Roommatesfromhell

Why My Roommates Suck

First of all, let me introduce them. Husband, wife and baby. Why they think they should rent out a room in their house is unknown to me, but it has become apparent that they need my rent check to survive. So, since that is the case, one would think that the roommate would be shown a little hospitality. Which is not to say that they are deliberately trying to drive me out. No, I think they are just as much caught by unfortunate living conditions as I am. Anyway, the main reasons they suck are as follows:

1. Their dog. Now I like dogs, but I don't like being forced to share my house with an unruly animal that eats its own feces. The dogs I had growing up were all good dogs. They didn't eat stuff off the table, they sat when you told them to, they didn't pee whenever you touched them. This dog pees whenever I make eye contact with him. I'm gonna just start leaving it there and saying "Hey your fucking dog pissed on the floor again, you better take care of it." Secondly, these people know nothing about dogs, so when they decided to get one, they chose one of those ones that's going to be enormous and needs months of obedience classes. The only good thing about this dog is that their daughter, now 18 months old, is constantly feeding him whatever she can find. I'm gonna hand her some chocolate soon and see what happens. (As an additional note, as of February, the dog has actually peed ON me several times now. It seems that when he jumps up to greet me he's unaware that he's already leaking with excitement. Now really, if there was a god, I'd give him the finger for creating this worthless animal.)

2. Which brings us to their daughter. I love kids. I want to have at least 4 of them in my future. But this child, Rosemary's baby as it were, was born a holy terror. Literally. The day she was born she screamed and screamed and screamed until she lost her voice. Normal babies cry, but this one has never cried. She screams. Bloody fucking murder. Now, at nearly 2 years old, she has taken the screaming to a new level. Put her to bed and she screams for 3 hours. Not joking! It's not uncommon that she screams till she throws up all over the place. Now this is not a normal kid. And see, I'm not part of the family and I have no children yet, so I don't feel very comfortable offering parenting advice to these people. But once, I ventured a tiny peep and said "You know, normal children don't do that, you should probably mention it to your pediatrician". Of course this was met with grizzly stares and turned up noses. I guess they enjoy the constant screaming. Update 7/3/04: At this point, the only part of this house I consider sanctuary is my room. It's worse than living with your parents. I can't go upstairs unless I'm just passing through, and god forbid I should leave any personal belongings upstairs. (See #3) Anyway, whenever I leave the house it apparently becomes open season in my room. Their daughter has learned to say "feh-ets", which of course means ferrets. And because her parents have never said no to her in her entire life, they escort her downstairs and through the conspicuous child-safety lock on my bedroom door. You see, my room technically has 2 doors going into it, one door is actually more like a giant floor to ceiling window between my room and the rest of the house. A few months ago I was upstairs and heard a commotion coming from my room. Well, the unobserved 2 year old had pushed open the "window" door and made a bee-line to my nightstand, where she had removed an entire string of condoms and was waving them around like a banner. Luckily I grabbed them from her hands before her parents came downstairs and realized, but it now that I think of it, it wasn't lucky at all. In fact, she could have been down there for hours before I came home and noticed. Not unusual, because at 2 years old, she has now spent more time alone unsupervised than I did in the first 17 years of my life. It's really a CPS issue, but if I call they'll know it was me. Anyway, last night I came home to discover that, once again, they'd opened my door for her and let her run loose. What they do is just that, they open the door into my room and then they go sit in the next room and play computer games. So last night she fed my ferrets cat toys. This may not seem like much of an offense to the novice, but ferrets chew their toys like dogs, and then do not have the ability to vomit up the pieces like dogs do. So if my ferret chews up this mouse made from real rabbit fur and one of it's eyes is already dangling from it's plastic socket and threatening bowel obstruction, well I get to spend $1,300.00 to have it removed. I believe that's the going rate for an endoscopy these days, at least that's what they said on Emergency Vets. Update 7/3/04 11:00 p.m. (MST): Just moments ago, the husband very openly told me he needed a drink, and that he was going to go out for a few hours after he put his daughter to bed. (Of course she's still up, I don't think she's ever gone to bed before midnight in her short life.) Anyway, I agreed cause I figure I might as well, and he obviously does need to refuel his alcohol laden blood stream, as he's already used up a bottle of wild turkey this week and hasn't had anything but vodka for a few days now. So I was standing in the living room, waiting for him to put her in bed and he went to give her some medicine. Interesting, since he hadn't mentioned she was sick when he asked me to watch her, but I figured it was just a cold. Lo and behold, she sat upright on the couch and projectile-fucking-vomitted pink chunks all over the couch, and I mean those chunks were moving in excess of 50 mph. I rolled my eyes, realizing what the dad of the year meant by "watching" her, and walked downstairs without a word. In case I haven't clarified yet, vomit is the worst thing in the whole world to me. And the fact that this asshole left me in charge of his puking daughter means that he assumed if she threw up I'd just go on in there and clean her up. FUCK THAT SHIT. I'll deal with my vomit fears when I get knocked up, not for some worthless fuckup to leave me with his sick 2 year old. Update 7/20/04: I came home from work today to find my room very much in the state I left it, including condoms placed conspicuously on the bathroom counter to hopefully dissuade any parents from letting their children wander around my room unsupervised. Also, I did laundrey yesterday, so every article of clothing I own is on my bedroom floor, right where I left it. However, sitting on the bench at the foot of my bed I found my roommate's wife's passport and immunization record!!!! So in case you had any doubt that I'm completely psycho, I'm about to relieve you of those doubts. Just for fun, I measured the distance from the door of my bedroom to the location of said items, which came out to a grand total of 23 feet!!!! (Yes, my room is really big, but that's not the point) The ferret cage is 5 feet into my bedroom from the door, my really personal kinky sex stuff would probably be around 30 feet from the door. They're locked up in a box, but they shouldn't have to be. You see where I'm headed with this? So the location of the items indicate that someone was not just strolling into my bedroom to play with the ferrets. It would indicate that either someone was fucking snooping through my shit and happened to set down their stuff in the process, or someone's fucking 2 year old was snooping through my shit and they set down their stuff to pick her up. Either way, I know one slut who's going to have a lot of trouble if she tries to leave the country, cause she won't be seeing her passport anytime soon. Update 10/19/04: So this evening, I was in the kitchen making a bowl of cereal for dinner, because I don't have any other food. Then my roommates came home and plopped down on the floor in front of the big screen television and pasted their eyeballs to the screen. Now my living room is not very big, and the television is crammed halfway into the hallway, which is my only way out of the room. So I stood with my bowl brimming with cheap imitation cinnamon toast crunch and politely said "Excuse me." They looked at me, but didn't even lean over in that way people do when they pretend to be polite enough to move but don't actually move their fat asses. So I proceeded to do a very elaborate belly dance type move trying to squeeze past them with my bowl of cereal sloshing precariously. Just as I thought I was home free, Tavion, the little rugrat from hell decided to flop backwards into my leg, knocking me off balance. I saved the bowl, but its entire contents gushed onto the head of this snot-nosed child. I saw it in slow motion, and it was easily the greatest kind of comedy I'd ever seen. I felt like I should paint my face blue and ride a horse around whooping that I had won a battle.

