Assignment 2

WAKING UP TO A NIGHTMARE
COLLEGE ROOMMATES GONE BAD
MEGAN E. STUTTLE
September 22, 2009


BUFFALO, NY – A weeknight at the State University of New York in Purchase of sophomore year for Danielle Hanna would typically consist of preparing for the next day’s classes and getting a good night’s worth of sleep. Hanna knows otherwise due to be awoken by odd noises coming from the bed of her roommate, Heather. “Heather this is the second time this has happened and I really don’t appreciate it,” Hanna recalls saying. Never would one guess that this would be a request for Heather to stop having sex in the bed next to her roommate who was trying to sleep.

This scenario is only one of many nightmare examples of how having a roommate in college can go terribly wrong. A bad roommate experience can happen to any person, in any college, at any level of their education. Luckily, a bad roommate experience can give others a chance to learn and receive advice to avoid these situations. Here is a collection of stories that are both enlightening and disturbing from those who have experienced nightmare roommates firsthand.

One such story comes from Mike Pompette, a senior and English major at the University at Buffalo. Pompette describes his experience with his roommate, Jack throughout the fall of 2007 at Binghamton University as “the worst experience of [his] life.”

Jack was a previous roommate of a mutual friend he and Pompette shared, who also neglected to inform Pompette of the certain chaos he was about to face by sharing a living space with Jack. Pompette described Jack as the most intrusive and nosy person, who would make use of stuff that was not his in the apartment on a daily basis.

He would sleep and eat on the leather couches, spilling mustard, relish, and getting “all kinds of shit everywhere” from the food which was made on the grill, also supplied to the apartment by Pompette. Due to opposite work schedules, living with Jack was tolerable, but only for so long.

After locking Pompette out of the apartment for two whole days by use of a padlock with all of Pompette’s belongings inside, Jack had crossed his last line. Pompette moved out after only six and a half months of living with Jack. He was so perplexed by the entire situation that he forgot his own grill while trying to move out as quickly as possible.

Pompette’s advice for anybody going into a situation of living with a roommate: don’t live with somebody you don’t know, advice that is agreed upon by several other victims of nightmare roommates.

Jonathan Joseph, also a senior at the University at Buffalo, experienced a similar roommate nightmare such as that of Pompette’s. In the spring of 2007, Joseph was placed in a dorm room with his roommate Josh. Josh and Joseph were later joined by Rashad, a new roommate with some bad habits. “He smelled like feet and ass,” Joseph claims.

He and Josh assumed that Rashad was pledging a fraternity that made him not shower for a certain period of time as a part of the hazing ritual, a process that is illegally practiced by many fraternities on college campuses to become a brother. The smell was allegedly so terrible, that even the RA (Resident Advisor) of the floor would not enter the room to solve or discuss the problem.

Rashad was also nocturnal. He would stay up on his computer at night watching porn or movies and eating very strong scented food such as chicken wings or fast food. Joseph knew that there was something odd about his roommate’s behavior, especially due to the fact that he would sleep through having Febreze sprayed on him and water poured on him during the day. He seemed to be “knocked out cold.”

Only later did Joseph and his roommate find out that Rashad had some far worse habits than his person hygiene; he was a coke head who was thrown out of his previous room because he was caught with drugs and placed into the triple to reside with Josh and Joseph. Joseph found himself avoiding sleeping in his own room and spraying on some extra cologne to avoid smelling like the stench of feet and ass that had occupied his room.

The breaking point, he claims, was when Rashad woke him up in the middle of the night to use his computer to watch a TV show because his personal computer had died.

Joseph’s advice for the situation is to do as he did and take action and go to the correct authorities. Within a matter of only two days of complaining to the Resident Directors and threatening to move into a hotel and to bill the university, Joseph and Josh no longer had to deal with the living nightmare that was Rashad. He had been relocated.

Some bad habits, body odor, and intrusive behavior in a roommate could be tolerable for some people, but for Danielle Hanna, now a senior communication major at UB, waking up to her roommate Heather’s romping in bed was a line that was crossed not once, but twice, making her semester at SUNY Purchase a nightmare.

Hanna’s first impression of her new roommate, Heather, was not a good one. She partied way too much- nearly every night. Hanna explains how she doesn’t think that Heather ever attended class, except for a tennis class. This impression did not improve over time, as Heather continued to be a messy and inconsiderate roommate.
The first extreme incident of this inconsiderate behavior occurred mid-semester when Hanna awoke to her roommate’s bed, which was placed not even ten feet from her own, making squeaking noises. Now aware that her roommate was having sex with somebody in the bed next to her, Hanna decided to ignore it and try to fall back asleep, only confirming her assumptions in the morning on her way to class when the boy was still in the bed with her roommate.

Still choosing to ignore the situation, Hanna and Heather became distant from each other, until Hanna experienced her roommate’s sex antics again, in the same fashion as before: waking up to squeaking noises of the bed next to her own. This time, however, Hanna decided to speak up, something she feels she should have done from the beginning.

She advises that, if in a situation where a roommate is being disrespectful, you should be more up front with that person and tell them how you feel.
To this day, Hanna believes that her old roommate, Heather, is also to blame for the death of one of her pet turtles who sadly died due to being caught between a rock and the glass of the tank. “Somebody moved the rock,” she explains, because the rock was not placed that close to the glass for that reason.

Regardless, karma came back around, as it usually does, and Heather paid for her lack of care and respect for her own responsibilities as well as to her roommate by failing out of school.