Living with people is hard enough without them being complete crazies. And sometimes they push a little too far and snap, time to teach them a lesson. Content edited for clarity.
Enough Is Enough
“I don’t mind when my roommates borrow my stuff. We’ve all been there. All I ask is that they replace what they take. You drank my milk? Just buy me a new thing of milk. It’s as simple as that.
Unfortunately, my roommate doesn’t seem to get this. She keeps taking my stuff and when I ask her to please replace everything she takes, she’ll buy one new thing and ‘forget’ to do it the next time. She does this despite having more money than me.
I finally snapped when I wanted to wash my clothes but only found an empty box that used to contain my washing powder. I don’t buy fancy or expensive stuff and I don’t care about brands. After using the last of my powder a week earlier she could literally have bought the cheapest no-brand powder in the world and I would have been fine. I just snapped. I had told her over and over to not use my washing powder if she wasn’t going to replace it and I just had enough.
I bought a new box of washing powder and some Dylon machine dye. Then I mixed it with a bit of the washing powder and dumped it into the old box. When the dye is dry it looks like washing powder, especially if you’re not expecting it. I took my new box of washing powder to my room and waited.
A week later I came home from work and saw her laundry hanging outside, all with a mysterious pink color. She stomped up to me and demanded to know what I had done. I told her I was going to dye my own clothes and someone had told me the shade would be lighter if I mixed it with powder. Then I asked her why she had used it when it had clearly been in a box with my name on it. And why would she use it when I had told her not to because she never replaced it?
I don’t think she believed me but she finally got the message. She almost never takes my stuff and when she does she’s quick to replace it.”
Cautionary Tale
“This happened during my junior year of college. I lived with five other women. I’ll call them ‘Abby,’ ‘Brooke,’ ‘Dani,’ ‘Ella,’ and ‘Fran.’
When we signed the lease on the house, we agreed to a one-year deal (June 1-May 31). The house was off-campus and unfurnished, so we needed things to make it feel like home. Before moving in, we all sat down and decided what we needed for the house and who was going to bring what and also settled on a chore schedule. We also decided that we’d have a household supply fund set up so we could buy things we all would use like toilet paper, paper towels, dish detergent, and laundry detergent. As it turned out, Dani, Ella, Francesca and I brought most of the stuff we needed like a couch, a small dining table, dishes, silverware, drinking glasses, cookware, food storage containers, etc. That left Abby and Brooke slacking on their part of contributions.
Things went pretty well during the fall semester. Shortly after that, however, things started to decline. Abby’s boyfriend ‘Andy’ basically moved in with us and the two of them started acting like they owned the place. Left a dirty dish in the sink? They’d leave a passive-aggressive note about how rude it was to do that. Come home after the library closed at midnight? Abby and Andy went to bed at 10 and if you woke them up there was hell to pay. Pretty soon, Brooke and her boyfriend ‘Brad’ were acting in much the same way.
By early February, it was clear to Dani, Ella, Fran, and me that we did not want to live with Abby and Brooke for another year. The four of us found a different off-campus place and signed a lease. We let Abby and Brooke know and from then on, the two of them, plus their boyfriends, went from partial jerks to complete jerks. They’d do things like stop the clothes washer mid-wash, take our clothes out, dump them on the floor, and start their own laundry. They’d use up all the hot water by taking super long showers. They’d write ‘return to sender’ on our mail. They destroyed flowers our boyfriends sent or brought to us. They refused packages. They stopped contributing to the shared supply fund and stopped doing chores. Well, everything was about to turn around to bite them in the butt.
About a week before Memorial Day, Ella got a call from the landlord on our new place saying the previous tenants had moved out and we could move in early if we’d like at no charge. Dani, Ella, Fran, and I discussed it and decided to get out of our current house ASAP but didn’t tell Abby and Brooke of our plans.
Memorial Day weekend rolled around and Abby, Brooke, and their boyfriends headed out of town to go camping while the rest of us put our plan into action. With the help of friends, Dani, Ella, Fran, and I got all of our stuff moved out. And when I say all, I mean everything–living room furniture, dining room furniture, dishes, silverware, cookware, food storage containers, baking supplies, shower curtain, rugs, lamps, vacuum, broom, dustpan, etc. We also decided that since neither Abby nor Brooke had contributed to the shared household supply fund since March, the toilet paper, paper towels, dish detergent, laundry detergent, and so forth were ours, so we took all of that too.
Abby, Brooke, and their boyfriends were shocked to return from their camping trip to an empty house. What made our petty revenge even sweeter was that on their way home from the camping trip, all four of them got food poisoning and were really, really sick. The scathing texts we got about moving out unannounced AND taking all shared household goods–especially the toilet paper? Priceless. Dani, Ella, Fran, and I are great friends and still get a good laugh about the situation about 12 years later. None of us have heard from Abby or Brooke since graduation.”
Have His Cake and Eat It Too
“My old college roommate didn’t know how to cook or do dishes and didn’t go food shopping much. This led to him eating my food, especially my leftovers as those were prepared meals. I would use my leftovers to meal prep for the week and told him to stop as it was expensive as well as inconvenient.
The behavior did not stop and he actually seemed to be eating more of my food out of spite. To punish him, I baked a chocolate cake with habanero peppers and mixed the frosting with wasabi. I labeled it with my name and a bold ‘Do Not Eat’ and waited. This guy has a very low tolerance for spicy foods so I thought he would take one bite and quickly realize the error of his ways.
About two days later, he and a couple of his friends got really drunk while I was at work and decided to dig into my food. Somehow, they ate about a third of it before realizing it, and when they inevitably went to throw up from overdrinking and eating spicy foods, got hit by the cake a 2nd time. I don’t know for sure but it couldn’t have felt good coming out of the backend either. When he asked me why I made this monstrosity, I told him I found a chocolate habanero recipe online that I wanted to try. He stopped eating my cooking after that.”
‘Neigh’ther Of Them Saw It Coming
“Back in 2013, I was living in a large space with 5 roommates. One of my roommates was known for borrowing food including expensive stuff like meat but never replacing it.
Well, one day I knew his mother was coming to visit and stay a few days and his mom absolutely loved horses. So what I decided to do was bait this roommate with horse meat.
It’s not common in the US but legal to buy imported so I acquired some nice thin cuts and sliced most of it and salted and left it in a Tupperware in the fridge. I put the rest of the package with the horse meat store label in the freezer.
Well sure enough in the evening I noticed some of the horse is gone so I made a big deal about someone stealing some of my horse meat in front of his mom.
They both laughed saying, ‘Haha. Very funny. Sure it’s horse meat.’
And my roommate owned up to borrowing some meat to make him and his mom steak and eggs for breakfast and lied that he would replace it. That’s when I pulled the package from the freezer and showed that it was, in fact, horse meat. His mom burst into tears crying to her son, ‘How could you feed me horse meat?!’
He definitely at least stopped stealing my meat after that.”
