Probably the very worst thing about living with strangers is not knowing what you are getting until they arrive – and in many cases, until long after they’ve arrived. After all, it can take a little while for a person to show their true colours.

It’s really the luck of the draw. You might end up living with people who, in time, become your best friends. Or it’s just as likely that you’ll end up with people you have nothing at all in common with, and have a cordial but generally non rememberable relationship with. But in the worst case scenario, you could find yourself living with people who are objectively terrible, and who make the time you live there miserable.

The fifth year college student in this story thought he’d got around this by choosing to spend his final year living in a house he’d already lived in with friends (and friends of friends). But soon after the semester started, it became quite clear that this was not to be the case. But they could never have imagined the drama that would come next.

Read on to find out what happened.

Roommates’ revenge

Back in the 1989/1990 school year, I was a fifth-year senior living off-campus at a large Midwestern university. In my fourth year, I shared the bottom floor of a house with three other guys. Two of them graduated and one needed only to finish up a class or two, so he decided to commute for his last semester. I wanted to stay in the same house, so I arranged to get three other roommates for my final year.

I had the following roommates: Bob 1 (with whom I worked at the campus library. An art student with a sarcasm problem. A bit of an ***, but not a terrible human being), Bob 2 (a friend of Bob 1. Yes, they had the same name. No, this is not their real name), Mamma’s Boy (a third roommate who is important in this story only because of his departure), and Chunk (the roommate who replaced Mamma’s Boy about six weeks into the semester. He will be the focus of this tale.)

This story also involved Tim the Landlord, His is the only name I have not changed. This is not because Tim the Landlord is guilty, but because he is a prince among people and needs to be celebrated.

Tim was the sort of man who, when he sees evil, slaps it across the face with his veiny manhood and then drinks mead from the skulls of his enemies. Your children should wish to be half the human being that Tim was for this year.

Let’s see what the setup of their house share was.

As I say, we had the bottom floor of a house. There was a common bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. Off the southeast corner of the living room was a single bedroom.

Off the southwest corner was a second bedroom that connected, through a slightly smaller room, to the bathroom.

The first year I lived in the house, one guy paid extra and got the southeast bedroom to himself. The other two guys and I shared the two connected rooms, with the guy who got his own room paying a little more in rent.

This second year, I paid a little more rent and got my own room with the two Bobs and Mamma’s boy sharing the two-room “suite.”

Read on to find out how their situation got underway.

School started and everything seemed fine. But unbeknownst to us, Mamma’s Boy is not happy. Despite him being a college senior, this was the first time he’d ever lived away from home, and it turned out that he was not a fan.

He didn’t like having roommates, he didn’t like making his own meals, he didn’t like doing his own laundry. So, after six weeks of these living arrangements, he left and went back home to mom.

The other three of us panicked. We couldn’t each come up with the additional money to cover Mamma’s Boy’s quarter of the rent (yes, it would have only been about $55/month, but all of us were working minimum wage jobs. At that time, minimum wage was under $4/hr, so that money was something close to a week’s wages for a part-time job).

So we went across the street (literally) to Tim the Landlord’s house and tell him of our woes.

Read on to find out how Tim the Landlord responded.

As I said, Tim was a man among boys and a man among men. He tells us that he would find us a fourth guy. But this was a bigger problem than you may at first realise. With school already six weeks in, everybody already had housing, so no one was looking for a roommate, but Tim said he’d handle this for us.

Further, proving just how great of a human being he was, Tim told us that on the off chance that the guy he found for us proves to be a complete waste of oxygen, he’d put the guy on a separate lease. We’d be responsible for our part of the rent and the guy he found for us would be responsible for his part. This way, we wouldn’t be liable of the guy proved to be a flake.

The guy Tim found for us was Chunk. Chunk was not a college student, but a local who was looking to move out of his house. He worked construction, mostly installing drywall, and made pretty good money doing it. Even more, while his boss kept him on the books, he was on not as a full-time worker, so most of his money came in under the table and untaxed.

However, Chunk was not the smartest of human beings.

