Living with roommates definitely has its pros and cons. Like, on the one hand, you get to split the bills. But on the other hand, you have to share the bathroom. And when you get stuck with a bad roommate, it can absolutely drive you up the wall.
But some people don't take bad roommate behavior lying down. Instead, they get even. So I've rounded up some of the most upvoted tales of petty roommate revenge from the aptly named subreddit r/PettyRevenge. Pop some popcorn and dive in:
1. "I retrained my roommate's brain to ignore his alarm. I was a senior in college. My roommate was a sophomore. He’d been a pretty lousy roommate, constantly left the room a mess, left his stuff on my side of the room and on my bed, stole my alcohol, used my shit without permission, never cleaned up my dishes after he used them, and a bunch of other stuff. Not to mention, he would set, like, 10 alarms in the morning with a bunch of different alarm tones.
2. "When I was in college, I had a roommate that I met during intro week over the summer. We hit it off and decided it would be perfect, and it was. Until it wasn’t. I brought my TV from home, and my parents paid for cable for the room. If I came home and she was watching TV, I didn’t mind until I’d ask for the remote and she’d tell me her show was on in three hours and I couldn’t use my own TV.
"Next, I had a storage bin full of snacks I’d buy when my mom would send me some money, just cereal, granola bars, you know college crap. I’d go home for a weekend, and she would eat EVERYTHING. I’m talking literally every single food item in this bin, leaving me nothing. She wouldn’t even tell me she had done it. I’d just find the bin empty and no, she never offered me money or replaced anything.
"I tried talking to her about it, and when that didn’t work, I decided to get petty. She’d leave her ID everywhere. I started taking it and hiding it so she’d have to go get a new one from the office. It cost $20 every time she had to replace it. I must’ve stolen at least $400 worth of her ID cards, and she never realized; she just thought she kept dropping them. At the end of the year when we moved out, I packed up and was out first. After I had moved all of my boxes and cleaned up, she left to go somewhere, and I left all of her 'misplaced' ID cards on the desk on her side of the room."
3. "I just moved out of the house I was renting. I am only moving out because my very passive aggressive roommate, who hid the coffee pot and TV remote from me, lied to the landlord to get me kicked out. She told him that I smoke cigarettes inside, which isn’t true because I don’t smoke them at all. And it turns out, her best friend from another state is moving to town. What a coincidence…
"So as I moved out, I got tired of taking the high road. I took a piece of the coffee pot and hid it somewhere in the house so she can’t make coffee anymore. I also unplugged her freezer in the garage and left it open overnight. I know I’m an asshole for this, but just thinking about her raging over it is making me feel some sense of justice for the whole situation."
4. "I'm a clean person. Unfortunately, my housemate creates 90% of the mess — dishes in the sink for a week, leaves fried fish grease pans on the stove overnight, tracks dirt into the house, and leaves stuff laying out, like dirty socks and used dental floss in the living room. I always clean up more than my share, particularly in the kitchen because I refuse to put my clean food on his dirty-ass counters.
5. "I have lived with this girl for over a year. She doesn’t realize how annoying she can be. She’s a good person at heart, but she was coddled by her parents and thinks she’s the center of the universe. Anyway, her car stopped working, so I have been getting up at five every morning to drive her to work. Never ask her for a thing in exchange. I also do a lot of stuff for her as well such as buying her drinks, etc.
"I forgot my card one day and wanted some candy. I asked her to pay. It was, like, $4.50. When we get home, she asks for the money, but I forget. Then, she keeps hassling me for it until I snap and say, 'Fine, then let’s count the cents.'
"I tally up all the gas she owes me for driving her to work, plus the price of hiring a car for a day (I let her drive mine for a day), along with all the other little things I have bought for her this year. The total is over $100.
Immediately, she wants to backtrack and say the candy is paying me back for driving her every day. But nope! Now she has to pay me every cent she owes and has to find a different lift from now on."
