Around 2000 or so, I was living in a pretty sweet two-bedroom apartment right above where I was working at the time. My sister’s boyfriend had recently moved to town and needed a place to stay. We were already kind of friends, so I gave him a bedroom. The rent was split, but it was still my place overall.

[Sister’s Boyfriend] had a pretty annoying habit of making food and then eating it in his room and leaving the dirty dishes in there. I bugged him about it for a while until he finally started at least putting them in the sink — still dirty, but at least accessible.

Eventually, I got petty mad about this and basically told him to clean the f****** dishes. His reply?

Sister’s Boyfriend: “That’s not happening.”

Okay, then…

For the whole time he’d been living there, he was allowed to use my computer (a pretty bada** gaming rig I had built) to check his emails and such.

After he said that garbage about the dishes, I had a little idea. When he left for work that day, I hopped on the Internet and found a free tiny program called BootLocker. It basically locked the computer with a black screen with a password prompt. No password, no computer. It even had an option to lock the BIOS, so if the PC was rebooted, it would ask for the password before even booting.

There was also an option to include some words below the password prompt. I chose, “Clean dishes = checked email”.

Then, I went about my day.

[Sister’s Boyfriend] finished work and was home before me. Needless to say, when I got home, the dishes were clean, but he was not happy. Poor widdle baby.

Cue his revenge.

He had a pretty fancy television in the living room. I had it hooked up to the computer so movies could be watched, games played, etc., on the sweet big screen. (Thirty-two inches was way bigger than my monitor!) Plus, we had free cable from work downstairs.

After the BootLocker thing, [Sister’s Boyfriend] thought he would get me back by activating the parental controls on his TV. I got home after work — when he wasn’t home — and went to watch some TV. It was a no-go without the four-digit code.

It took me roughly two minutes online to find “What do I do if I forget my [Brand] TV code?”

The look on [Sister’s Boyfriend]’s face when he got home and I was watching TV was golden.

He moved out not too long afterward.

My roommate and I (both women in our mid-twenties) lived together for three years. It was great the first couple of years, but this past year has been a nightmare.

In 2020, when [Roommate] was moving in, she talked me out of putting her on the lease. Honestly, I should’ve said no to her moving in just for that, but at the time, we were best friends, and I thought I could trust her.

At the beginning of 2023, [Roommate] went to some classes and met a guy there. They had a thing together, but there was a rule set in place stating you couldn’t date within the class. They decided to date on the down-low anyway, and then they got scared that they were going to get caught, so they ended things a couple of months into it.

Fast-forward to the time when they both graduated from this class. [Guy] had a new girlfriend who attended. [Roommate] was infuriated by this and kept saying he was doing it to get at her. Really, he had just gotten a new girlfriend, and she couldn’t cope with that.

Fast-forward a little bit more. [Roommate] and [Guy] continued to hang out behind his girlfriend’s back. It got to the point where they were drinking together one night at a bar, and on the way home, [Guy] got pulled over and got a DUI.

This is where it started affecting me. [Roommate] owed me rent right around the time this was going down. And instead of giving me rent, she spent $1,000 bailing [Guy] out so his girlfriend wouldn’t find out. I confronted [Roommate] about not paying rent.

Roommate: “You’re just throwing my mistakes back in my face!”

She never ended up paying me back for rent.

Then, [Roommate] got in a wreck at some point and still owed quite a bit on her totaled car. She had GAP (Guaranteed Asset Protection) insurance, but it was taking a while to go through. Instead of waiting, she decided to get into another car payment before the insurance company paid off her other car, so she was paying on both cars and still struggling to pay me rent. I said something about it to her.

Roommate: “But I need a car!”

Me: “You could ask your dad to use his since he works from home, and he uses your mom’s car most of the time, anyway.”

She got really mad over this and flipped out about how I thought she was privileged or whatever.

At some point while we were arguing, she suggested moving out.

Me: “Okay. The lease is up in a few months. We can revisit this then and see if anything has changed.”

She liked that, so we stayed until the end of the lease, and then we both decided this wasn’t working and to go our separate ways. [Roommate] told me she’d found an apartment in the same complex.

She also kept asking to get a dog this past year, and I kept saying no because I didn’t think she could afford it, and I wasn’t going to pay for her to get a dog to tear the place up more. A couple of days before her move-out date, [Roommate] posted on her Snapchat story that she had gotten a dog. She didn’t even tell me that she had this giant pitbull in the middle of our tiny apartment when I went to move some more of my stuff out. That infuriated me; she really couldn’t wait two more days or warn me about the dog?

I told her what we needed to replace to get my deposit back, to which she replied over and over again:

Roommate: “That’s what the security deposit is for!”

Since she moved in, she ruined all of the blinds somehow, broke my bedroom window by breaking in a couple of times when she locked herself out, tore up the floor in the kitchen and the entry moving the dryer in, tore up the washroom door because “it was in the way”, poked several holes in the walls hanging things, and so much more.