Let’s see how Chunk lived his life in this house.

Despite coming home every Friday with $4-600 cash (keep in mind, those are 1989 dollars, so something closer to $1,000/week), he would regularly have to return to a store on Thursday night to return a purchase so that he had enough money to buy himself dinner. I have no idea where his money went.

We assumed he would go to crowded college bars and buy rounds of drinks for everyone. The money wasn’t going to drugs, although now that I think about it, it could have been fueling a steroid habit. However, since he was on his own lease, as long as he covered his share of things like gas, electric, and phone, we were all good.

However, Chunk was a terrible roommate. Big, stupid, loud, and just about everything else you could think of. He left dirty dishes everywhere and refused to wash them. It got to the point where I bought my own cookware and dishes and kept them in my room. He would eat other people’s food and replace it with cheap, substandard versions. Oh, you bought yourself a package of Oreos? He’d eat them and replace them with a smaller package of generic, off-brand sandwich cookies.

He’d use other people’s towels after he took a shower, and if you didn’t like that, he’d tell you that the best way to handle the dispute was to go out front and fight about it. After all, if he could beat the **** out of you (and he could), he must be right. He bought himself Pay-Per-View movies and, since we all lived there, thought we should all pay for them even though we didn’t watch them. Still, he was a necessary evil. We didn’t plot revenge against him, but eventually, revenge fell into our laps.

Read on to find out exactly what shape their revenge took.

To give you an idea of just how dumb Chunk really was, though, here’s the prime example. Chunk lost his job. Because his boss kept him on the books a little, he managed to get unemployment. However, since he had lost his income, he panicked regarding his rent.

He went to talk to Tim the Landlord, who agreed to let Chunk work for him through the winter shoveling his various properties and doing other menial tasks in exchange for his rent. As I say, Best Beloved, Tim was the sort of man we should all aspire to be.

So, after claiming poverty to Tim, Chunk went out and bought himself a motorcycle, then asked Tim if there was anywhere safe he could park it. His new motorcycle that he purchased after claiming he couldn’t pay his rent.

One fine spring day, Chunk was out gallivanting on his motorcycle when he did something stupid like blow through a stop sign. He was naturally pulled over by a cop who had seen this action, and when the cop walked up to discuss his behaviour with him, Chunk decided the best course of action was to drive away as quickly as he could.

And this revenge plot was just getting started.

So we’ve got a traffic incident and leaving the scene to start with, so our count of problems Chunk has caused for himself is at two. As it happened, Chunk drove off because 3) he didn’t have insurance or 4) a license because he’d had it suspended. Why? Because he 5) blew off his court date for his earlier arrest on a 6) DUI.

Chunk was suddenly a wanted fugitive. He was Public Enemy #1 in our little college farm town. Evidently, he drove home and hid in our basement for a couple of hours before realising that eventually the police would get his address and come looking. He left and vanished into the wind.

I knew none of this at the time, as I was working the circulation desk of the college library. I got home just after midnight, said hello to the two Bobs, and walked into my bedroom. Lo and behold, Bob 1’s girlfriend was sitting on my bed. I turned, look at the Bobs, and said, “Okay…explain.”

Bob 1 said, “Well, I had her go into your room so that she wasn’t involved when the cops showed up.” I nodded and said, “Okay…explain.”

Read on to find out what happened when the police showed up.

The Bobs explained, and I learned of all of the events of Chunk and his desperate flight from the law. Just as the explanation has finished, the police showed up again and questioned us.

Now, we had endured about seven months of living with this idiot and the three of us hated him about as much as three college-aged guys can hate another human being. And it’s worth noting that the two Bobs had to share rooms with this human trash fire, so they got it worse than I did and hated him more than I did.

We assured the police that if we knew anything, they’d be the first to know it. We wanted this ******* out of our lives, and if the police could bring that about, so much the better.

The next day, we went across the street to talk to Tim the Landlord. Tim’s response was as pragmatic as it was epic. “He hasn’t paid me in months and he hasn’t done any work for me in months,” was Tim’s reply. “Why don’t you guys evict him?”

