Roomate Revenge
SHAWNA SWEENEY
Out of all the stresses and anxieties involved in starting a new school year, roommate roulette is one of the scariest. One slip of those tricky assignment odds and you’re stuck with a sickly shut-in or purebred psycho. The best way to avoid this is to luck out and get good roommates, but if you end up with roommate real estate that is less than desirable it’s still possible to get a little revenge and take one back for the good guys.
My freshman year I got stuck sharing a double room with a terrible girl named “Diane.” She was originally from Chicago, and when I asked her how she ended up so far north she said, “Well, I spent six months in Sweden last year and I thought it would be kind of the same.”
Riiiiight.
She seemed to lack social skills of any kind and rarely left the room. She spent most of her days lying around in a dumb flowered robe watching Saved By The Bell reruns and eating my food. I tried many verbal warnings, but despite several involved conversations I could never get her to a) watch a better show or b) stop raiding my precious food rations.
I managed to stay pretty calm overall, until the day I came home and all her nasty underwear were laid out on my bed, dresser and desk. “What the hell is this?” I asked. “Why is all this underwear on my bed?”
Diane turned slightly away from the television and said, “Oh. They get too stiff if I put them in the dryer and there wasn’t enough room to dry them on my half of the room. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
WHAT? How could I not mind coming home to find used lingerie strewn all over the place where I have to sleep? GROSS.
After that, I started complaining about her every chance I got. I complained to the resident advisors to see if I could get a room change, and then I complained to the dorm administrators to see if I could get a room change, and when that didn’t work I complained to my friends about how I was stuck with a psycho.
But fate was on my side. Soon a revenge campaign like no other would swing into effect and Diane’s strange behavior would become far more tolerable.
One night after many beers and a long rehash of my situation, a friend of mine said, “You’re looking at this all wrong. Right now she’s horrible and slowly destroying you. But you can’t look at it like that anymore. You have to change your attitude and turn it into something you can laugh at so you don’t go crazy.”
“Like what?” I asked. “I could kill her. That would be pretty funny. But I’m going to college to get a solid future, not a solid jail sentence.”
“No, no,” he replied. “You don’t have to kill her. I’ve got a better plan. We just have to wait until she leaves the room.”
A few days later she left a note on our white board in elaborate bubble print that read, “Study group tonight — back by 9 p.m.!” I called my friend immediately so that we could move on to phase two.
He arrived fifteen minutes later, but we were cutting it very close. By this time it was almost 8:45. “You’ve got to hurry. She’ll be back any minute.”
“Okay, okay.” He said. “I need a little time here.”
The plan my friend proposed was very simple: since there was no legal way to injure her person, we had to do something awful to her property. He thought the best way to do this was to urinate just a little on her dorky flowered robe. Nothing extravagant, mind you. Just a few drops.
“You don’t want so much pee that it smells bad,” he said. “She’d figure it out too fast and try to wash it or something and then the plan would be ruined. We just need enough to know.”
He made me turn around as he did the deed but a minute later we were both hunched over the tiny wet spot on her collar laughing hysterically.
We were still laughing when I heard her key in the door and I scrambled to put the robe back in place. She walked into the room and looked us up and down before commenting, “Oh. You have company. I hope you don’t mind if I watch TV.”
No, Diane, I don’t mind at all. Go ahead and get comfortable. Take off those binding street clothes and settle in for the night.
After that it was easy to endure all the missing food and obnoxious television programming because every time I looked at her I thought of the pee-pee robe and laughed quietly to myself. Revenge was mine and it was very sweet.
So the moral of the story is that if you find yourself stuck in a tough roommate spot, just think outside the water closet. I’m not advocating urinary revenge here, but find a solution that works for you and try to start laughing instead of crying.
