Housemate madness - Tales From The War Table

Hi there folks.  I've been a bit (alright, VERY) slack on ye olde blog shenanigans lately.  The main culprit is a new writing project.  I'm about fifty thousand words in and it's shaping up quite nicely.  It's all about share houses.  Set in Melbourne, it is the tale of a Gen X man thrust into a Gen Y world.  There's sex, there's drugs, there's even some saucy language.

Now, I need your help.  More specifically, I need your stories.  Below are a few sections of the book, based on real life events.  Please share your own, either in the comments section or via email (idiotsview@gmail.com) and I will do my best to completely steal your ideas and use them for my own evil purposes.  Who could ask for more?

Extracts from Tales From The War Table:

Ian was unemployed and had offered to take the rent to the real estate agent because it was on his way to the city.  Now, you’re probably wondering why he had to go to the city if he didn’t have a job.  Well, he liked to ‘hang’ apparently.  After a few months of this I received a phone call from the real estate agent.  They were a little concerned that we hadn’t paid rent in four months. Our helpful little unemployed bum had developed an oh so minor gambling habit and spent most of his spare time down at Crown Casino.  Losing.  Badly.  We confronted him as soon as he came home from a hard day of squandering our hard earned.  At first he denied it.  Then he told us it was our fault.  When that didn’t work he ran away to his room.  The sound of the wardrobe being pushed against the door told us he wasn’t in the mood for a chat.  He never did come out.  And I mean, never.  We later realised he’d scarpered via the window and scaled down the wall.  Not bad for a little weedy bloke on the second floor.  His sister came over the next day accusing us of spreading malicious lies.  We promptly showed her the letter from the real estate agent and the rent book.  She soon switched the target of her wrath.  Her dad showed up later that day with a cheque.  Problem solved.  Except for the issue of moving a wardrobe away from the other side of the door two floors up. 

*****

           

           I wasn’t a radical greenie, but cared enough to make an effort.  The housemates had gone along easily enough, though Trev had trouble keeping plastic bags, food scraps and Styrofoam out of the bin.  He would have been lynched by some of the ultra greenies I’d lived with.  There was one lot in Fitzroy North who used to berate us for leaving the porch light on when we went out, or if we turned on the hall light when we went for a slash in the middle of the night.  We thought we were pretty considerate despite the occasional lapse, we even watched the TV in the dark.  That didn’t go down as well as we thought, they believed TV was a waste of energy, except for the 7:30 Report and Four Corners; that was it.  We eventually grew sick of trying to placate these loons and started leaving lights on at all hours.  A little anti-Earth Day act of juvenile rebellion.  It didn’t work.  They started stealing the globes.  After we started replacing them, they nicked the fuses.  We had to move out in the end anyway.  The stench from the compost bins was what forced our hand.  It was zero carbon footprint biological warfare.  It was the only time I waived the white flag and admitted defeat.  There was no winning against a zealot.  You could only minimise your losses.

*****

             I was living in a Carlton sharehouse around the corner from the Royal Women’s.  We needed to rent out a room to cover the cost of an overeager party where we had accidently knocked down a wall to grant better access to the bar.  We settled on a guy in his mid-to-late 40's who seemed a bit weird, but at least he was quiet; which is exactly what we needed.  The guy claimed to be ex-army and had a severe buzz cut to match.  He apparently had a job at a takeaway joint, and would often bring home calzones and pizzas and leave them in the fridge.  Which was fine, except he continually committed the most unforgivable sharehouse crime; drinking beer without asking or replacing it.  There’s a special layer in hell for his type, along with anyone who puts used batteries back in the drawer or hangs the toilet paper facing the wall. 

            After he lived with us for a few weeks, we noticed he didn’t have any sort of set schedule.  He came and went at all hours of the day and night.  We also figured out he was addicted to – wait for it - Panadol.  He popped Panadol like they were tic-tacs.  Must have gone through a packet a day. 

One day my housemate, Alan, realised there was a problem with his bank account.  I was there when he opened his letter from the bank.  Staring back at him in black and white were impersonal block letters, ‘Balance $0.00’.  It doesn’t get much lower.  Alan had always been pretty frugal, not tight, just smart with his cash.  It turned out that Private Panadol had searched Alan’s desk, stolen a bunch of checks and was using them to get cash and to buy things, for example; calzones and pizzas.  He had no job at all.

We called an emergency house meeting and waited several hours for the guy to show up.  When he finally did, we confronted him sharehouse justice style.  He sat passively in the chair, popping Panadol the whole time.  He denied the whole thing.  When anyone asked him a question, he’d give them a Jack Nicolson Shining stare, pop another Panadol and start denying again.

We eventually gave up and adjourned the meeting until morning.  Somehow he moved out in the middle of the night without us noticing, but not before stealing half the household crockery and most of the cutlery.  How he managed that in the middle of the night is anyone’s guess.  

If I use your stories, you'll get a credit and become exceedingly rich and very famous.*

*(Statement not legally binding, fame and fortune may vary between vary from contributor to contributor, may depend on current level of fame and fortune)