by RICK MORTON
I had a flatmate who insisted on serving dinner on airplane crockery, with airplane cutlery on those little airplane trays.
He was, let’s be frank, a plane buff.
We ate it in authentic ‘off-the-back-of-the-truck’ Qantas business class seats with fully functioning electronics. We had a normal television but this would not suit our in-flight experience (of course!) so we had to watch our programs on individual tiny screens that folded out from within the arm rests in our seats.
It was just like travelling business class except we were in our apartment building which didn’t go anywhere and the uncomfortable, sporadic clink of cutlery on cutlery permeated the curtain of silent discomfort in which the rest of us had learned to live.
We had evolved to bear it in the same way an armadillo learns to roll into a protective ball when its peaceful existence is threatened.
The flatmate eventually spent tens of thousands of dollars converting our spare room into a full-sized flight simulator with actual Qantas cockpit chairs, two main 42-inch plasma screens and seven smaller computers running flight instruments. His cockpit had the proper steering columns (or whatever you call the darned things) and unfortunately enough room for one of us to sit by his side on a seven-hour flight to Singapore.
The only whiff of something being slightly amiss were the sheepskin covers on the pilot and co-pilot’s chairs, something I’d only ever associated with being behind the wheel of a Torana.
He would summon me for take-off and I’d move hesitantly into the room hoping for a quick flight to Coffs Harbour and frequently being disappointed by his chirpy response: “Nope! Europe! Via Bandar Seri Begawan“. Sometime between take-off and landing, hours later, I’d make up an excuse to leave (I have to study / clean the cat / re-classify several species of insect for fun) and he’d look at me, horrified, like I’d actually suggested opening the locked doors on a real plane mid-flight.
My flatmate had an illness that made his enthusiasm peak at stratospheric heights while ours languished behind.
He’d stumble down the stairs sometime the next day having landed in Frankfurt, nattering on about a speedy tail-wind and I’d be sitting in the living room snoring on the tray table, trapped by a passion I didn’t share.
You have to laugh. I was prompted to tell this story of a flatmate so bad he’s good because of this little gem I read on the Huffington Post about flatmate Alex who stole some of Mark’s milk … and then wrote an hilarious apology letter. Here it is:
Alex is kind of loveable, right?
Time to share your own hilarious housemate and flatmate stories. Even if they’re husbands or kids, most of us have lived with an interesting character…
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Some years ago in my mid thirties, I was sharing a rented house with an older chap and his two sons around 27 and 30? The dad would spend weekends with his g/f. One particular late Sunday night I was settling down to go to bed and I hear the younger one call out to the older one. I ignored it at first, then he yelled out again.
So I open up my bedroom door to the hallway to find out what's going on at 10.45 on a Sunday night and I see this trail of blood all down the carpet which I follow out across the open plan kitchen/living room, then through to the other mini hallway at the front of the house, where the separate lounge (his makeshift bedroom) is at by, the front. It honestly looked like something from a horror film with blood all across the floor. Here is younger brother standing in the front doorway, STARK BOLLOCK NAKED! What the J.F. is going on? He's dripping with cuts from head to toe and a great big gash on his lower left leg above the ankle. I could see bone protruding.
Turns out he'd thrown himself through the front window of our house! He'd been hallucinating. Drug induced? Maybe... I honestly don't know - never did them at home that I was ever witness to (though I was busy having a life of my own). Older brother comes out and stands there like a stunned mullet - 'call your father' I instructed, while I laid little brother down on his bed, elevating the leg and applying pressure while waiting for the ambulance to arrive (and getting a full eyeful of his w..ger). The irony was, we lived directly opposite an ambulance bay that wasn't even staffed that night. Eventually they and Dad turned up and trotted off to the hospital after midnight.
But the story doesn't quite end there...the glazier comes round the next day/later in the avo, to repair the broken window. He lifts out all the remaining shards of glass. To his misfortune, he squats down in the garden below the window to pick out the last pieces from the frame. He gets jabbed in the arse by a piece of glass that landed in the garden and went thru his jeans. Unable to carry on, he has to call his boss to come round and finish the job!!
Ok, so I'm late to the party, but here we go
I had a Sri Lankan housemate who let a friend borrow his room when he was away, these instances perfectly coincided with large sex line phone bills. He was the same guy who I found at 3am in the lounge room, naked, banging a bongo drum.
I was living with a family, a single mother and her children, and I was woken up one night by the mother repeatedly yelling 'for the last time you're not putting it up there!' Mind you this was the same woman who said once, 'well, maybe you don't need to 'pay' for rent this month'. I fled.
I has just moved to Sydney and I was room-sitting while a guy was overseas and in his gumtree ad he failed to mention that the room was actually more of a hallway with a shower curtain for a door and the clean new bed was actually a old bed bug riddled piece of crap. I had to throw out all my clothes and even thinking about it will make me scratch non stop.
I had a housemate who chose the cheap bedroom, the one next to the kitchen and bathroom, because it was cheap. She seemingly failed to realise that was the reason it was cheap, so instead she enacted a 9pm ban on the kitchen and bathroom, no action after this time or out came the passive aggressive post its.
There are many more stories but at the risk of you thinking I'm making all these up, I'll stop.