When Indiana University junior Candice Beckham is asked to describe her most memorable dorm roommate, she does it succinctly:
“She was the devil.”
Beckham says this roomie was overbearing, opinionated and wicked to the bone.
“She was evil,” said Beckham. “She would play Hootie and the Blowfish real loud at the crack of dawn, waking me up. Once she kicked my bed while I was sleeping and said, `Get up!’ “
Her closely quartered companion also could get a bit compulsive about cleanliness.
“She was very, very picky,” she said. “If she found a lint ball on the carpet, she would go ballistic.”
Beckham’s story is the kind of nightmare many college students worry about at least on a subconscious level when they agree to cohabit with another in a relatively small cubicle of space.
Whether it’s a freshman who’s been randomly matched with a stranger by a computer, or an upperclassman who’s joining some buddies in an off-campus apartment, there’s always the possibility of conflict.
Toothpaste in the sink. Loud music at midnight. Dirty sweat socks on the kitchen table.
These are just a handful of the annoying habits that can make apartment and dorm dwellers rub one another raw with interpersonal friction.
Sometimes it can lead to an ugly collision of wills, causing combative and combustible behavior.
If it gets bad enough, students at Indiana University can turn to free student mediation services. There, a trained third party tries to help students resolve their differences.
“The trained person doesn’t provide the students with a solution but helps them come up with their own solution,” said Beverly Warren, director of the student advocate’s office, which sponsors student mediation services.
“It’s not considered resolved until both students agree on a solution and put it in writing.”
The service is available to both dorm and apartment-dwelling students.
But not every conflict can be rationally resolved. Just ask Jenny Kubo, an IU sophomore who says she once shared a dorm room with “psycho woman.”
“She was a cleanliness freak, but instead of talking about it she would write me nasty notes,” said Kubo. “One of them said, `I left some cleaning supplies on your desk. Why don’t you learn how to use them?’ “
When the silence between the two became deafening, Kubo would ask, “Are you mad at me?”
“She would say, `No,’ but then wouldn’t speak to me for days at a time,” she said. “She kept it all inside. It was unnerving.”
As rocky as the relationship was, Kubo might have been able to stick it out had it not been for the TV.
“She watched it all day and all night,” she said. “I would be trying to study or go to sleep, and she refused to turn it off.”
Two months into the school year, Kubo moved into an off-campus house with a friend and never returned to the dorm.
“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “She was just too weird.”
Senior Matt Bolkovatz saw nothing weird about two of his three roommates’ behavior last year, but did at times find it irksome.
“They never cleaned the bathroom or the kitchen sink,” he said. “Me and another guy who was a neat freak did most of the cleaning.”
Each of the four roommates bought his own food and beverages, but Bolkovatz noticed that his gallon jug of milk seemed to lose its contents at an alarming rate.
“They were drinking my milk ’cause it was handy,” he said. “They would say, `I’ll buy you another gallon,’ but they never did.”
Bolkovatz had another roommate problem that was more serious than the depletion of his milk supply.
“My girlfriend became better friends with two of my roommates than me,” he said. “We broke up over it.”
Like Bolkovatz, IU senior Heather Lutrell didn’t appreciate her roommates’ unfastidious ways.
“They left clothes everywhere and dirty dishes in the sink,” she said. “I would start to wash the dishes and there would be mold growing on them.”
But worse than the plate problem was the pet problem.
“One of my roommates had a lot of pet snakes that he kept in a cheap cage,” she said. “The snakes kept getting loose and he would tear the apartment apart looking for them.”
Matt Lyndblom is an IU freshman this year, but a year ago experienced a roommate rift at the University of Southern Indiana.
The issue was music.
“All five of us had different musical tastes–rock, alternative, hip hop,” he said. “I had the only stereo, and we all had to share it.”
Though the music problem was vexing, says Lyndblom, it was never expressed.
“None of us ever talked about it,” he said. “But you could tell by the irritation in peoples’ voices.”
This year, Lyndblom doesn’t have to listen to anyone’s music but his own. He’s living in an apartment by himself.
Interestingly, most of this fall’s batch of IU freshmen are naive about the potential for tension among roommates anticipating a year brimming with love and harmony.
“I don’t think we’ll have any problems,” said freshman Nana Mensah, referring to her roommate. “My roommate is a friend from high school and we’re both pretty laid back.”
A pair of freshmen, Elizabeth Sexton from Colorado and Tara Short from Maryland, feel their sharing of the same space will go swimmingly.
“I probably need to be neater, but we like the same kind of music,” said Sexton. “And if one of us needs some quiet to study, we’ll just ask the other one to turn the stereo off.”
“I don’t think my roommate and I will have any problems,” said freshman Cassidy White. “I plan to study in my room, but if she’s talking or listening to music, I’ll just go the library.”
