One of the greatest things about living in off-campus housing in Athens or Columbus is the bonds you’ll make with your housemates. That is, if you’re not renting a place by yourself. On the other hand, one of the biggest perils of sharing housing with other folks is, we’ll be blunt, the risk of living with an a**hole. Or heaven forbid, two or three.
Yet, there’s a variety of degrees and types when it comes to terrible housemates; some are much worse than others. In order to help you detect when a prospective housemate is a lemon (using an apt used-car term), we’re providing a primer on some of the worst. But beware, however well you screen a prospective housemate, you may end up not learning how truly awful this person is until after you’ve signed the lease, moved in, and almost immediately begun finding beaver dams of black hairs clogging up the shower drain.
Avoid the Slob
If you trend toward the middle or neat side of the neat-freak/slob continuum, you of course will want to avoid living with Pigpen. There’s nothing fun about being confronted with a sink full of dirty dishes when you get home from class or wake up in the morning. There’s nothing cool about being surrounded by someone else’s grime caked on shower walls, dirty clothes flung on furniture and floors in common areas, and beer and wine bottles left on the front porch rails.
Avoid the Neurotic Clean Freak
It should be left without saying that as a young adult living on your own for the first time, you’d rather not have a surrogate mom screaming at you to wash the dishes or clean the bathroom or vacuum the floors. (This assumes that you’re not a slob but fit somewhere in the middle of the clean/slob continuum.)
Keep Miles Away From Chatterbox
Some people can’t help themselves. They talk constantly, and if you do get a word in edgewise, they interrupt. If you’re considering living in off-campus housing close to OSU or Ohio University, and your prospective housemate shows signs of being a chatterbox, steer clear. This is one of the easiest problem personalities to detect for an obvious reason; they talk all the time. A close relation to the chatterbox is the “one-upper.” You likely know some people like this. No matter what you have to say, they’ll always butt in with something that’s bigger, better, more exciting or funnier. If you say you had a great summer trip to the Outer Banks, they’ll say, “Well, that’s nothing, we visited the Mediterranean Coast of Spain.” If you say you have a great dog at home, they’ll say their family dog is an award-winning Flemish Llama Retriever. If you say you love the burritos at the corner joint in Athens or Columbus, they’ll say their uncle owns the best Mexican restaurant in Ohio.
Beware the Mooch
Nothing can be as annoying as the housemate who is always borrowing clothing or food or money. If this bugs you after a few days, just imagine what it will be like after weeks of living with the guy or gal who casually asks, “Hey, do you mind if I bum that hoodie in the back of your closet?” Or frequently drops comments like this: “I hope you don’t mind; I ate that left-over pizza in the fridge.”
Believe us, we realize that we’ve merely scratched the surface in detailing a few different types of awful housemates. You’ll have plenty of opportunity in the next year or two to discover a multitude of other terrible, rotten, no-good, moronic types of people. Pray that you won’t have to live with any of them.