Anyone who’s ever agonized for long about an apartment search has probably agonized for some very good reasons. Finding the perfect place in the perfect location is one of the secrets to living an effective life. Place is sometimes more important than the roommate situation, because location is almost always the emphasis on any advice about moving. That doesn’t mean the roommate isn’t important, because there is plenty of evidence of times when the wrong roommate has made a situation much more colorful than anyone could have anticipated.
Most people who have lived in different places have had interesting roommate stories. These days, most people do end up living in a variety of cities and situations. It’s also pretty likely that everyone has a crazy roommate story, and there are enough sites on the web by now that they begin to look like rather interesting collections. Eventually someone will start compiling lists of the best of the worst, but for now it’s enough fun to look through examples of good intentions meeting with unlikely characters.
The worst of these can help to remind us that a thorough roommate search is a very good idea, and knowing how to judge good character is a necessary skill. In most cases where the crazy roommates turn into the stuff of good fiction, there is ample evidence ahead of time that things might go wrong. Trusting one’s first impressions can certainly help. At the same time, there is a hint of a suggestion that sometimes a strange roommate experience is something that we all welcome, at least at times in our lives, because crazy behavior is awfully interesting.
The stories do have tendencies to overlap, and eventually one crazy roommate becomes confused with another, so that it’s easy to start to break them into categories. The most entertaining ones usually involve some kind of intoxicants, sleeplessness, or are tales where subtle neurotic tendencies start to go haywire. They all do have one thing in common, however. What, at the time, may have been remarkably unpleasant experiences eventually turn into wonderful stories, and they ring true for most of the readers. This is probably because the experiences do make us better people, able to laugh at ourselves, and inspire us to keep meeting new people and trying new things. They also remind us that everyone is capable of doing strange things every now and then, and perhaps somewhere we are on someone’s crazy roommate list.