6. "I am a cat person. I have a cat that I love very much. My roommate (let's call her Jill) wanted a cat, so I said great as long as we can take the time to introduce them so they don't fight. So Jill gets the cat. And then I find out Jill didn't tell our other two roommates.
"So then Jill keeps the new cat in their room (because they didn't tell the other roommates who then told Jill to keep cat out of common areas — and fairly so). And then every time I try to get Jill to intro the cats, Jill tells me I'm giving them too much anxiety, and they don't have time to honor our agreement.
"And THEN, Jill leaves their door open, and the cats get into a fight. My cat is getting sick every other day from the stress of the new cat, and Jill totally went back on our agreement to have any kind of introduction.
Jill stopped communicating with anyone in the house, freaked out if we tried to talk to them, and is now (thankfully) moving out. BUT I still had to go through months of misery and stress because of their shitty dumb decisions.
So I regularly go on their social media accounts and report all of their topless content. They've been progressively banned from their main account for the past three weeks, lol."
7. "Most of the bills were included in the rent except WiFi. So I took this on in my name and agreed to split the cost three ways with my two housemates to make it affordable for all of us. Simple, right? Well, it became the bane of my fucking existence. Every. Single. Month without fail I had to chase them for money."
8. "This happened a couple of years ago and is one of the main reasons I prefer living alone. I'd moved to a new city for work and needed to find accommodation on short notice. I ended up in a shared room with a roommate. We both left early to go to office. He'd always enter the bathroom at 8 a.m. and stay in there 'til 9. This really annoyed me since I needed to catch my company bus at 9:30, so I wasn't left with much time.
"I tried talking to him, but he insisted he needed an hour, because reasons. After a few months, I got tired of this and decided to set my alarm for 7:45. I'd immediately get into the bathroom and stay till 8:45. Then I'd get ready and leave.
"The cherry on top was that he used to get the daily paper delivered to the house. The delivery boy would just throw it over the gate so it would always be lying in the yard when I left. I started to pick it up and leave with it. I had an hour's commute, so the paper came in handy for filling in the time.
"I left that place a month or so after this, but I did enjoy getting a free paper for a month. But I've never had a roommate again."
9. "My flatmate has a habit of having really, exaggeratedly loud screaming sex with her boyfriend, and whilst trying to study for economics, that’s a bit of a put off. Anyway, after sex, her boyfriend and her always go to the toilet to ‘clean up.’ So I decided enough was enough, and as they were having sex, I crept to the toilet and waited until I heard them come over and try to open that door, and laughed inside as they crept back to her room to stew in their juices."
10. "My old college roommate didn't know how to cook or do dishes and didn't go food shopping much. This led to him eating my food, especially my leftovers as those were prepared meals. I would use my leftovers to meal prep for the week, and told him to stop as it was expensive as well as inconvenient. The behavior did not stop, and he actually seemed to be eating more of my food out of spite.
11. "I inherited a horrible roommate when I took over a lease. This person never cleaned, 'borrowed' my dishes without cleaning, 'borrowed' my food in the fridge, and was generally a nasty person who was not even willing to talk about the issues. They would crank up the music when I knocked on the door to try and initiate conversation.
"One habit this person had was to toss their key on the kitchen counter as soon as they came in (kitchen counter being right next to the entrance). So I started filing down one of the teeth of the key, ever so subtly as to not be detectable.
"After a few days, the key wouldn't work so well, so eventually, it would have to be replaced for $10, per apartment policy. This went on for about four keys until they finally decided to move out for other reasons."
12. "One of my roommates had this stupid, unexplainable habit of getting up in the middle of the night to piss in the toilet but would NOT flush it! No one knew why! It was just something he didn't do. Anyway, you can imagine our disgust when the two of us other roommates woke up in the morning to see it.
"So this goes on for a couple of weeks. Not every night, thankfully, and sometimes, he was the first to get up, so he had to deal with it himself.