3. My stuff. You see, I don't have a problem with sharing. In fact, I'm a very generous person. But I can't even store any of my belongings outside my room. I had a crepe maker once. It was very difficult to find the perfect crepe maker and I'd begged my parents to get me one for Christmas every year. Finally I got one and I happily tucked it into a pantry in the kitchen to await one bright morning when I could make crepes for everyone in the house. I awoke one morning to the sound of pots and pans being thrown
around the kitchen upstairs by the evil daughter.
I ran upstairs to find this horrible gremlin child had
been dragging pots and pans ACROSS the teflon surface
of my crepe maker!!! So of course, what was new
is now unusable, since crepes have to be paper thin and
couldn't survive sticking to bare metal. I have since
tried to even the stakes by putting a few minor cuts
in the teflon of their pots and pans. At first this
consisted of me accidentally-on-purpose using
metal utensils in teflon pans. No dice. So I advanced to
a little innocent steel wool scrubbing when washing.
Still not even a tiny scratch. One morning I was making omelettes and happened to be particularly annoyed, so I took the knife I was cutting bell peppers with and savagely attacked the pan. Nothing. I am becoming less convinced that it was there horrible child who scratched my crepe maker, but it wasn't me and that only leaves THEM.
Update: Today, 2/29/04, my bundt cake pan was destroyed. Obliterated as much as a cake pan can be. I rinsed the pan, but since I was already running late to be at my brother's house, I left the pan sitting on the counter to more thoroughly clean it when I got home. It looked clean anyway. But, while I was gone, one of my completely vacuous roommates put the pan in the dishwasher. So when I unloaded the dishwasher this morning, the nonstick surface was literally flaking off. But see, it's not just me. They don't have any thought about the value of anything. For Halloween, 5 months ago, they bought 2 very large pumpkins, probably at least 40 pounds each. And, for some reason, they decided to keep them. Now, ANYBODY who's ever had a pumpkin knows that they rot out the bottom. But my roommates decided to store the pumpkins in our very narrow hallway directly on the white carpet. Even after the stench of pumpkin was noticeable upon entry to the house, no one felt like moving them. So, this past friday they moved the pumpkins and there were 2 large brown stains in the carpet. But they actually left them there for a whole day till I said "What the hell happened in the hallway!?!" and THEN they cleaned it up. Well, as much as one can, since the stains remain, but they got up most of the pumpkin pie-looking puddle. So I wisely moved all my posessions out of the kitchen and into the one bedroom I feel safe in.
Update 3/20/04: I remembered that I at one point owned an egg slicer. Naturally, when I pulled the last of my kitchen utensils from the drawer, I noticed that the delicate wires had been broken, and my egg slicer now resembled a guitar after all it's strings have snapped.

