Biological Cluck

NEW PODCAST!!! Episode 92 – He’s Dredd Jim

COMMENTERS: I think I’ve almost decided that Eli and Josh live together in this new HE canon. Almost. Please share your stories of weird roommates and their weird animals, noises, foods, behaviors, etc. I lived with a few guys when I first moved to Dallas for about 3 months. One of them, Lance, accused me of both stealing and wearing his pants. As in “THOSE ARE MY PANTS! YES, THE ONES YOU ARE WEARING! THEY ARE MINE! YOU TOOK THEM!” They were not, in fact, Lance’s pants. They were mine.

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  1. It's pretty fair to say I was the worst in our dorm, playing music all day long.. nights too.

    But we had a roommate who'd eat all the food. Regardless whose it was. Up to the point that the guy sharing a fridge with him bought a seperate one for his food, hoarded that in his room and locked the room whenever he was away. He was the one guy that regularly shopped and really bought stuff for a week or so.

    Shopping on a need-it-now basis is the best strategy when it comes to roommates like this.

  2. I once had a housemate that was convinced I was eating all of her food. Because she knew I was allergic to raspberries and pepperoni, she started putting one or the other in pretty much everything she could manage as a deterrent. And when the food kept disappearing (it was her adult son. He'd come over in the middle of the day and eat like he hadn't seen food in a week, even though he had just been over cleaning our her pantry the day before), she accused me of faking an allergy and keeping an epi-pen on my person for attention. In her mind, this was all an evil scheme concocted by me to steal her dollar-store groceries.

  3. I had a roommate(best friend in college too) who went off her anxiety meds, movedout of our apartment, during spring break while I was visiting family, leaving my cat without food for a few days. then when I did not sit next to her during thw class we had together she called me emotionally abusive and cut me out of her life.

    • Holy crap, that sounds familiar. My best friend/roommate in college decided my indoor cat (never been outside, and I was taking care of for another friend) needed to be an outdoor cat. Unbeknownst to me. I came home one day to find him long gone. She had a way of 'deciding' what was best for everyone. I moved out and never looked back.

  4. Had a roommate who decided she was going to have a pet python in our apartment. Just came home one day and boom! Big gorram snake. She bought it to help get over breaking up with her boyfriend. She'd regularly leave the cage door open or ask one of us to feed it. My girlfriend was terrified of snakes so that made things great for us. Eventually we all told her to take her snake and her baggage somewhere else.

  5. The roommate/landlord was in the breakfast nook and we were chatting as I made my dinner on the gas stove. He started laughing and I started to ask what was funny when I realized my loose t-shirt had been lit by the burner. I struggled out of my burning shirt saying "I'm on fire. I'm on fire!", toss it to the floor and pat out my hair and stamp on the burning shirt. *Then* he helps by picking up the shirt and putting it in the sink and running water on it. Second degree burns… *so* funny.

  6. I had a roommate that would leave passive aggressive sticky notes at the site of the perceived offence. On the stove, in the shower, or on the door to my room if it was a general grievance.

    • Reminds me of a college roomate who would threaten to put my hair in my food if I didn't wide from the shower drain (like it wasn't JUST MY hair in the drain), & scribbled it on the whiteboard in our room. Evidence for the RA of his sociopathic insanity.

  7. Had a roommate who immediately taped a huge chastity pledge on his door the day he moved in. Two days later he disappeared, we started calling all his references as we were concerned. His mother acted nonchalant yet chipper and said she didn't know where he was. Finally one of his friends told us that the roommate had tried to kill himself while on drugs.
    He came back to live with us a few days later. He had no furniture, so a relative of mine heard this and gave him a bed. We let him use our things since he had so little, yet this guy went to see Titanic in the theater 1-3 times a week . He lived on ramen and always wanted to talk about Marilyn Manson. He had a journal that he would leave on the coffee table, and my other roommate took a peek at it….and it was filled with complaints about how awful we were to him, and described how he would like to shove our faces into his dirty dishes. I moved out soon after that for unrelated reasons.

    • Did I mention that he stole my Simpsons inspired mutant 3-eyed fish t-shirt? Also stiffed the other roommates for his share of the utilities.
      Have run into this roommate once since then. He got married and seemed more together and happy, though still broke.

