Last but not least, our third and final contestant in the battle for Seattle's very worst rental horror story: an anonymous recent grad who will dispel your idyllic memories of college housing.
"Last year, I voluntarily chose to live with five other girls in a low-ceilinged, cramped, three-bedroom apartment. We thought it would be a good idea. We thought it would be fun. We were a group of six 20-somethings who, for some reason, felt indestructible – impervious to the big, bad real world.
Little did we know that we were going to live the roommate horror edition of Groundhog Day. Disasters mounted day after day after day after day and it seemed like June 1 would never come. Ever.
It started out fine. We were all friends who excitedly made trips to Target to find décor to spruce up our apartment and went to Trader Joe’s to pick out ingredients to make “family” dinners together. Everything was sunshine, lollipops, and unicorns until people started getting comfortable. Not the normal kind of comfort when you feel secure enough to walk around the apartment without a bra on. But rather the never socially acceptable level of comfort that makes her feel comfortable enough to unapologetically leave a bloody pad right side up in the trash, leave snotty tissues strewn about the bathroom floor, and leave a growing pile of damp, steaming workout clothes in the corner of the bathroom to accumulate mold and a potential warm sauna for mice."
"Take that visual and multiply it by five. Welcome to my life circa 2010.
One of my roommates liked to have loud porn star sex that everyone could hear through our industrial, paper-thin walls. (They very well could have been a third-grade paper mache project?) Another seemed to hate the girl with whom she shared a room and would have the guy she was seeing that week leave his used condoms on top of her roommate’s books.
And yet others had irrational, neurotic tendencies that turned our apartment into a mild episode of Hoarders. Over a year, we accumulated piles of never before opened copies of the newspaper, stashes of Starburst wrappers (because one of my roommates decided that she was going to make Starburst friendship bracelets out of them), broken ceiling tiles (a “keepsake” from the night the Boston College football team upset Virginia Tech’s and the school rioted), leftovers that one roommate refused to throw out because she was positive that she was going to eat it (and yet, a month later, the two bites of now green-tinted lasagna still sat in the paper to-go box?), broken bicycle parts, bags upon bags of empty beer cans that we were determined to “return” for five cent compensation for, a Thule bike rack?and a partridge in a pear tree.
To add insult to injury, two of my roommates loved to talk about music. That sounds harmless, I’m sure. But when they – smart, attractive, educated women – stayed up talking about the differences between the Jonas Brothers, swooning over their posters that they had torn out of “Disney Girl” magazine, listening to the band of brothers’ music until 3AM, and then shaking me awake at 6:45 AM to get online to help them have better chances at getting optimal presale tickets for the Jo-Bro concert?therein lies the horror, my living hell.
For one year, living with five other women, there was no rest, no reprieve from the onslaught of daily insanities. So Bill Murray, before you complain about being stuck in a cozy town with friendly sanitary people over and over again, try moving into an apartment with these five other ladies and see how you like repeating day after day in that disaster."