4. My food. I used to enjoy cooking. But whenever I cook a meal here nobody will eat any of it, even when I offer it to them. Make cookies, though, and it's a different story. "Oh hey, we ate your cookies, sorry." No worries, I shouldn't be eating cookies anyway. But it's EVERYTHING that I don't offer to them. Once it was a whole package of honey ham. Another time, a whole bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's went missing but I still had a box of waffles. And one time I went shopping, you know, one of those BIG grocery shopping trips where you don't wanna have to go back to the store for a month. And the day I got home they decided to do some cooking with ALL MY BUTTER. Didn't even ask. The best is when they team up on me, like when I make ramen noodles and their little hellion screams her nails on a chalkboard scream until I feed her from my own bowl.
Update 6/22/04: Recently I discovered how being petty can occasionally make you feel better than being the better person. You see, I decided I wanted to get a mango, but when I went to the store, they were all hard as rocks and green. So I spent, not joking, 15 minutes going through every single mango until I found one that was soft, reddish, and emitting a pleasant mango-ey odor. So I purchased just the one and took it home, set it on the counter to finish the ripening process- as opposed to beginning the molding process in the back of the one little Ema-Li-designated shelf in the pantry out of the entire freaking kitchen. I then went to my room to get my game on as I had recently received a copy of American McGee's Alice for the first time. 45 minutes later, the phone rang and I was invited to go out. So as I was pulling out of the driveway I noticed my roommate and her daughter sitting on the lawn enjoying a mango. And you know those old Donald Duck cartoons where his head turns all read and an egg fries itself on it? Well, yeah, that was me. So upon my return home I double checked to see if, by chance, she had actually purchased a seperate mango. No, of course not. So I calmly walked downstairs into the storage room, in which they hoard the entire world's supply of star wars action figures and vases from various parts of the country all in boxes in the dark. I opened a box and removed a smaller box with a glass vase from Las Vegas in it and looked at it for awhile, then just let it drop. I was thinking it would only crack a little, but it sounded like a crystal chandelier had hit the ground. Still, I calmly put the box with all the peices in it back into the larger box and turned out the light in the room. They won't discover it for a minimum of 6 months from now and hopefully by then I'll have a new job and be long gone. I was deeply afraid that I was going to have some kind of moral issue with being so petty, but I slept well that night and woke with a smile on my face the next morning. It was the most satisfying feeling imaginable, I felt like I needed a cigarette afterward.
Update 10/11/04: The other day I bought zero percent fat free water milk. It's so repulsive. It turns yellow within 48 hours of opening the jug. But I bought it, hoping that it would be mine and mine alone so I could have milk in the mornings for my cereal. You see, my roommates get government subsidized milk, despite the fact that they both have jobs AND a roommate(me) who pays half their mortgage. So I bought a gallon of milk Saturday evening and by the time I got up Sunday morning it was down to a half gallon. And they always buy whole milk. WTF??

5. The library. My bedroom is located downstairs in what was once a basement. It has since been converted, but presumably to save on building costs most of the downstairs hasn't been insulated very well. And of course, it seemed like a good idea to put his computer library next to my toilet. So when I'm trying to sleep he usually makes calls on speaker phone that echo throughout the downstairs (Literally). But one morning I'd had an unusually large amount of fiber and needed to use the bathroom. And HE was sitting quietly in his study playing around on his computer. I waited for 2 hours and still no movement from him. Finally, desperate, I went upstairs and began slamming doors and stuff. His daughter woke up, screaming as usual, and he finally went upstairs. The clincher was that he was ignoring her screaming until I came back downstairs and told him she was awake and angry.