"But one day, while he's gone, my other roommate and I are bitching about him, and we hatch a plan! That night, after No-Flush (our nickname for him) goes to sleep, we take a sheet of plastic wrap and very carefully wrap the toilet with it so that it's perfectly stretched over the bowl. It was totally transparent! Then we went to bed.
Later that night, we were awakened to screams of, 'OMG! What's happening!?' Sweet revenge. After that, he always flushed the toilet after using it."
13. "A few years ago, I was renting a small two-bedroom place with my brother. He was very social while I was more introverted. So he would often bring 'friends' (I often had never met these people before) over to hang out. Since in the summer it was extremely hot and we didn't have any AC, it was pretty common that we would both just hang out in our underwear as a way to beat the heat. So, I would be hanging out in my underwear watching TV or playing video games, and my brother would walk in with anywhere from two to four people.
14. "College student here living in an apartment of five guys. For the most part, we all get along and are good friends; however, there is one of us who frequently uses the kitchen, always leaves a huge mess, and never cleans it up. The rest of us have brought up the issue multiple times, and he always just brushes off.
"Well, me and one of my other roommates finally had enough and decided to take matters into our own hands. We decided to do a 'deep clean' of the kitchen, except instead of throwing away the trash, we threw it in his room. If he won't clean the kitchen, let's see if he'll clean his room."
15. "About seven years ago, I had this roommate, and man, she was a piece of work. Everything had to be done her way, and if I didn't do something exactly right, she would flip. She once jumped all over me because I apparently didn't dry a dish thoroughly enough before I put it in the cabinet. Even my dog didn't like her, and that little dog loved everyone. As soon as the lease was up, I moved out. In the week leading up to my moving day, I started noticing something odd.
"Things were disappearing, one or two every day. The holder for the remotes, the stick blender, stuff like that, all things she owned. It took a few days, but I figured it out. She was hiding stuff so I wouldn't steal it when I moved out! But I was so done with her; I was being extra careful not to even accidentally take something of hers. I wanted nothing to do with her ever again. And I was pissed that after a year of tiptoeing around her, she apparently thought so low of me as to believe I was a thief.
"She wasn't home the day I moved out, so I did the most petty thing I've ever done and will probably ever do. She thought I'd steal her stuff? Fine. So the last thing I did before leaving that apartment was take every last square of toilet paper I could find. All of it.
"The only thing I regret is not getting to see her reaction when she went to pee and realized she had nothing to wipe with."
16. "My roommate's girlfriend Jenn is at our house nonstop. They've been dating for six months, and she is probably at our house 6.5 days of the week. She's materialistic, lazy, and generally unhelpful. She brings her dog over and lets it have free rein without discipline. She expects to be treated like a guest and doesn't help out with any house maintenance or chores, even though she spends more time at our house than I do. It's annoying as hell.
17. "I don’t mind when my roommates borrow my stuff. We’ve all been there. All I ask is that they replace what they take. It’s as simple as that. Unfortunately, my roommate doesn’t seem to get this. She keeps taking my stuff, and when I ask her to please replace everything she takes, she’ll buy one new thing and 'forget' to do it the next time, despite having more money than me.
"I finally snapped when I wanted to wash my clothes but only found an empty box that used to contain my washing powder. I had told her over and over to not use my washing powder if she wasn’t going to replace it, and I just had enough.
"I bought a new box of washing powder and some fabric dye, mixed it with a bit of the washing powder and dumped it into the old box. When the dye is dry, it looks like washing powder, especially if you’re not expecting it. I took my new box of washing powder to my room and waited.
"A week later, I came home from work and saw her laundry hanging outside, all with a mysterious pink color. She stomped up to me and demanded to know what I had done. I told her I was going to dye my own clothes and someone had told me the shade would be lighter if I mixed it with powder, then asked her why she had used it when it had clearly been in a box with my name on it?
"I don’t think she believed me, but she finally got the message. She almost never takes my stuff anymore, and when she does, she’s quick to replace it."
Note: Stories have been edited for length and clarity.