Turning a friend into a room-mate. Jinxed? (boyfriend, member, brother)
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I have the knack for turning my friends into the room-mate from hell every time I've tried the experiment. I started out on room-mate disasters in my last year of college when my best friend and I decided to share an apartment. She had already graduated and was looking for a job. I was pretty broke and moving in with each other and sharing costs seemed like a good idea at the time.
BIG mistake!
All went well for a while then my BFF fell in love. She spent all her time with her new honey and ended up following him down to Denver when he landed a job there. I was happy for my best friend that she had found true love at last. Plus, I could study without any distractions when I had the apartment to myself. However, we had signed a year lease on the place.
My friend decided that she wanted to officially move out about 2 months before the end of the academic year. I didn't blame her for not wanting to pay rent on a place she no longer lived in, but her decision put me in a major financial bind. It was too late in the year to find another room-mate and finals were coming up fast.
Plus, I was over-whelmed by the requirement I had in one of my classes to identify and collect 200 flowering plants, put them in a plant press, then mount them nicely on herbarium sheets. I also had to memorize the family, genus and species of them all and turn the collection in to my highly demanding botany professor. My graduation hung in the balance since the class was a department requirement.
I had flowering plants in various stages of the project all over every flat surface in the apartment. I came up 20 plants short and had to go drive up in the foot hills and mountains to find and collect MORE of the damned things, and I spent hours and hours doing that. By the end, I hated ALL flowers and never wanted to see one again.
I was just a tad stressed out. Already long story short, My EX BFF and I had a huge fight. She had plenty of money from her family and her BF was paying the rent. Plus, she had signed that lease with ME, not him, etc., etc. A few days after our blow up, she came over and got all her stuff when I was gone on one of my desperate last minute plant searches. She took advantage of my absence to help her self to my clothes in addition to her own. We wore the same size and she was PO'ed, so why not?
I wanted to kill her when I came back to the looted apartment. Worst of all, she had carelessly knocked a bunch of my plants drying on herberium sheets onto the floor which destroyed parts of my project. Good thing she'd high tailed it out of there or I'd still be in prison for murder one.
My other friend to room-mates attempts ended up just as badly if not worse. Is this just me? Have other people lost friends over house mate blow-outs? Has anyone been successful at sharing a living space with a friend? If so, what made it work out instead of fall apart?
(Sorry I made this kind of long with my plant story.)
Not to derail the thread or anything, but I was once assigned a similar project, but with insects. And the number of species we had to collect, mount, and identify kept going up as the project went on. It was the project from hell. The only people who got good grades had obviously bought the insects they turned in. Just posting this to say I totally sympathize on the crazy flower project.
And yes, you never really know what a nutcase someone is until you live with them. See, I made this post relevant after all.
Not to derail the thread or anything, but I was once assigned a similar project, but with insects. And the number of species we had to collect, mount, and identify kept going up as the project went on. It was the project from hell. The only people who got good grades had obviously bought the insects they turned in. Just posting this to say I totally sympathize on the crazy flower project.
And yes, you never really know what a nutcase someone is until you live with them. See, I made this post relevant after all.
Weren't projects like that the very worst? You really have to love biology to take classes like that!
I was down and out and my half sister would not take me in. He let me come in, helped me out and because of him I am about to get my teaching credential in a few weeks. I would do anything for this guy. He's like the brother I never had. So see, not all the stories are bad...
Actually, I'm wondering about the people you pick as friends. You didn't TURN her into a selfish little byoch. She came that way.
It's hard to be roommates with anyone, but decent people work things out in a decent manner.
Well, I sometimes wonder about that, too. It's the reason I posted this thread in the first place. I knew my friend had certain issues going into it. I knew that she had a tendency to get into very intense relationships on very short notice, and she always came to grief as a result. My only excuse there is that I didn't have enough life experience at age 20 to see what was coming from a woman who ALWAYS dropped her women friends, including me, when she became involved with some guy. Her moving in with her boyfriend and refusing to meet her commitment to me to pay half the rent on OUR apartment was true to form. Live and learn.
I had the same experience. She was being pressed by her new boy friend, who had been my cubicle parter where I worked and had endlessly hit on me until he got fired. She and I set things up for her to move in six weeks and then she moved out early and mid month. She was upset with him but not willing to push things and wait.
She signed the check I got from my insurence secretly a year later after there was a fire and she didn't want to let him know.
If I was to have a roommate I might just run and ad and it be a business deal, not that it would be something prefered, but if they move out you don't end up feeling like you got shafted by a friend at least.
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