6. Weird marital drama. This is a new one to me, but it may be more than I can take. To my knowledge, my roommates have never actually "done it" while I was home. Until last Friday night, when I heard a female's voice moaning loudly ALL NIGHT. Slightly disturbed, I tried to remind myself that healthy marriages require that sort of thing every now and then, and in a way, I was happy for them. Saturday morning, however, I bumped into the wife. She looked mortified and obviously hadn't realized I had stayed there all night. I didn't see the husband, but I thought nothing of it, and ducked out quickly to avoid awkwardness. Saturday night I stayed in. (Yeah I'm a loser. But I wouldn't have gone out if you'd invited me) I stayed up til midnight puttering around, and finally decided to retire downstairs. Still no sign of the roommates. The horrible dog had been in the backyard all day, and it was starting to get chilly, so I kenneled him for the night. Around 2 am I heard footsteps upstairs and someone let the dog out into the backyard again, probably assuming that he'd spent the day indoors. So all night long the dog would let out one solitary bark every hour on the hour. Not enough to power the blind rage it would take to get me out of bed after 2 in the morning, but just enough to keep me from actually sleeping. 7:30 Sunday morning. The phone rings. I let the machine get it. Whoever it is hangs up on the machine and calls back. FOUR TIMES!!! I pick up the phone to ask the person if it's a medical emergency and to describe how it's about to become one, and lo and behold, it's the husband's mom. Now I can add her to my hate list. Worst of all, she's annoyingly sweet. So at 7:30 in the morning on my day off she squeaks in her high pitched too much volume for this hour of the morning voice "How's the weather down there?" I replied that I didn't know because I was still in bed. She basically said that she didn't know where her son was. Odd, but still I thought nothing of it. I think I'm not the only person who avoids this woman anyway. Jump to late Sunday night. Both roommates are sitting in the living room with the screaming daughter perched in a highchair. There is an audible tension in the air, even above the screaming. I prudently decide to avoid the situation. Monday, things are finally cooling down, I've decided to wait on asking what the fuck they did with my miter box, since things are pretty tense without my reminding them subtley of our mutual dislike. So I casually asked the husband where they've been all weekend. His reply was "I've been in Vegas all weekend but she stayed here and had to work". (Insert record scratch sound right here as the music stops) I realize I haven't actually seen husband since Thursday, and the year before when he went on his "Annual Vegas Trip with the Guys" he left on a Thursday. So um, yeah. Fuck dude. AWKWARD!!!
Update 6/23/04: I should include some background information on this relationship to explain how unfortunate is is for everyone involved. They got married because she got pregnant and they are both way too Christian for an abortion and for some odd reason apparently didn't want to give it up for adoption either. So logically, even though they'd been dating for less than a year, they got married in January of 2002. On this evening, 2 and a half years later, the D-word came up for the first time, at least to my knowledge. I didn't mean to evesdrop, but unfortunately they chose to argue in the kitchen, whose floor air vents connect directly to the ceiling air vents in my room. The first phrase that caught my attention was him yelling at her, "So you wanna go have sex with other people is that it?" I shuffled about and made some noise for a bit, quite uncomfortably, especially since I'd wanted to go upstairs for some tea. Then I caved to curiosity and decided that if they were going to make it too awkward for their own tennant to enter the kitchen then I was entitled to listen a little. The next thing I heard was him yelling again, "I don't want to get a divorce but if you don't.." and then she interrupted and said, "Well if that's what we have to do then that's what we have to do." Then something slammed and I've since heard water running but no more voices. So either he killed her, or much more likely, he got pissed slammed a door and one of them is taking a shower to cool off. But is it safe for me to get my tea yet?
Update 6/25/04: Take the drama up a notch. Today, my household went full on Jerry Springer. Fuckin A. The wife's parents are here and I can hear she and her mom screaming at the top of their lungs at each other. Apparently her mom was trying to hit her, which is suprem-o fucked up, and she was screaming, "Don't fucking hit me" to which her mom replied, "You're being a fucking bitch!" Wow, you better believe if that was my mom that'd be the last thing she'd ever say to me. Anyway, poor wife, because I really kinda like her, it's her husband that sucks, and yet even her parents are fuck-ups. So she's screaming, "We're not even divorced yet we're trying to work things out." At this point, despite my hatred for every person and dog in this house, my heart has gone out to her in a way. She got knocked up, her husband's a fascist pig who believes his dog has a higher impact on society than his wife, and to top it all off, her parents are apparently horrible abusive people. It's one thing to smack a kid's hand for touching a hot stove, it's quite another to bitch slap your 24 year old married daughter. That is FUUUUCCKED UP.
Update 8/26/04: First of all, I washed every dish in the house this weekend and I loaded the dishwasher and ran it. I noticed this week that the dishes were piling up in the sink again as usual. So today when I came home from work I opened the dishwasher to find, lo and behold, no one had even emptied it since I ran it on Saturday. There was a cookie sheet and a muffin tin in there that had water sitting in them and had already rusted. The pile of dishes in the sink, I should add, had slabs of cheese with bits of cereal in it, since it had started out as milk earlier in the week. There was also a big hunk of ground beef sitting on top of the mound that had been exposed to air so long it was turning brown and hard. The pile was so high it was pushing into the faucet. Disgusted, I emptied the dishwasher but I'm leaving the sink full of dishes to see if anyone else in the household has any conscience. Then, I decided to do some laundrey. Upon opening the washing machine, I was hit with the stench of urine so strong it took my breath away. This wasn't just regular urine, it was the "I stayed out all night drinking and pissed in the washing machine" kind of piss. I use piss to describe it very deliberately, as piss is a foul and repugnant word, much like the people I live with. Anyway, so the wife, Jodie, evidentally got so drunk she pissed her pants in large quantities, and wrang them out in the washing machine sometime over the weekend. Today is Thursday, and all that was in the machine was a single pair of size 6 pink panties soaked in a pool of urine. Remember, too, that the piss has been brewing in there all week now, since nobody actually turned the washing machine on. Just when I think it can't get any worse, it does.

