The Worst Roommate of All Time

April 23rd, 2010 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in Roommates | 1 Comment »

You may think that you have or are now currently living with the worst roommate of all time, but you would be wrong. For the worst roommate in the world does not reveal himself until it is too late and you are sitting on the side of the curb, jean pockets turned out, shrugged shoulders, upturned palms and crooked expression.

[editor's note: We are going to make this an regular installment, so leave a comment below about your roommate, we'll feature it on next week's blog and we'll give you a prize. Really, we will hand out prizes. Or just make up stories and give ourselves awards for creativity]

(photo courtesy of A Natural Sound)

Now what makes a bad roommate? Someone who doesn’t clean the dishes, someone who doesn’t pay rent on time, someone who just doesn’t plain respect the fact that they are living with other people? Indeed, all of these things can be intolerable, but it wouldn’t quite make someone the worst person in the world.

Imagine a roommate who borrows your bike and then breaks it and doesn’t tell you. That would be bad. Then, picture a roommate who just straight up steals your bike and doesn’t admit it. That would be scurrilous. Then if you can, wrap your head around a roommate who steals all of your possessions and pawns them for beer money that he drinks himself. That would be diabolical!

But imagine if your roommate figured out a way to steal your actual apartment. That’s right like one of those showboating magicians, actually stole your apartment from you.

This is how he did it:

In San Francisco, a lot of people live in multi-bedroom homes for rent and whoever has lived in the apartment and landlords typically deal primarily with one master tenant who collects rent from everyone else and then writes one big check to the landlord.

You can guess how this turned out; the master tenant collected rent from 3 other roommates and then didn’t pay the landlord for 3 months…and then went on a huge bender. So now they are all evicted, lost their security deposits and have 3 days to find a new apartment.

But how can you protect yourself from this kind of thing? Always live alone or with friends? Sometimes it’s not really an option.

A few weeks ago, we had a guest post from WilliamPaid, a company that provides roommates an easy, secure way to pay rent and build their credit. You can read about the many benefits in that article, but one thing I thought about when I heard the above story, is how this could be a good way to ensure that the master tenant is not hatching a devious and short sighted plan to take the money and run. Kind of like a “I won’t totally screw you over” assurance.

So, let us know your horror stories in the comments, again, we will indeed be giving away a prize if your story is funny, tragic or instructional and we can write a longer article and add pictures to it.