Ok. Yesterday, my girlfriend discovered a mouse nest under the bed. So this means... that a group, a family if you will, of mice, were having a partay under our bed. Is that nasty or what? I mean how nasty is that. I have always know that I am ... a little messy, ok I am downright slob when it comes down to it. But vermon living in the same bed with you, really now.

What is the nastiest, grossest thing you have ever found in your house?

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Answers

You mean other than my last roommate?

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

And other than my ex-husband?

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

Well, not sure if this counts because it wasn't my house, but here are some disgusting things I found at someone else's house.

I had a friend in elementary school who had gotten her big toe crushed somehow and ended up losing her toenail. She saved the nail, probably out of fascination because it was green, yellow and black, and came off all in one piece. That toenail sat on top of her stereo speaker for years, on display. She showed it to people on purpose.

We lost touch in high school, since I chose to be in the 'throw away old toenails' crowd, and the last I heard of her was she married right after high school, had three kids, got divorced and lives with some guy in his 60's in his trailer. I wonder if she took her prized nail with her when she moved? My other elem. school friends and I still talk about that toenail.

This is the worst - I have also been in a house that probably should have been condemned. I babysat for a single mom who didn't care if her kids threw food on the floor because 1.) she did it too, and 2.) you couldn't really see the food once it settled to the bottom of the layer of trash that was all over every floor of every room. She was a 250 pound nudist, and had no problem leaving around sexually explicit stories that she printed off the internet, and I would find them laying around next to a bottle of K-Y jelly sometimes. I tried not to think too much about what it all meant.

One night I was having trouble getting her daughters to go to sleep, they kept fighting. I separated them, and put the younger one in her mom's room. A few minutes later I peeked in to check on her, and found her rummaging through the bottom drawer of a dresser. When I asked what she was doing, she leaped back into the waterbed and closed her eyes, apparently to make me think she had really been laying there asleep the whole time. As the bed slooshed around from the impact, I heard another sound. A buzzing, humming sound. Coming from behind the child's back. Oh no. Please, God, don't let it be a vibrator.

It was. I had to pry it from the little girl's hand, and when I went to put it back in the drawer, I saw there were about 2 dozen assorted dildos and vibrators. All crusty. YUK!!!! As I washed my hands, nearly scalding the first two layers of skin off my hands, I realized I had to tell their mom what had happened, because otherwise she might think I had been the one snooping in her 'personal drawer'. The next morning when I told her, she just asked me to check the girl's backpack and make sure she didn't take one to school. She had done that before. Good grief.

Oh, and one more thing. There were a million dead ants all over the 'personal drawer' because some flavored gel had spilled and she always had a terrible ant problem. She liked to spray them with Raid, and leave hundreds of tiny carcasses stuck to her walls and surfaces. Pretty sick, eh?

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

Jesus, that toenail story almost made me vomit and then you follow it up with an ant-encrusted dildo story? Please tell me both of those were made up.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

Allison, I wish so badly that those were made up stories. They will haunt me always.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

i woke up to a mouse chewing on my hair during my first semester at school...roommate was truly psycho and disgustingly dirty and attraced mice and ants by the bagful. i moved out pronto. after screaming loud enough to wake the entire hall. i am shuddering just remembering this.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

mmmmm, speaking of ants in food...

we had a huge problem with carpenter ants in the house i grew up in. for those of you who aren't familiar with carpeter ants, they are 3 times as large as regular ants and 10 times as disgusting. anyhooo, i came home from school one day to a note from mom saying "we're having tacos for dinner, please start browning the meat at 6:30". a package of ground beef sat next to the note, where mom had placed it that morning to thaw. so i got out the pan and was about to tear off the plastic and styrofoam tray dealie the meat comes on when i notice....ants. big black carpenter ants, crawling in and around and over. the little buggers has chewed their way through the plastic to feast on raw hamburger.

it took me awhile to get over that one.

i yelled at mom and told her to thaw the meat in the refrigerator from then on.

surprisingly, for once she agreed with me!

