Apropos of the 5402 thread on wandering to which I will contribute very soon I promise, a story:
Sebastian, whose disaster roommates make my disaster roommate look like Martha Stewart, moved recently. In the interest of background, he had a rotating cast of three roommates in the old house who may well have been the models for Kay Hymowitz's description of the modern single male. The house was a complete pigsty. The stove was crusty. There were two of each kitchen appliance, but nothing in usable condition. One of the roommates was addicted to video games and slept on the living room couch so he could get more gaming time in. One appeared because he decided to quit his construction job in Utah or something one day and move across the country for no reason. He forged a resume and became a waiter, and brought in the other roommate, who was the manager at his restaurant. This guy was about 40, worked about 20 different jobs in two months, and had his tax return docked because he was behind on his child support. He also stole from the other roommates. And so on.
So when the one sort of decent guy announced he was moving out, and the 40-year-old delinquent child support guy announced he was moving upstairs next to Sebastian, Sebastian decided to move out. (At this point, delinquent child support guy conveniently met a girl at a club and decided to move in with her the next week, so he left too.)
Sebastian found a room in another house where he'd only have one roommate, whom the landlord promised to find, so that seemed like a better bet. When he got back from Chicago with me and started to move, he discovered that his other two roommates had apparently fled (without paying rent) and, moreover, left all of their stuff behind--stereo, espresso machine, kitchen appliances, dining room set, everything. So Sebastian and his remaining roommate sold some of it and appropriated the rest. In the process, I got a sweet free espresso maker. True, I had to dig it out of a coffee and sour milk-encrusted skin three inches thick, and I'm still not sure if it works (haven't tried), but it could be a great thing.
But when Sebastian arrived at his new house, he discovered that instead of a roommate, he would be sharing the house with some unexpected guests--namely, an Ethiopian family living in the basement. According to the landlord, they're only going to stay until the end of the month and then go back to Ethiopia, but it's not clear if that's true, and they haven't really explained their status. (At one point, they told him they were "on vacation"--in the basement.) Despite the obvious awkwardness of sharing a house with a family, especially since the family is in the basement and he's in the master bedroom, Seb has concluded that he prefers the family, who is at least orderly and clean and sometimes shares its meals with him, to his previous roommates. (The baby is also, amazingly, quieter than the video gamer, the "pew-pew-pew" of whose virtual guns could be heard at 3 am.) So he calls the new living situation a net gain.
Monday, January 26, 2009
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8 comments:
I suggest Seb, in light of his impending law school matriculation, read the Wikipedia article about the permanent income hypothesis and adjust accordingly. That, or get a book deal for “Dreams of My Ethiopian Family: In the Basement.”
The best thing is that people fled and left behind sellable items.
Credit checks, background checks, reference checks, employment checks.
I am wondering if the take-away from Sebastian's experience is that we should all move to Ethiopia...
The more I read of these 20-something roommate horror stories, the more I appreciate my blind-in-one-eye, sprayed-with-Agent-Orange-in-Vietnam, forced-to-retire-for-health-reasons older brother who moved in for a few months eight years ago and never left.
Hum III: Sounds like a recipe for a personal subprime mortgage crisis.
Lori: Who's going to pay for all that? We use craigslist to lower transaction costs, not raise them.
MGC: What was he doing before that?
Phone calls to verify employment and check references are free. The prospective roommate can provide a credit report. That shouldn't be more than $20; in some states, you can get a free one every year. As for background checks, you can at least find out for free if someone is a registered sex offender.
For a few phone calls, your friend could have found out that the guy who had 20 jobs in two months didn't have a steady job and the gamer probably didn't have any job at all. For me, that alone would rule them out as roommates.
It's a wonder that I have had such good roommates in graduate school. But I think that's the difference between living with random twentysomethings and twentysomethings who work in science or medicine.
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