7. This is about half their fault, half mine. By nature I'm a very non-confrontational person. I'm more of a passive aggressive type. I'd rather scrape your razor stubble off the soap with your toothbrush than mention that finding your hairs in the bathroom sink bother me. But, with enough provocation, I'll stand up for myself normally. (Just ask the Harris County Police Department) Unfortunately, these are not normal circumstances. I have to work up the balls to ask these people to move their car. Not because they scare me or anything, but because you can cut the tension in this house with a knife. There are 2 levels of conversation: a.) "Hey did you have a good weekend? The weather was nice." and b.) "You fucking son of a bitch I knew you were sleeping with another woman!" So naturally, I have to strain to keep any conversation in the "a" column.

UPDATE 8/10/04:

Holy Mother of God. That time I got arrested for beating up that guy in high school has nothing on me now. I have never been this pissed off in my entire life, bar none. You see, my roommate, Sean, who owns the house, has gone to Texas to see his mom in person and tell him that he and the wifey are getting divorced. He also took his 2 year old daughter with him. I was enjoying the solitude for awhile, that is, one day. Because the night after he left his wife called at 11:30 completely drunk and then proceeded to tell me that it was only 10 o'clock, nevermind the fact that I had to get up for work at 6 the next morning. Anyway, today when I came home from work I found the wife, Jodie, who was wearing so much makeup I thought for a moment I'd stepped onto the set of the Queen of the Desert. I smelled Aqua Velva before I even entered the house, no kidding. And, of course, there was a harley belonging to a man I can only describe as Billy Ray Cyrus parked in the driveway. Embarrassed, Jodie boogied out of the house as quickly as she could with her white trash date (who, incidentally, she charged with date-raping her not a month ago, despite the fact that they've been fucking for over 9 months- explain that one to me). So I went downstairs to my hobbit-hole in the basement. After a few minutes, I heard loud rythmic crashing sounds coming from outside and I immediately recognized the sounds as hail. In a panic, I ran upstairs to rescue my car, which I've owned for less than a year. To my dismay, when I opened up the garage, the Harley was parked inside, crosswise, so as to block the entire garage from entry. Now, I pay rent here. I'm not sleeping with anyone who's married, particularly not the wife of the man who owns the house. And yet, this fucked up yokel apparently has more right to park in the garage at my house than I do. I quickly dragged the Harley out of the garage and down the driveway with super-human baby-rescuing strength. Then I hopped into my Subaru and wheeled it into the garage, just as the hail stopped. But not before I was pelted with several golfball sized hailstones that left me with some hefty bruises. I got out of my car, surveyed the damage, and summed up the cost of everything I've owned that these people, my roommates, have destroyed. Every fiber of my being twitched with hatred. Then, like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, I bent over at the waist and bellowed the loudest scream of rage that the earth has ever known. Elk, high up in the Rocky Mountains, heard the animal howl of an anger unleashed and stampeded in panic. The neighbors, calmly sitting at their dinner tables, dropped their forks and covered their ears as the shrill siren that was my voice pierced the air. I was pretty sure, for just a moment, that my skin was about to peel back and some winged beast of the apocalypse would emerge and smite the sinners. But no. As the wind left my lungs, the scream that could curdle your blood began to wane, and soon was a mere echo in the wind, drowned by the sound of the rain falling on my roommate's wife's boyfriend's Harley. And now, after having lost the battle, I gather my strength for the war.