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

The last year I was in my last apartment, before I bought my house, for some reason that winter I was OVERRUN with mice. Truly. Overrun. They would dance and caper in the pantry, which incidentally was only an open shelf with no doors, practically in front of my three cats.

Okay, so I have the most lazy, useless cats in all the land. I bought traps, and baited them with peanut butter. For maybe four, five weeks I caught at least one mouse every two days. I thought I had the Gateway of Mice in my apartment. Unbelievable.

At last the flood stopped. "Thank goodness," I said to myself, "that's over." A couple weeks passed. No mice.

One fine day, I was making a spaghetti sauce, and I reached into the aforementioned pantry and pulled out a can of tomatoes. There was something... odd stuck to the label.

I checked things out, and realised that in fact, there had been one last mouse. Caught in the trap I'd finally forgotten about checking. Forgotten maybe two, three weeks before. The mouse had melted. It had dissolved. The only solid thing in it was its little jawbone, and I know this because it fell out when I picked it up (in rubber gloves that I disposed of like nuclear waste afterwards).

The only curious thing was that despite this excess of decomposition, it didn't smell at all.

Then there was the squirrel that fell into a rain-filled garbage can one fall, drowned and got found the next spring. But that was outside.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

One of my old college roommates would save the condoms after she and her various boyfriends had sex. They were trophies to her, I guess. She would hang them on the wall -- so you'd come in after a weekend away and there would be, like, eight used condoms stuck to the wall.

The house down the road from mine in high school was populated by some very strange, very dirty people. Their kids invited me in one afternoon, and I literally sprinted home after walking and and seeing that the floor was covered with piles of dog poo (they had a whole bunch of mean mongrel dogs) and moldy garbage. There were cockroaches and maggots everywhere. Maggots! I wish I were kidding. *shudder*

Mary Ellen

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

I was going to ask one of those unanswerable questions. I.e., why do people who are able to live in filth only exhibit that ability AFTER you room with them?

I had a couple of friends in college and they each blamed the mess in their room on the other one. So I flipped a coin when we were all looking for roommates after school and chose to live alone. They transferred their roommate situation to a house and proceeded to trash it. Again, one would point to the other and blame their messy ways for the tidal waves of cat hair and food containers and clothing and printed material and shoes and hair accessories (etc.)

Living alone got expensive and I was working three jobs. One of the roommates went away. The other said she needed a roommate, and wasn't it great that the messy one with the 6 cats had gone home? Yeah, sure.

I saw her house, though, right after the 'messy' roommate left. It was untidy but clean enough. Nice furniture handed down from mommy and daddy's house. There was an ill-behaved Pomeranian puppy and an antisocial cat, both both smelled and looked clean. (Also 'illbehaved puppies' and 'antisocial cats' aren't unusual things.)

Moved in. I worked 2nd shift. She worked 1st (like normal people do). I'd be awakened at 8:15 every morning by the sound of her banging around, already 15 minutes late to work before leaving the house. Wpould avoid coming out until roommate was gone because roommate was bleeding heart liberal and liked watching news shows in the nude fresh out of the shower and arguing. (I'm on the liberal side myself, but don't like logic-free political discourse with naked 300 pound women at 8 am.) Would come out after she left to find smelly unwashed robe, towel, hairy hairbrush, barrettes, rejected clothing items, breakfast remains, wet depression in brocade couch, traumatized cat, TV blaring, etc., etc., in common areas. Appliances would often be left on (irons, toasters, coffeepots, etc). I'd drag myself out of bed either because I smelled something burning or imagined I smelled something burning. I'd have a clean-up job to do right off the bat. I'd put all food items away, unplug all appliances, go back to bed. At 1 or so, I'd have to get up to go to work by 4. I'd take a cardboard box around the house and load it up with detritus in the common areas, place box in stinky room, shut door.