So with that, they took action.

And so we did. We gathered up all of Chunk’s stuff and put it in the shed behind the house. All of his clothing, his weight bench, and even his food. Everything (with a single exception—we’ll get to that) was moved to the shed.

We printed up a series of eviction notices and posted them around the house—front door, back door, interior door, windows. Pretty much every possible point of access into our part of the house had a notice for Chunk telling him that he’d been booted by Tim the Landlord, that his stuff was in the shed, and that he owed us for supporting his out-of-work ass for things like gas, electric, and phone for the previous several months. Been a slice, bro. Don’t let the door hit you and don’t bend over for the soap.

That evening, Bob 2 had just finished calling in to work, saying that he couldn’t come in because he was (fake cough) “sick.” He put the phone down and it rang immediately. It was Chunk! He’d called to tell us that he had to leave town for a couple of weeks. Could we put some of his stuff together for him?

Why yes, we said. Your *** has been evicted, my friend. Your stuff is conveniently already together for you in the shed out back.

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Let’s see how Chunk responded to the eviction.

Chunk was outraged that the rules actually applied to him and that he could be evicted for something as trivial as not paying rent for three months. He slammed down the phone.

Roughly an hour later, there was noise outside the house. The eviction notices were being pulled down. The prodigal son had returned, and has brought some of his steroid-junkie friends with him to help gather his belongings.

We lifted the phone receiver. We dialled the phone. “Hello, Farm Town police? Are you still looking for the dangerous outlaw Chunk? Well, we are his roommates, and he is here collecting his belongings after being evicted. You might want to send some patrol cars ‘round to this address to collect him.”

We waited. Minutes later, two squad cars rolled up, sirens off, but lights on. One blocked the driveway, the other stood ready by the field to the east of the house. Cops exited the cars and flanked the house, guns drawn. It was like an episode of “Cops,” except that we could not change the channel. We ran to the kitchen where the windows overlooked the shed. Cops arrived. Chunk was busted. Chunk offered a lame excuse. Cops were not having it. Chunk was cuffed, dragged to a squad car and driven away.

But that wasn’t the end of the Chunk ordeal.

Moments later, basking in the milky afterglow, one of the Bobs realised that while we put almost everything of Chunk’s in the shed, we neglected to give him his beer. We celebrated Chunk’s arrest by drinking his beer.

Several weeks later, Bob 2 and I graduated. That morning, we decided that our best course of action was to sue Chunk for the money he owed us. We did. Small claims court was a few weeks later. Chunk again failed to show up. Decision for the plaintiffs to the tune of about $650.

I never saw a dime of that money, but I slept better knowing that if Chunk ever tried to get a loan for as much as a pack of gum, he had that unpaid settlement on his record.

And that is the story of how two of my roommates and I got our other roommate arrested and out of our lives.

Eventually, scumbags like Chunk get their just desserts, and for those they’ve terrorised it’s sweet.

So it’s no wonder that these students got all the retribution they could for all the drama Chunk brought to their lives.

And justice must have been amazing.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a landlord who learned the hard way not to try to keep a security deposit he should have paid.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

Some people thought that Tim was the real hero.

While this finance expert commended them for suing Chunk.

Meanwhile, this Redditor liked the story so much he wrote a limerick about it.

It’s a real shame that this guy’s last year of college was blighted by so much roommate drama. Sure he was living in the house he’d enjoyed staying in, but the roommate turnover probably wasn’t too enjoyable for him. At least he had the Bobs on his side. Because when their first roommate left the house, they thought things were bad – but they never imagined quite how bad things could get, since they’d never experienced a roommate like Chunk before.

The real hero, though, is Tim. There aren’t many landlords nowadays who treat their tenants with so much understanding and kindness – and the fact that he found them a new roommate (however awful he ended up) and put him on a separate rental agreement shows just how much he was on their side. And let’s not forget that he was letting Chunk live there even though he was so behind on rent. What a rare gem this landlord was.