Students share roommate horror stories

By Courtney Swessinger

One of the things that most people don’t tell you about when you go to college is the experiences. The surprise weight gain from the food, the frozen walks to and from your car in the mornings, and the roommates.

While most DMACC Ankeny students live at home there are quite a few that live in apartments, and many students whom had at one point a roommate. A few of these people have had a bad roommate. However, just how bad is bad when it comes to roommates? Meghan Petrie, a 20 year old pre­nursing major at DMACC Ankeny is a second­year student who had a few experiences with a roommate from hell.

“Well, last year when I went to Kirkwood, and I had two different roommates that year. My first roommate was from Chicago, and we were allowed to have dogs in our apartment; she painted her dog to look like a tiger in our bathroom and had black dye all over; we had locks on each of our bedrooms, and she would break into my bedroom and wear my clothes around. If we had friends over, she would get mad if my friends or her friends talked to me instead of her, she would cause drama, she would break stuff. So then I was allowed to switch roommates. And my next roommate was almost worse; she was the Kirkwood party girl. She always tried to have parties at our house, or she’d go out to parties and come home drunk or on drugs at random points in the night. I had to lock my room because they would try to get into my room while I was sleeping. I would wake up to random people in my house. There’s one incidence where I woke up to two men on my couch not wearing anything. So that was interesting. I used to stay at friend’s houses because I didn’t know who was going to be at my house,” Petrie said.

Earlier this year, in Jan. there was a case out of Chicago where a young man was accused of murdering his roommate in their apartment after the two met through a Craigslist ad earlier that week. This all took place 8­hours after the one man had moved in.

Most cases aren’t that extreme. Alexandria Stratton, a DMACC Ankeny Marketing/Web Design major who is in her first semester at DMACC has had a bad experience with roommates as well. Well I had a girl who lived with me who didn’t pay rent, she just basically was to keep her stuff there. She kinda treated like as a storage unit more than a actual living place and she was never there, and she pretty much left me the rent to pay, and pay utilities. And I lived with another one prior to her, and she pretty much she moved in, and told me that it was someone I really didn’t know when I moved in with them, and I met them on Craiglist and they came and stayed with me, and she paid the rent for the first month but once again she left me with the rent to pay, and she left all her stuff and just left and never came back. She threw all her stuff in the garbage, and took only what she absolutely needed, then she like never came back,” said Stratton.

So I’ve dealt with quite a few not paying rent, just telling me that I’m unprofessional when it comes to having a roommate, like I don’t know how to have a roommate, but I was not there to be there friend. I was there to be their roommate. We’re not friends, I met you off of Craigslist, you’re there to live and to pay the rent, we’re not there to be buddy buddies, especially when I was never there, I was either at work or doing something else,” said Stratton. However rent isn’t the only thing that will get roommates kicked out. Aaron Weddell, a former DMACC student from 2008 also briefly mentioned his bad roommate experience. “He didn’t really clean, he didn’t shower much. The reason I kicked him out was because he got me in trouble with my internet provider. He was downloading video games for free and not paying for them. Yeah, so the internet company shut off my internet, and I had to write them a letter of apology and how I’ll would get it to stop. So that was fun,” said Weddell. So how should you know if the person is a good roommate?“Preferably you should know how a person acts at their own place before you move in, but that’s kinda hard unless you already know them beforehand. But I’d try to find somebody that could clean and doesn’t download illegal video games,” Weddell said. “Don’t let your apartment complex randomly assign you to a person, because you’re going to get somebody crazy,” Petrie said.

“To get them on the lease, because they were not on the lease, and so to put them on a lease so if there is an issue with them not paying rent, I’d have legal documentation to take them to court so they must pay rent. So to get them on a lease, cuz’ I think that’s a huge common mistake that people make,” said Stratton.

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