Ill-behaved Pomeranian was allowed to get outside and was never seen again (putting signs up was too much work) but anti-social cat stayed behind and was completely unsocialied, hid under things, tried to escape constantly (who can blame it?). I considered it a major coup when the cat started sitting on my lap and relaxing every once in a while. Cat was agitated by movement and so was mostly in room, as I'd have to move to clean house. So cat lived in room and roomamte was slack about cleaning cat box. Room reeked of poop, was wall-to-wall with cardboard boxes, 8-month-unwashed sheets, roller poopie balls everywhere, catlitter crumbs, rotting food, stinky cups and glassware, dirty clothes, etc. Would pack towel up against bottom of door when home alone to block stench.

When roommate got home, every day had same ritual: would immediately drop fast-food dinner on counter and start to strip starting at the back door. Purse on counter, papers and trash and mail on other counter, keys on or near table, shoes in doorway to trip over, coat on chair, headband and jewelry (wore copious amount) all over every flat surface in living room, would strip to bra and underwear and sometimes would strip out of underwear and stockings. NEVER knew when she was about to have her cycle, and would leave nasty brown undies knotted up with dity-foot-stained pantyhose in plain sight in middle of living room floor. Smelly shoes would congregate in hall, empty family-size bags of greasy snacks would be emptied and left out on the floor or on furniture, wet rain gear would be put on top of non- water-proof delicate objects...generally, no common sense or shame at all. She'd talk constantly, too--there was a constant stream of chatter, and you could only get away from it by leaving the room. So if she wanted to watch TV, forget actually hearing anything going on. She'd complain about how people were mean to her, and it would usually be because she had been irresponsible in some way. She was perpetually late to work and sullen about doing work she didn't enjoy and unprofessionally attired in one of her 5 usually unwashed outfits. She 'borrowed' and stretched out and destroyed a pair of my white sneakers, which she wore as mules. When I couldn't find them, she admitted that she'd forced my size 7.5 shoes on her size 9.5 feet and had worn them because she couldn't FIND hers.

She'd go on diets and then I'd find my food missing. I was about a size 6 at the time and I would eat Pop-Tarts and junk all the time (not recommended, by the way). I'd get a yen for some chips or a bit of junk food, and my roommate would have cleaned me out and put the empty boxes back in the cabinets, as if I'd believe I'd absentmindedly cleaned out an entire box of crackers and then put the empty continer into the cabinet to sit. She had money, a car and we were half a mile from a 24-hour grocery. I did not, at the time, have a car, so I'd walk. When she ate my groceries, I'd have to walk up there and replace things with money I couldn't spare because she was too lazy to drive herself up there and buy her OWN junk food.

She owned 7 cassettes and proclaimed that she loved music: John Denver with the Muppets singing Xmas songs, the Blues Brothers soundtrack, TWO Corey Hart casettes, Elton John hits, a scratchy / trebelly / nearly-dead Bach classical tape, and something else so hideous that I've blocked it out entirely. She blared these at all hours. She sang along.

She was highly religious, went to church each week, thought I was going to hell because I didn't feel the need to do the same. (The problem would be the 'going to hell' part, I don't care whether you do to church, of course...my current roomamte is a devout Catholic, we have no religious issues.) She was a good cook, and got the idea that she wanted to be a kitchen witch so she started reading witch books and fancying herself a spell-casting witch (BTW, she did NOT call herself a pagan, nor a Wiccan, she was clear on the fact that she was a witch and it had nothing to do with religion). Started buying bulk herbs and letting them rot in the refrigerator and cabinets. Had stinky cheese-cloth bundles lining her bathtub (never scrubbed). The disposal would choke on stems and leaves of various things all the time. In between her practicing her choir pieces in the bathtub, she was soaking in herbs and trying to manipulate people's free will with magic and spells. Nice, huh?

Would regularly forget to pay bills she said she'd take care of, and my job was restaurant management / waitressing (at the time) so my income was more sporadic. I'd put off paying my own bills and not go to the grocery store to pay her on time only to find out she didn't take care of the bills she said she had already paid. Her parents frequently bailed her out.

