The worst things I ever did to my roommate

So, a year or two back I had a roommate - not Keltie, some other entirely unsuspecting innocent. I won't name her, just in case I decide to post a sequel to this missive, listing the iffy things she perpetrated upon me.

Note that two of the three things here were done ACCIDENTALLY.

One day I finally got around to doing chores the way she requested, so I cleaned the mould in the bathroom grout with her old toothbrush (totally kosher). I didn't want to put it back in the bag until it dried, so I left it hanging over the sink before we headed out to a big house party.
The next day, we were both really hung over. I was in a comforter cocoon, squinting as I tried to watch TV, when she eventually crawled out of bed. A while later she appeared, and apologized for most likely using my toothbrush. She held out two pink toothbrushes and asked me which one was mine. Naturally, I didn't have a pink toothbrush. I sort of blinked at her for a while, trying to find a good way to break the truth. "Umm, bad news honey, if you didn't use your toothbrush . . . "
Needless to say she brushed her teeth repeatedly with the propper toothbrush afterwards, and used half a bottle of scope.

My friend Carly picked me up so we could go dog-walking for someone, and we chatted with my roommate then fiddled around before we left in her car. I thought I would be prudent in locking the door behind me as it was winter and already dark, so I called out a farewell to the roomie then locked my door and headed out.
en we returned 40 minutes later, my roommate was sitting on the stoop with some laundry beside her. She had forgotten I was heading out, and she had been just below us, doing laundry, when we left . . . without her apartment key. She realized it just as the car started up, so she ran out of the laundry room and down the driveway after us, but we didn't hear or see her. If any of you have seen our driveway, you know that it is the steepest driveway around, the bane of taxi drivers. She made it halfway down the driveway before she tripped and fell, but didn't stop - she slid the last ten metres, right over the sidewalk, and ended up half in the gutter. Naturally, she had left a fair ammount of skin behind. The manager wasn't in, and noone else had the key, so she had no choice but to wait, though she didn't know how long I would be.
Fortunately after she used up about 20 of my bandaids and half a tube of polysporin, she was willing to forgive me, and she thought it was pretty funny. I was the one who winced the most when she happily showed off all the gravel-burn to all our friends.

And last and most culpable, my (ex)boyfriend called me early one morning to help him with something, so despite knowing my groceries would be delivered shortly, I headed out. To make sure my poor roomie (who is the most zombie-like thing I've ever seen until she gets half a pot of coffee into her) answered the doorbell, I posted a nice big sign on the door saying "will be in bed, ring really loud".

So, what's the worst thing you have ever done to a roomie, or had done to you? I had a subletter once, who used the other subletter's vegetable cleaning brush to clean the mould off the bathroom ceiling. He didn't really see what the big deal was.

My scary aunt should also not read this

My scary born-again Catholic spinster aunt suddenly sent me an email last week, about how my writing is very interesting, but mostly when I write about every-day things. Again, a moment of panic - have my parents actually found my blog? She finally got back to me when I asked her which writing I meant . . . apparently she found a few emails from [literally] years back, and hit the reply button assuming I would know what she was talking about.

She even sent me a sample . . . from four years back. Please note that the pet mentioned, like pretty much all our pets, came to a sad end in a dramatic way soon after this passage. It's not that our pets don't usually have relatively long, fulfulling lives - their exits are just rather extreme. But more on that next post.

So, here's from four years back:



Hello everyone - my life right isn't interesting enough for me to want
to tell anyone about it twice, so I'm doing a mass-email. Here, let me
prove it to you . . .

I got a very good job at a pulp and paper mill for the 4 months of
summer vacation from University. It pays twice as much as I thought I
would get this summer, but it means that I don't have much time to
spend with my friends. Most of them work on the weekend, and so when I
am free most of them are busy with their jobs. Yeah, poor me, right?

