Filthiest roommate ever.
It's Pat, hands-down.

Pat was the bass player in a friend of mine's reggae band. Pat moved into my house.

Pat was a filthy bastard.

His bedroom was just off the front room, and the front room soon became a no-go area for me and anyone I cared to bring by, due to the fetid odour emanating from Pat's room. No worries, there, lots of room in the rest of the house.

I know it's prosaic, but Pat did not do dishes. Ever. I tried everything to change this -- from the passive-aggressive approach of immediately cleaning up after him in the hope that he would come to appreciate the kitchen always being clean and feel vaguely shitty about having someone else clean up his mess. (This is the approach that reformed me from my formerly slovenly ways.) It didn't work for him, so I switched gears, and stopped doing any of his dishes, which effectively meant abandoning the kitchen altogether.

The most he would ever do was rinse off dishes and utensils as needed -- it didn't bother him that every surface was covered in filthy clutter, or that he was eating off dishes that were usually kept under a layer of composting organic material. When every dish in the house was soiled, he hit upon a solution -- he went to his storage unit and brought home two more boxes of dishes.

But still, this is really not remarkable stuff, is it? We've all seen these.

No, what sets Pat apart is this:

One day I returned from a weekend at my girlfriend's, and Pat informed me that the toilet wasn't working. The unspoken assertion was that it was my toilet, and therefore my responsibility to set it right, even though in spite of its unflushable state he had continued to fill it up as dictated by the ineluctable demands of peristalsis. Let's leave aside the cheek of his refusal to stoop to having a go with the plumber's helper himself, and instead expecting me to look after things after he'd contributed two days' more worth of poop to the problem.

Why was the toilet not working?

The toilet was not working because I had been away at my girlfriend's for a few days, and so had not been there to buy new bog-rolls when the supply had been exhausted. (Pat, of course, would never walk the block-and-a-half to the store and make the two-dollar expenditure required to maintain usual anal hygeine. This is a completely alien thought; banish it utterly from your mind.)

What is such a creature to do in such a situation?

It's obvious: Use coffee filters. (My coffee filters, of course -- this was another consumable item that Pat considered only right and proper that I should supply him with.) He just brought the whole box of 200 right into the bathroom for convenient use, and left them on top of the cistern.

To be fair, I must concede that they were #2 filters.

Pat was looking for a new address after that weekend, I'm afraid. I'm pretty tolerant, but...
(Larry_Mudd, Sat 7 Apr 2007, 23:41, Reply)