She read romance novels and was convinced that this was how men and women interacted with each other. She had never had a real date, poor thing. (The one time she got set up in college, the guy was a jerk and flirted all night with someone else.) Her sex education was solely based on these books.

There was a hard luck case at my job, who had started off seeming like a nice enough guy, but he got progressively worse. She befriended him when she'd come to han gout at my job to join in on our after-work plans. He had told us horror stories about his home life/roommates and at first I was sympathetic, and said he could crash on our floor or sofa if things got bad. She was fine with that because he was fairly attractive. Then I found out he was a crackhead. I told her to watch out. It was too late. She thought she was in lurve. As for him, he knew he'd found a patsy. She was not often graced with male attention because she was shy and heavy (and sometimes didn't smell good). He showered her with attention and she started giving him money. I came home one day and there was a lump on the floor and it was the crackhead. I was livid. We had a discussion, she said that I'd offered him our floor. I countered that this was long before we knew he was a crackhead. She didn't understand the distinction, and went outside to hug and comfort the poor baby, who was pissy that he'd been awakened. I went to bed and locked my door. When she got up to check on him the next morning, unsurprisingly he was long gone and he'd stolen money from her purse. She regularly got money from mom and dad and fashed huge rolls she'd pull from the ATM (didn't like the chore of getting money out of the machines, so would walk around paying for everything off a huge wad until it ran out). Wouldn't be so bad, except it was rent money. Mom and dad bailed her out again.

She found out the crackhead had checked himself into the VA Hospital and promptly became Florence Nightningale, going over after work every night with food and treats. (She got a shock when they refused to let him have a Bic razor to shave with.) He took about $800 from her, blew it in one weekend on crack (and god knows what else, because I don't think any human could smoke $800 worth of crack in three days) and then she spent another $2-300 dollars on him buying him toiletries and food and gifts and clothing.

Meanwhile she continued leaving piles of crap for me to clean up. The smell didn't improve, and I'd end up cleaning twice a day just so I wouldn't be ashamed to live there. (When tidied, it was a nice place.) We had bugs, but they were solely in her room, because that's where the filth was. (I never saw an ant or roach or anything else in my room or in the common areas, but saw them frequently in her room.) She continued to forget to pay bills for our apartment and I was struggling financially myself. I'd had enough. I'd been dating a nice guy and she was evil to him, told him he was mean to take me away from her. He found this scary. I moved out (NOT with the nice guy, though a year and a half later, that did happen).

She lost her job and moved away from the apartment and went home to mom and dad, where I HEAR they bought her a boutique and stocked it with sundry cute things to sell to people. I suspect she's still selling tschotchkes today.

That'd be both the grossest thing in my apartment, ever (tops the bug stories I told in another thread) and my worst roommate ever.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

I should have known better than to read this thread. Now I'm in desperate need of a shower. A very hot, very soapy shower, with lots of loofah scrubbing.

Yet I still feel the need to contribute. When my family and I lived in San Diego we living in a naval housing complex that was basically built upon a humungous roach hill. My mom kept the place pretty clean, but no matter what, there were roaches everywhere. In every nook and cranny and every piece of furniture. It took years after we moved away to get rid of those damned roaches.

I don't want to even think about whether or not those suckers ever crawled on me while I slept. *shudder*

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

I'm a little messy myself, although I never have piles of dishes or dirty laundry or anything like that lying around, as I really hate filth. I'm more the kind of guy who leaves huge piles of letters, newspapers, magazines and other paperwork in his wake, and yes, they're all over the place. Anyway, last year, some friends got me this huge flower arrangement to celebrate my new job. Unfortunately, the bouquet came with a little surprise. For weeks after that, my house was infested with fruitflies. They got into everything, and I only got rid of them after throwing out all the food and my plants as well. I still get the shivers thinking about it now.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000

Note to self: Do not read threads like this while eating.

Gah.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000