I’ve been cheap and living with one set of roommates or another for a while now, and so far, almost all of them have been either great guys or at the very least kept to themselves and were no hassle to me. That is except for one person.
The rental location was great. We each had our own entrance into our own room, sharing only the kitchen and bathroom, so we almost never saw each other and it mostly felt like my own place. My room was enormous compared to the barely-more-than-closets I was used to renting. It was in a great location within walking distance of a place I went to every weekend, there were lots of scenic walking paths nearby despite being close to the city and my work, and the price was cheap. I was very happy there for half a year or so.
Then, one day, I went into the kitchen to find a broken plate on the floor. That was strange, but I didn’t think much of it. I swept up the plate pieces, tossed them in the garbage, and went on with my life.
The next day, I went into the kitchen to find a rather rudely phrased letter basically accusing me of breaking [Roommate]’s plate and demanding I replace it. I was only stopping by the house to pick something up before going on a six-hour post-work trip for volunteer stuff, so I didn’t have the time to hunt him down about it then, and frankly, I was too annoyed with the way the letter was written to want to speak with him that second, so I resolved to hunt him down and explain I’d found it broken the next time we were both free in the house.
That night, I arrived home to find that one of my few plates — always cleaned after use and put back with the others in my bedroom so I could never be accused of leaving dirty dishes around the house — was broken. The guy came into my room when I was out just to hunt through it for a plate to break because he presumed I’d broken his and didn’t wait to ask me.
This was only the start; [Roommate] escalated quickly. I forget what crazy activity happened when, but at one point, I found a broken microwave, clearly intentionally so, placed immediately in front of my doorway like some sort of threat. I have no clue why. The landlord replaced the microwave when I reported it broken, only to have a second microwave fall to the same fate of being murdered and its corpse left at my door a little while later. The landlord at least made [Roommate] — or more accurately, [Roommate]’s far more reasonable uncle — replace that one.
[Roommate] also started moving the refrigerator so it would block my path from my room to the bathroom. It was pretty easy to rotate back into place, and he was inconveniencing himself as much by moving it as he was me to move it back, so it seemed a rather pointless form of vindictiveness. A more effective one was setting the alarm on my stove right as he was leaving at some ungodly early time in the morning so it would wake me up shortly after he left.
At one point, when my usual parking spot was blocked, I parked in a different spot on the road near our house. I found my tires slashed the next day. Presumably, [Roommate] figured I was in “his” spot, even though this was just roadside parking with no allocated parking spots.
All of this kept happening, despite my barely talking to the guy. We had practically no direct interaction both for the first six months when things were normal and after he started going down the road of crazy. I honestly have no clue what motivated his escalating insanity. I couldn’t even tell you the guy’s name! He really was as much a stranger as your next-door neighbor likely is to you. (Well, assuming you’re as much an introvert as I am.)
You’re likely wondering why I never left. Other than not wanting to give up the otherwise amazing location and not wanting to let him “win”, it was mostly because my landlord kept promising to remove him. Then, when she took that away, she dangled a promise of moving me to a nicer place she also rented at the same price, which, of course, didn’t happen.
It was becoming clear, despite her empty promises, that my landlord didn’t intend to do anything about the lunatic. She implied it was just a disagreement we could sort out as if we were both equally at fault! Of course, the slashed tire was when it was clear that [Roommate] was not just annoying but potentially dangerous, and I had to get out no matter what the landlord promised.
The night before moving, I did my best job ever cleaning up to make sure I got my security deposit back, so it wasn’t until very late that I was leaving for good. The one thing left after my move was the pile of two mangled microwave “gifts” from my crazy roommate that had gotten shoved into a corner and forgotten about. In a moment of petty vengeance, I stacked both broken microwaves in front of his door, as he had once done to me, before heading out.
A week later, my landlord tried to tell me I wasn’t going to get my security deposit back because I had broken the mounted TV that had come with the room. I’ll give you one guess who had actually broken it after I left. The joke was on him this time; I had predicted that he would do something crazy and so had taken a detailed video of the entire room, clearly clean and with everything intact, right before leaving. I also pointed out that I hadn’t paid my last month’s rent yet, intentionally, and that it was in my legal right to not pay her back since there were laws that she had violated by not addressing the situation sooner. I offered for her to take it to court, and she quickly backed down, given my evidence, but she acted aggrieved as if I was bankrupting her.
Personally, I felt no pity. I told her many times that allowing a crazy person like that to stay would end badly for her even after I left. When it came down to an ultimatum of either getting rid of the crazy guy that had already vandalized her stuff or the quite reliably paying guy who had already helped save her money by fixing things for her various renter properties, how did she not see that siding with the crazy guy would end poorly?
No, I’m sorry, Miss Landlord, but you brought that expense on yourself.
