It’s 12:30 a.m and you decide to get some studying in before your 8 a.m midterm tomorrow before going to sleep. Your two other roommates are getting ready to go out to Ybor for a night of clubbing. You eventually fall asleep, but then wake up at 3 a.m. when your roommates finally stumble in, turn on the bright light in the room and talk as loudly as possible about random nonsense. They have also brought their hook-up partner for the night, so you know you aren’t sleeping at all. “This is the worst,” you think to yourself as you pull the blanket over your head. “It can’t get more horrible than this.” The truth is you aren’t alone. Roommate problems are bound to happen at one point or another, no matter how big or small of an issue. A Bloody Mess A student, came back to her room in Brevard after a night over at her friend’s house when she noticed something was different about the room. “When I came back, I found a trail of blood leading to my room as well as the front door being broken,” She said. “It turns out my suitemate had stabbed her boyfriend with a fork and then pushed him out into the hallway where he hit the door so many times that he broke it and the police had to be called.” A Crappy Situation A student’s friend was paired up with an international student from his freshman year. “[The roommate] was generally a nice guy but the differences were crazy,” the student said. The student asked to use the roommate’s bathroom one day and found the source of an unpleasant smell lingering in the room. “The roommate had been discarding his used toilet paper into a trashcan,” the student said. “He would let the used toilet paper pile up over the lid of the can and then began miniature piles surrounding the overflowing can.” The student sat down to talk about what he saw in the bathroom with the roommate. “It became apparent that this was how you go to the bathroom in his country because the plumbing can’t handle toilet paper,” the student said. After the talk, the student thought that the roommate would change. “Apparently it is a hard habit to break, or he just didn’t want to change because he refused to flush the toilet paper [and] let it pile up on the floor,” the student said. A Little Pissy “It had rained all week and I had slept over at my boyfriends place again. I came back one morning and my rug was kinda wet but I just figured my roommate had put her umbrella down on my rug or something. Two days later the entire room smelled like pee. I had class all day and initially I thought it was our A/C. So I tried turning it off and the smell got worse. I called my RA and talked to him about it and he said he would call maintenance. My boyfriend remembered that my roommate had gotten so drunk a couple of nights ago that she needed to be carried into bed. He went over to smell her bed, which smelled fine. So he went down to her white shag rug -which wasn’t so white anymore- and said the smell was stronger but it wasn’t her rug. He then went and smelled mine and said my rug reeked of pee. I called my RA and he came over and picked it up and there was a rust colored puddle right under my rug. We rolled up the rug and threw it out. I asked her about it and she said she had no recollection of two nights ago.” Avoid Living in a Horror Story: Advice from Victims “We did our own thing, but were able to live peacefully together. I learned that you have to give and take when you live with other people. However, just because you live together does not mean you have to put up with everything. Sometimes things have to go from bad, to worse, and then slowly fall into place. What matters is how you deal with the situation. If you fall apart now, you’ll fall apart in other areas of your life when it really counts. Do not give up, dust your shoulders off, and put your adult hat on.” “Trust and healthy communication are a huge part of being successful roommates. And if you are moving in with a friend, just remember that you may pick up on little things that you never noticed before. It is totally healthy to not do everything together, otherwise you might drive each other nuts.“ Mark Sugden can be reached at markjune613@gmail.com