Well, I finally found that I CAN get sick of reading hours and hours a
day. I am working in the Health and Safety department, and I do a lot
of computer work, write papers on health issues in the mill, and test
the air for gasses and metals and so on. I like the people I am
working with, but outside of my area I don't think I would enjoy being
there much - it is certainly not the sort of place I would want to work
in for a career. For one thing, you can smell the mill from kilometers
away. A lot of the people who work there have a pretty negative
attitude about the place - the staff workers like me are paranoid about
getting fired, and the union people are almost impossible to fire, so
they complain about anything they want.

The last 4 days I had very little work to do, because my boss was too
busy to even find me any work that he didn't have to help me with.
He told me about the main job I will be doing this summer, but he
didn't give me enough information to do anything beyond a bare beginning.
I will be statistically analysing the effect of the new safety program, using
Microsoft Excel. He basically left me in my office with an Excel manual
for days -boring, but at least I learned a whole lot about the program -
I will need it for some of the courses I will be doing in September as well.

I haven't written much of anybody this last month, because as you can
tell, work is my life right now, and it isn't very fascinating. My dad
told me that whenever I have nothing to do though, I should just use
Excel to calculate how much money I am making. When I was little and
bored with a job, I use to calculate how many chocolate bars I could
buy with the money I was earning. Now I calculate how many months rent
and food it will cover- if I am very lucky, I will be able to get some sort of job
in Europe next summer - as long as I can make a little money overall, maybe I
will be able to manage it.

Some of my friends are on big trips through Europe right now, and every
time I hear about it I am horribly jealous. But at the same time, I
would much rather live in one place in Europe for several months than
travel all over for a few weeks - now I have done both to some degree,
I realize that really getting to know a culture is much more satisfying
than just seeing the sights and using a phrasebook. And I really need
to practice my German!

I was so bored today that I made a new harness for my rabbit, attatched
it to my dog's leash, and took it for a walk. Unfortunately, my rabbit
doesn't want to go anywhere, or she wants to run at about ten times my
speed - and since I made the harness so stretchy, she jumps forward,
then gets slowed down in the air and snapped back like she's on a bungee cord.
It's amusing for me, but it pisses her off and after a minute she
snorts in dusgust and lays flat on the ground to show her unhapiness.

She's got a lot of personality, especially for a rabbit - when she is
irritated with someone, she will snort, then ignore them and even
refuse to eat until she is satisfied again. When she's really
comfortable, she will flop down on her side with her feet sticking out,
which shows that she trusts you, because she can't get up from that
position very fast. We have her in the house a lot, because she's even
smart enough to know that she can't pee inside - she will even wait for
hours, if we forget to take her out soon enough. We could even make
her an inside rabbit if we wanted, because rabbits can be taught to use
litter boxes like cats, but my mom doesn't like the idea. She things
the rabbit is allright to watch, but she doesn't like it that much -
she says it is too much like a long-eared rat. She has the worst rat phobia
I have ever seen.

Anyways, I have to go water the garden, so I'll be off.

Best wishes,
-Lindsay

So - to update this letter -
This summer I am not yet sick of reading . . . I'm trying to store up, like a camel in an oasis. Not like I don't read too much in the school year anyways.

This year I have the boss (a PR/newsletter writer/communications) person I had last year, and she expects lots from me - so I always have tons of things to do. No extra time to sit around. I like it better, though it was sort of nice to the ego when she was more surprised when I managed to get things done well. Now she has decided that I am reasonably efficient and expects me to stay that way, sigh.

Calculating my healthy paycheck-per-irritating-task is still an excellent way to get over the occasional mind-numbing job.

I'm still wildly jealous every time I hear of someone who is planning a trip to Europe, etc -I've been working here every summer and going to school full time every winter, with no more than two weeks off at a time. Christmas is usually my longest break.

The rabbit, as aforementioned, is no more . . . but I did try to harness-train my cats, and it turned out to be even harder. They just sort of lie there, then eventually do a sort of slow somersault if I try to tug on the harness (made of old tights this time).