Update 1/15/05:

I haven't updated this in awhile, so let me fill you in. Yes, there have been MANY minor battles since that last one. I have completely stopped washing my dishes, since doing so requires me to wash theirs along with mine, just so I can make enough space in the sink to get mine under the faucet. I have also cut way back on buying milk, since they continue to get free government milk, yet seem to prefer to drink mine before they crack theirs open. One night, my roommates actively fought back by locking me out of the house. My house key is a copy of a copy, so long ago I gave up on struggling with the front door lock. I simply punch the button on the garage door opener and the inside door is never locked. So when I came home one night after a movie, I didn't expect for the inside door to be locked. Why it would be locked, I'm not sure, since the garage door was closed and cannot be raised without the remote. Sadly, the door from the garage to the house has a key broken off in the deadbolt, so there is no getting in that way. Peeved, I was forced to monkey with the front door lock, which has to be jiggled for about 5 minutes prior to opening. And it was snowing. So I've also taken to deliberately spilling oatmeal on the carpet. Recently, I went into the upstairs bathroom to blow my nose and apparently someone had been out all night drinking about a week ago, pissed orange concentrated booze urine into the toilet, and then left the lid up and refused to flush it for a few days. What the fuck. How much effort does it take to push the handle down? Apparently too much. I have also switched my schedule at work, so that I work Sundays through Thursdays, which leaves my Fridays and Saturdays free. I have noticed since I've had Fridays off, that my "self employed" roommate Sean actually sleeps till around 10 on the weekdays, then goes down into the basement to play video games for about 5 hours while his 3 year old daughter plays alone upstairs. Anyway, I've got a new apartment I'm looking forward to within a month, and the greatest most glorious finish of all is to follow: for the past few years since the child was born, Sean and Jodie have taken to drinking themselves to sleep every night. Sean usually has a few glasses of wild turkey on the rocks, and Jodie's favorites are martinis and vodka sours. Every morning there are several pints of hard liquor missing from the bottles, and they go through one of each a week. So, this behavior has continued until about a week ago. About around the same time I noticed a glucose test for pregnant women in the fridge. Yesterday, Jodie started wearing maternity shirts again, and the little bump is already plainly visible. Now, I can do math, and most women don't show until their third or even fourth month! Which, of course, means that she's been getting piss drunk and passing out every night up until now. To add to the glory, she and her husband have not had sex in over a year. So now she will be bringing into this world yet another unwanted child (and possibly a flipper baby from all that boozing), not only out of wedlock, but a bastard, as well. They can lock one child alone in a room for hours and pretend they don't have it, but what will happen when they have two? Luckily, I won't be around to see it.

The Last Little Jab: I put a listing up on the bulletin board at work to sell a couple things I didn't want to have to pack. I already sold my snowboard, and a few years ago I bought a brand new car cover for around $35, and never even took it out of the box. I listed it on the bulletin board and someone offered $15 for it, which I was happy about. So when I got home I went to the spot in the garage where it had been sitting and there was an empty square in the dust where the box used to be. I searched the entire house only to conclude that, yes, my roommates threw it in the trash that had already been picked up. So....a few weeks ago I noticed a strange hole in the basement floor. It's a deliberate hole, partially covered with a lid of heavy duty black plastic. It's about 2 and a half feet in diameter, which is pretty damn big for a hole in your foundation. It's lined with aluminum siding material and when I shone the flashlight down there I couldnt' see the bottom. So anyway, I think as my final jab I'm going to toss a slab of meat down there before I leave. That should leave the place smelling nice.