroom and one as his tool room) plus half of the phone, cable and hydro bills, so my monthly rent was only $300. This was awesome! I was still working my way up to getting more hours at my job, but with this I would have enough left over to pay my car insurance, gas, groceries and save up to buy a computer.
Everything was going well at first. He had his own landscaping/odd-jobs thing that he did for money, but he had no car so he'd ride his bike that pulled a little trailer of sorts with his tools in it to jobsites. More often than not, I would give him rides. It was a smallish town so I didn't mind. Sometimes he'd give me a few bucks for gas. I've always been a bedroom-hermit so our paths other than that didn't cross much.
He kept tidy for the most part too. But after a couple of months he stopped doing his dishes. They would sit in the sink and on the counters for days and days. I would get sick of looking at them, so I'd wash them and leave them in the drying rack for him to put away. They would sit there for a while too... but then they started getting notes left on them to the tune of "If you can't do them right, don't do them at all!" ... Well, that is the nicest note I got about them. There was nothing wrong with the job I had done (and had only done to be nice) as he liked to eat canned pasta with tomato sauce in plastic containers. As we all know, the tomato sauce leaves a horrid orange stain behind when left for DAYS especially when the inside of the plastic is all scraped up. He made no attempts to wash his own dishes, but I kept washing them. I figured, if I am washing my own, I can do his too.
A little after that, he wheeled the living room TV into his bedroom. He already had one in his tool room and one in his bedroom. I didn't have a TV so he did it just so that I couldn't watch it. A little after that, he accused me of deleting the caller ID history on the phone (which I didn't do) and was furious because he never actually took the time to write his customers phone numbers down in a book and had relied on the caller ID to access the numbers. The apartment only had one phone jack. It was on the wall in the kitchen. He fiddled with it one day while I was at work and managed to get it facing into the room on the opposite side of the wall, which was his tool room... that he kept locked at all times. He said it was to "teach [me] a lesson" as if he was allowed to do that.
So now I had no access to the phone at all. A cell phone was not affordable at the time for me. I told my work that I had no phone access anymore, but no one listened to me and they would still call to try and give me additional shifts, which I wanted, but as I couldn't take the calls I wouldn't get the shifts. Or, in a couple of cases, the coworker that wanted me to cover for them would give me the shift anyway, but I wouldn't know... so then the next time I would come into work I would get written up for a no-call/no-show.
He had a daughter with a woman who came by periodically. The woman was on the larger side, like me, and I have a feeling that he was an abusive boyfriend and he was treating me the same way he would treat her... at least partially.
I also had a feeling that my roommate was going into my room when I wasn't home. I went out and bought a locking knob for the door. I even locked it when I was home, as he had taken to staring at me creepily when I would come home from work and walk to my room... My bedroom was at the very end of the apartment from the front entrance. One night I came home and he was on the phone at the kitchen table (right inside the front door) and I was laden with bags. I didn't want to stand in the kitchen while he was there, so I went to my room with all of my stuff. I fumbled around with my keys until I got into my room. As soon as I shut the door and locked it, I heard him laughing menacingly.
In the shuffle, I hadn't taken my keys out of the other side of the door (though I thought I had) and a few minutes later heard a very soft metal noise. Not realizing the error with my keys, I thought I was just hearing things. The next morning I discovered my keys still in the lock and the spare key (which had still been on the ring) was missing. He had stolen my key to get into my room, thinking I wouldn't know. Now I was scared. The next day I bought ANOTHER locking knob and switched them out, making sure that he didn't have access to a key. That night he was making noise to scare me and it worked...
I had a kitten and a hamster at the time, so I packed them up and a bag for myself and climbed out of my window (the window was right at ground level) and went to my parents house. They suggested I go to the local police and see if I can file a harassment complaint against him or something for all the things he's done. The officer I talked to listened, but said that there was nothing they could do for me, especially about the phone since it was in his name and he could do whatever he wanted.
The roommate knew I had been to the station though. I think he had been following me. He sent me a note, mocking me about it also telling me that he was kicking me out because I "hadn't paid the rent" and it was almost halfway through the month. I had actually gone down to the bank and deposited my half directly into the landlords bank account since I didn't trust him. I had left him a receipt and paid for my part of the hydro though.
I get revenge though...
A couple of days later, my stepdad had helped me come up with a plan.
While I was sure the roommate was not at home, my dad helped me move out the majority of my things into the big motorcycle trailer he had. We left behind a couple of things that wouldn't fit, but were going to come back for them. As the roommate had threatened to change the locks (even though he had no right), I left my bedroom window open a smidge, so little that it looked like it was closed.
We came back a little later to discover my last remaining things on the lawn and the door open a bit. As I had left my bedroom door locked so I was wondering how he got my things. As my dad and I were walking up to the door, it slammed shut and I heard the lock thrown... my key didn't work in it. As the other part of our plan required us to be in the apartment, I said to my dad "Oh don't worry I left my window open a little, I can get in that way." The roommate must have been listening because we heard scrambling. When we got around to the other side of the house, my window was now all the way shut and locked.
My dad had no objections to kicking in the window. I didn't mind losing my miniscule security deposit for my revenge. I climbed in (cutting myself a little) and saw right away how roommate had gotten into my room... When the owner of the house made the basement into a suite, they had thrown up walls to make bedrooms with really thin paneling... like on those cheap hollow doors. There were two layers with a hollow space between. No wonder I had been able to hear roommate and his whore of the night as well as if I had been in the same room. Anyway, roommate had torn down part of this wall to get into my room and it was still down. After he slammed my window closed, he ran into his tool room and locked himself in.
Anyway, we hung out in the house until all of my dads friends started arriving. All of his biker friends. There are quite a few that showed up. At least twenty. They all roared onto the property on their Harleys, in their leather, they brought beer, snacks and a stereo. A loud, biker party then happened. Roommate opened his door and told everyone to leave. They laughed at him. He hid again and used the phone to call 911.
Police showed up ... and promptly told him that as I lived there I had a legal right to have guests over and since they weren't doing anything illegal, there was nothing they could do about it and left. My parents friends jeered and taunted roommate through his door, but made no attempt to get in or anything.
We had a great party and everyone went home around 2am. I never went back there again. I phoned the landlord the next day to tell her what had happened and that I broke my window (and earlier in the year I had spilled pink cream soda on the carpet and couldn't get the stain out) and that roommate had torn down part of the wall between our rooms. I said that I would not be going back to the house, but if she needed any additional money from me to repair the damage I had done, what my parents address was.
I was then informed that she had told roommate a couple of months earlier that she had gotten in trouble with the city for the basement apartment (it wasn't a legal suite I found out) so she had given him notice to be out by Jan 15th... and it was just before Christmas when I was talking to her.
Roommate hadn't told me. I didn't know we had to move anyway. I was just going to get a rude awakening mid-January and would have had nowhere to go! The landlord forgave the damage and gave me back my deposit and two weeks of rent.
I never saw roommate again, but my dad said that he saw him a few times after that and when roommate would see my dad in return, he'd go white as a sheet and run in the opposite direction.