When she finally moved out, I went to clean the place up a bit and spent four hours alone cleaning trash out of her room and cleaning out the fridge, which she left packed full of gross food. I also spent a whole day scrubbing the tub, which she left full of gunk, and scrubbing all of the other surfaces. (I say “she” alone because it was getting so hard to live with her that I basically stayed with my boyfriend for most of this past year.)

I was going to put all of this behind me and move on, but I got a bill in the mail from our old apartment for $1,776.08, and my security deposit covered $820. So, I texted [Roommate].

Me: “They sent me a bill for $956.08. Are you able to send half?”

She replied with a bunch of questions asking everything they charged us for, and I answered and sent pictures of the documents with receipts for everything. I knew in my gut that she wasn’t gonna pay anything, but she straight-up said:

Roommate: “Okay, so, looking at what all the deposit covered, it looks like damages and cleaning expenses, other than the vinyl repair, which was $520.86. I don’t feel like I am responsible for the utility fee or the carpet cleaning because that was on the lease as your responsibility. You also told me you were going to get the carpets cleaned. So, I’m willing to send half of the $520.86 for the vinyl replacement. I don’t feel like I am responsible beyond that.”

Basically, she was saying, “Screw you,” to me because her name wasn’t on the lease. I also never told her I would get the carpets cleaned; I asked her to do it and she said, “That’s what the security deposits for.”

She sent me $260 and that’s it for all of this. She moved in after I was already living there, so that security deposit was mine alone, and it’s very frustrating that she just straight-up didn’t care about ruining this whole friendship over this.

After she sent that, I felt defeated, thinking I couldn’t do anything about it. Then, I remembered that we had a phone plan together. I looked up how much I owed on my phone; it was $400. In the policy, it said that if you cancel, you’re still responsible for any fees on the phone. So, I called them, canceled it, made sure to remove my card information and my autopay, and told them to bill [Roommate] for it. Since it was under her name and she doesn’t care, why should I? And that ensures that she can’t contact me anymore, either.

My roommate was stealing my food and not only not admitting it but apparently bragging about it to my other roommates and calling me a “pushover”. I didn’t want to participate in whatever they thought they were doing, especially since I am moving away in two months. But I do want my food.

Today, they were sitting in the kitchen chatting. I came in, took my meatballs from the fridge, and licked them one by one while maintaining eye contact with the thief. Then, I licked several other items, spit into my milk (it’s a waste of milk, but luckily, there wasn’t a lot), etc. 

[Thieving Roommate] looked utterly disgusted. Eventually, she asked:

Thieving Roommate: “Are you mental?”

Me: *Calmly* “I always do this, didn’t you know?”

And I left.

I didn’t know if she would stop, but her face of mixed disgust and horror made it worth it. My food wasn’t stolen the next day!

I was in Italy for University and stayed in a dorm. We had a total of five people, and duties were immediately handed out. [Roommate #1] was told to handle the purchases of all cleaning supplies, and we all pitched in money.

A couple of hours later, we were treated to an impressive amount of cleaning supplies. We had, like, a vacuum, two brooms, two mops, a squeegee, a toilet brush, several buckets, multiple brushes, packets of cloths and sponges, wet wipes, at least fifteen different kinds of cleaning agents, and whatever else I forgot. Basically, way beyond budget.

This was partially our fault — we didn’t say exactly what to get, besides excluding laundry — but it was way overdoing it.

Roommate #2: “That’s a lot. How much did you spend?”

Roommate #1: “Yeah. I used my own money. You didn’t give me enough to cover it at all. I don’t mind. We can be very clean now.”

Me: “Right. Let’s have the receipts?”

Roommate #1: “Oh, I’m not sure I took them all. Never mind about the money; it’s on me. I hope that’s all we need.”

Roommate #3: *Poking through the supplies* “That’s way more than enough. What’s this? Tile cleaner… glass cleaner… drain cleaner…”

Roommate #1: “Well, they are all for different jobs, so I had to cover everything possible.”

Me: “This is like… neat freak, OCD type of cleaning. How do you clean at home?”

Roommate #1: “I never did. I have a maid who does everything.”

Roommate #3: “Oh. Well, most people don’t need this much.”

So, while we did get a rich roommate who had never cleaned nor done any household chores in her life, she was far from snobby or lazy and was keen to learn. She just goes overboard so we’re swamped with too many products.

The hallway my college dorm room was in had a large whiteboard posted along one wall. Unsurprisingly, it became a locus for a variety of graffiti. As it filled up, a few hallway residents denoted themselves as the “Keepers of the Board.” They had a notebook where they’d write down anything they deemed interesting or amusing enough and erase the board to make room for further doodling.

One day, my roommate and I came across the Keepers busily at work recording the most recent whiteboard notations. They were discussing a particular graffito and trying to decide whether they felt it was witty enough to merit entry into the annals.

My roommate leaned in and read the item.

Roommate: “There are two secrets to success. Number one: Never tell anyone everything you know.”

After a pause to digest this morsel of wisdom, he asked:

Roommate: “Wait, what’s the other one?”

The Keepers traded an amused look.

Keeper #1: “Quick! Write that down!”

Another one did so, attributing it to my roommate. Then, they dutifully recorded the entire exchange in the notebook before erasing the message from the board.