  8. am i the only one that wants what eli is drinking?

    it's called BEER FAST

    all i'm imagining is a can of beer with josh's breakfast blended into it

  9. I had a roommate who introduced me to the works of Whedon and the Harry Potter books/movies, while I introduced her to Tolkien and the movies Labyrinth and Willow. Not really on topic, I know, just wanted to brag. Nine and half years later we're still best friends, still roomies.

  10. I got this one roommate who won't throw cotton swabs away when he is done with them instead he will put them in a cup until it's full.

  11. My friend once felt something odd on her back only to look around and see her roommate peeling off her flaky sunburn and eating it. THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

  12. One of my current grad school colleagues started this semester with a snake-owning roommate. One evening, while preparing a meal, she hears the roommate yelling for help from the next room, so she runs in only to see the snake's tail slip from the roommate's grip (she had just used lotion!) and disappear into a hole in the fireplace. The roommate's solution? Go buy a mouse and waft it's delicious mousey aroma into the hole. Several of us suggested building a fire. Many days later, they came home to a hungry snake lounging in the middle of the living room.

  13. I had a roommate who never washed her sheets and by the end of the year there was a brown oval in the middle where she slept. There was also a carefully demarcated line down the middle of the room to keep her mess off my turf. Sometimes her mess would get tall enough to become an escarpment, and piles of mess would calve off onto my side, whereupon I would promptly throw them out.

    On a continuity note, I had been convinced that Eli lived alone and Josh lived with Joel. I think I thought this because we so often see him at Joel's place immediately before he leaves to go on an adventure like a gay pride parade or something.

  14. pfft i got all you pikers beat.

    i walked in on my roommate getting nailed by her dog.

    needless to say it was kinda awkward after that.

  15. I lived in student housing a few years back in a suite with multiple roommates. In the summer they let non-students rent some of the rooms, and an older lady (maybe late 40s) moved into the room next to mine. She was drunk about 80% of the time, told long rambling completely insane stories, and smoked in the bathroom (it was a non-smoking building). One time I was practicing a monologue in my room when she knocked on the door, proceeded to make herself at home on my bed, and told me all about how she used to work in film with a bunch of famous people. Then she gave me advice on how to play my character – it was slightly off because she thought the character was a crack whore when she was actually a kindergarten teacher – and when she left I found she'd left some blood from her fingers on my copy of the play.

    I moved out shortly thereafter, although mostly because there were so many mice.

  16. In college, I had a roommate that claimed our dorm room was haunted. She broke up with her boyfriend and moved to the other side of campus with absolutely no warning two weeks after the start of the year.

    The next roomie was a real winner–she was bipolar and off her meds on a regular basis. So, one night she came home and shouted at our third roommate (something about dishes? I honestly don’t remember much other than it didn’t warrant screaming in her face), then went into her room to do homework. I leaned into her doorway and asked if we could talk about what happened–the roommate she’d screamed at was pretty upset. This girl got up, looked me dead in the eyes, and slammed the door shut in my face, a fraction of an inch from breaking my nose and even closer to breaking my hand (which had been resting on the door frame).

    Oh, college.

    At least my current roommate of over two years is…moderately sane? I can be happy with that. =P

  17. One of the best things about being old(er) and respectable(ish) is you no longer need to have roommates – well, I have a wife, which is kind of like a roommate, only we sleep in the same bed and she lets me touch her boobs on occasion.

    Years ago I was woken up by a crashing noise and went into the living room to find my two housemates locked in a Mexican stand-off with a baseball and cricket bat respectively. When I asked them what they were fighting/arguing about, neither of them could remember. I told them to go to bed and think about it, and they were both so drunk/high that they did. I moved out not long after.

  18. I'm admittedly messy; it comes from having poor short-term memory. The most important documents are sort of scattered atop where I eat breakfast, because I'll forget to look at them if I file them away.

    Had a few housemates dead set on making the house look better. That lead to some overdue credit cards, most notably my Best Buy credit card, on which I bought a candy bar or something.

    This story repeats itself when another housemate did pretty much the same thing, but required convincing to stop doing it. When she left, she did so in a fashion uncharacteristic of her obsessive cleaning, and left things like cherished artwork from her students, a rather impressive little avocado tree (which later got half eaten by a squirrel and is currently in critical condition), and an assortment of liquors she intended as gifts, but seemingly forgot to tell us how many different ones she intended to leave with us. Sadly, no animal stories. One of these days, though, the attic is going to collapse and I'll find a scared raccoon on my bed.

