Roommates: can't live with them, can't live without them

When we talk about students living in Utrecht, it’s usually about how difficult it is to find a room. I’m not going to deny it: selection interviews are such a pain in the neck. After 834,892,349,328,742 of such evenings, you suddenly get an urge to live deep in the outskirts of Overvecht in a six square-metre room for 600 euro. However, even though finding a house is a big struggle, I’d say the real challenge begins when you actually move in. They you have to deal with both friend and foe: your housemates.

Most of them are quite nice: they pull you out of your room when you’ve been studying all day and ask you how you’re doing when nobody in online classes cares about you. They also compliment you on your cooking skills (five garlic cloves = "Mmm, smells good!") and don't mind a spontaneous drink. Oh yeah, in my case a housemate even saved my life after I injured myself cutting an avocado. That was quite nice.

The bigger the house, the more fun it seems. I only live together with two others and that’s more than enough as far as I’m concerned. Yet, I sometimes look at the IBB houses around the corner with jealousy. You might have almost forgotten, but outside the corona season, there is a party every weekend at the IBB.

But, you can already feel it coming, roommates aren’t always that great. Roommates are those people who n-e-v-e-r take their food waste out of the drain. In addition, they conveniently “forget” the cleaning schedule or do it so quickly that you wonder if things have been cleaned at all. They also leave empty toilet rolls behind or organise those spontaneous drinks when you have class at 9 o'clock the next morning.

If you happen to receive this column from a roommate, I suggest you evaluate your own behaviour for a moment. Maybe you just pooped? Then you forgot to spray. Were you supposed to take the trash out this week? Too bad, you probably didn't.

I hereby make this intellectual property available to the public for all forms of inter-house passive aggression. Please use it in the fight against your frenemy: the roommate. I will also send it to my own roommates. @Merijn, you still have to clean the toilet.