Two's a Crowd

When Roomies Attack: Why Talk When You Can Vent Endlessly On the Internet?

Living with college roommates -- especially freshman roommates -- can be the closest most people come to prison life. Close quarters, bad tempers and annoying little habits can cause a heap of trouble, especially nowadays for kids who grow up with their own rooms, their own bathrooms, their own everything.

They're packed into dorm rooms where they can't do anything without seeing, hearing, touching and smelling other students who can be grubby as goats and downright rude. Remember the roommate who ate her supper in a gigantic melamine bowl that she left, unwashed, in the middle of the floor? Or the guy who'd leave his toenail clippings on the bathroom floor where you'd step on them? How about the night you got locked out because your roommate and her partner were getting it on -- or worse, the afternoon you were typing a last-minute term paper at your desk and had to endure moaning from the bunk bed next to you? And let's not forget the vomit in the wastebasket (or worse, not in the wastebasket), the stranger passed out in your bed, and so on.

You let it go for a while and then you can't and you log on to the Internet and get nasty about the person concerned and the whole thing explodes into a mushroom cloud of emotion, gossip and demands.

"We see far more roommate issues than a generation ago," says housing director Jerry Dieringer at Towson University outside Baltimore.

He and his counterparts hear more complaints, deal with more parents and see more roommates calling each other names online. It's not the big issues that rile roommates, like race or religion. It's more often the little things, like an alarm clock that keeps ringing and ringing and ringing.

"Najah is incapable of waking up to her alarm," sighs Vyomika Jairam, a student at George Washington University. She's wrapped in a blanket, sitting in her dorm room in a borrowed desk chair, surrounded by roommates, loft beds, desks, laptops, an ironing board, piles of clothes and a just-opened can of Pringles.

"Well, Vy moved her towel from the bathroom to our closet," Najah El-Bash, one of four roommates, shoots back.

Jairam continues, "How about the time you and Lara made plans to go somewhere and when I asked what you were doing, you blew me off?"

And these are roommates who still like each other, three months into the school year. Other people on their hall aren't so lucky -- like the friend who is now rooming with a young woman who was living several floors below. The late arriver had so many bad habits, such as telling lies and screaming at her mom on the phone, that she was asked to move upstairs.

In another room, all the girls have boyfriends and lock the others out when they're getting it on. In yet another, a girl came back from a weekend at home and discovered the sheets on her bed were messed up. This could mean only one thing: Someone -- female, male or both -- had slept or done whatever in her bed and she didn't know who or what. Ewwww.

"Major personality flaws you can work around," says Jairam. "It's the little habits that take you down."

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