Dad has evolved new ways to harass my mom about her rat phobia - his favourite is putting some old short brown wig under the covers for her to find. That always causes some major freak-out. I'm surprised noone has shot my dad yet, now I think about it.

Yeah, things haven't really changed that much, here in the valley.

Who should not read my blog

Right, I went over this topic a few times . . . but somehow I let it slip to the parents that I had a blog. Nothing came of that for a few weeks, so I figured it had slipped by unnoticed . . . then suddenly my dad complained that if I was really working on the stuff he wants me to get done, I wouldn't have time to blog. Instantly my ears flattened back and the whites of my eyes probably flashed, just like my dog when he knows he is headed for a bath.

So after the first wave of panic started to wear off, I realized that he didn't look very pissy, so he probably hadn't read much of it, if any.

(I have been, mwahahaa, smart enough not to use my real name, and to ask friends who link with me not to use it either. I think this is always a good practice, especially because I do have some content containing the paranoid company I work for in here as well. )

So I started testing him to see if he had actually read it, or was just making it sound like he had. After a week of no fireworks when he read some of the earlier entries, I was unsurprised when I asked him how he liked my poetry, and he pretended to be too interested in Steve Nash's fantastic play to give a straight answer. A person less used to his sneaky ways might have been fooled.

Yeah, he so hasn't found this webpage yet . . . .I think he was mostly seeing how much I would panic if I thought he had. Fortunately, I have perfected the art of the silent panic, especially to be used around the parents. My parents especially have mastered the fine art of making me think they know what I have done-and-tried-to-hide.

But, now he knows that somewhere in the ether a blog by yours truly lies, I will take the precautions of resetting some of my favourite blog posts into 'draft' status so they aren't visible. Predictably, these blogs are/were titled:

"Coverup needed, tips required"
"Busted!"
"Waiting to be busted again"
and
"Update on the [actual topic excised]"

I also took the precaution of asking less nosy family members how he learned about my blog, and that is how I found out that he heard about it from my own lips. Darn. So I shall consider the blog 'very low privacy setting' from now on. How very lame.

Jobs I should not do

Someone in HR went home sick today, so they fished up a replacement low-on-the-totem-pole to do her job: me. The job is making mass scripted phonecalls reminding people about an employee appreciation dinner, and telling them they have to RSVP at such and such a number (or immediately, in the slight eventuality that I am talking to a live breathing person of the right name). So I called for one dude, and his dad (I assume) answered, and asked if HE could go, because he was retired from this place. I said something like, "Ummmm, nooooo . . . I think [your son] has to take you, but I don't know the rules. I'm just the phoning monkey."

Seriously, I billed myself as "the phoning monkey".

So, I can totally work of a script - should it be an answering machine. But when there is something written in front of me, I suddenly develop problems when speaking to a person. I have to change things around yet still make conversation, and because it is just this side of mind-numbing, this can be very difficult. After the canned sentence "If you and a guest would like to attend, please leave a message at xxx-xxxx" I suddenly realize that I'm talking to a real person and go "or, umm, you could like tell me, like, um, now, or like phone before Monday". God, I hate this job. Only 40 phonecalls (out of 250) done, and my mind is mush.

Somebody else's slogans

If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.

If you lend someone $20 and never see them again, it was probably worth it.

Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be recalled to their maker.

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.

Never put both feet in your mouth at once, because the you won't have a leg to stand on.

It may be that your sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

For the same reason, never wear granny underwear or tighty whities.

The second mouse gets the cheese.

When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Bad poetry, so bite me. Iambic pentameter my ass.

Now that I have put aside
the work that would not let me rest
I wonder when I really tried
and if that's when I did my best

I am so tired of laying down
the law to get things done
I'd really rather ditch this place
I think I'm gonna run

Away with all this talking
away with all this mess
f**k communication
I cannot take the stress

I'm running down the hall now
I'm heading for the door
my body's here till 5pm
but all I'll do is snore

My fantasy is better
my fantasy has beer
and lots of guys from Sweden
Bet you wish you were here