  19. I had a room-mate who put herself through college as a fetish services provider. One of her clients wanted to clean the apartment. While wearing a French maid outfit. I was totally fine with this as it meant that someone was finally cleaning the goddamn dishes and it wasn't me, but it did throw off my guests when I forgot to warn them. Hell, it threw them off even when I didn't forget to warn them.

    "You're not seeing this from the right perspective. You see a MAN IN A FRENCH MAID OUTFIT doing the dishes. I see a man in a French maid outfit DOING THE DISHES."

  20. i lived with a guy who would get fanatically stoned, eat everything he had in front of me then batter down my bedroom door an hour later to accuse me of eating his food. He did this on a regular basis, once to accuse me of eating his tub of butter. If I tried to argue back he would claim I was using the false media conspiracy that weed was bad for your brain against him to cover my tracks.

  21. Wow! You guys are making me lose any regret I had about missing out on college! My worst roommate was my own little sister who stole my clothes and ruined them. But that seems like a gift compared to some of these stories.

    On a continuity note, I just figured that Eli only carried out sins against nature while Denise was out of town.

  22. I've only ever had a roommate one time for one semester (besides my husband), so I count myself lucky. But he was a piece of work… He would make long distance calls on my landline and never pay them, eat my food, never watch dishes, and he would shave his balls on the bathroom counter every couple of weeks and just leave the hair there for me to clean up! But, he was actually a cool guy, and his girlfriend and I got along, and I was in a new city and didn't have many friends, so I just tried to keep quiet about it.

    But then, one day I woke up (around 9am) and stumbled bleary-eyed to the bathroom, and as I walked past his OPEN DOOR I saw his girlfriend (fully dressed) sitting on the bed, while my roommate (nude) stands in front of her and slaps her about the face with his penis!! I kind of just stared for a second and then ran! Needless to say I felt very awkward after that, but he never mentioned it to me, and I never saw her again!

    Oh, also, the day after I gave my notice, I came home from class to find he had started moving his stuff into my room! I had the bigger room, and he didn't want the Super to give it away… Douche.

  23. I never had a roomate in college, for precisely the reason that I didnt want to end up sharing with some psycho. Its like theres some sort of goddamn brain disease that causes anyone who requires rooming to be an utter maniac.

  24. Actually it's the people who need a roommate after college that you have to be wary of….at least when it comes to money issues. I have heard so many stories of people getting messed over by roommates….credit cards stolen…unpaid utility bills….one person submitting rent to the landlord for all the roommates but pocketing it instead and then disappearing so everyone else gets evicted and owes back rent.

  25. I had a roommate shove my dad down the stairs, try to kill my cats, and then board himself in his room insisting we were out to get him.

    Then, when we filed a restraining order, he stole one of my guitars when he left.

    …I guess it's not weird, it's just horrible. Um, he also thought I was an "Indigo Child" and that dad was an "Empty Vessel" and insisted the moon was a secret alien starship used to keep humans from escaping our earthly prison. And that Obama and McCain were shapeshifting lizard-people. And he was really, really anti-Semitic. Okay, still kind of horrible but back into weird.

    The good news is I think he's in Hawaii now so I'll never have to deal with him again.

  26. I think I'm the worse of me and my roommate. He's cool, mostly quiet, and has introduced me to many of his friends on and off campus. Meanwhile, I'm giggly, messy, read things off the internet he probably doesn't care about. He says he doesn't care about my quirks and I mostly believe him. and one time he asked me if I thought HE was annoying! But we have similar political views, watch the same stuff on TV, and rarely argue, so I think we're good roommates.

  27. Wow, I bet I had 40 roommates over like 8 years. I guess I just had really good luck.
    One time in a pinch we just found a young guy from Craigslist. Instead of murdering/eating us, we discovered like one awesome thing a week that he had in common with us. "Is that Futurama? I love Futurama!" "Is that Invader Zim? I love Invader Zim!" He had studied video game design. He borrowed and read all my Orson Scott Card books in a couple weeks.
    Had another guy for a couple years who was like 52. He was perfect. Maintained the house like it was his own place.

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