199 ways to confuse a roommate
Thursday, July 28th, 2005
These are intended for entertainment purposes only. We do not advise that you ever do these things to a roommate or yourself.
1. When talking to your roommate, alternate the pitch of your voice.
2. Switch the sheets on your beds while s/he is at class.
3. Twitch a lot.
4. Pretend to talk while pretending to be asleep.
5. Buy a fish tank. Fill it with beer and dump sardines in it. Talk to them.
6. Become a subgenius.
7. Pretend to type in the middle of the air. Complain about how slow the computer has been recently.
8. Learn to levitate. While your roommate is looking away, float up out of your seat. When s/he turns to look, fall back down and grin.
9. Speak in tongues.
10. Move you roommate’s personal effects around. Start subtlely. Gradually work up to big things, and eventually glue everything s/he owns to the ceiling.
11. Walk and talk backwards.
12. Spend all your money on Jolt Cola. Drink it all. Stack the cans in the middle of your room. Number them.
13. Spend all your money on Transformers. Play with them at night. If your roommate says anything, tell him/her with a straight face, “They’re more than meets the eye.”
14. Recite entire movie scripts (e.g. “The Road Warrior,” “Repo Man, “Casablanca,”) almost inaudibly.
15. Carry an unplugged phone around your room pretending to talk to people.
16. Carry old orange juice around with you everywhere you go.
17. Chain yourself to your roommate’s bed. Get him/her to bring you food.
18. Get a computer. Leave it on when you are not using it. Turn it off when you are.
19. Ask your roommate if your family can move in “just for a couple of weeks.”
20. Move your mouth when you’re silent and move your mouth as little as possible when you talk.
21. Fake a heart attack. When your roommate gets the paramedics to come, pretend nothing happened.
22. Eat only lemons. Every five minutes, offer your roommate a lemon.
23. Whenever your roommate turns your way, begin frowning.
24. Smile. All the time.
25. Cover up your mouht before talking to anyone.
26. Write your roommate’s name in big print on hundreds of pages of paper. Leave pages all over the room. If he asks about it, say you didn’t write it.
27. Hide a bunch of potato chips in the bottom of a trash can. When you get hungry, root around in the trash. Find the food, and eat it. If your roommate empties the trash before you get hungry, demand that s/he reimburse you.
28. Leave a declaration of war on your roommate’s desk. Include a list of grievances.
29. Apoligze to your roommate. If he asks why, tell him that he should know better than you.
30. Shoot rubber bands at your roommate while his/her back is turned, and then look away quickly.
31. Dye all your underwear lime green.
32. Spill a lot of beer on his/her bed. Swim.
33. Buy three loaves of stale bread. Grow mold in the closet.
34. Hide your underwear and socks in your roommate’s closet. Accuse him/her of stealing it.
35. Remove your door. Ship it to your roommate’s parents (postage due).
36. Leave a marble in your roommate’s bed every day.
37. Whenever your roommate walks in, wait one minute and then stand up. Announce that you are going to take a shower. Do so. Keep this up for three weeks.
38. Array thirteen toothbrushes of different colors on your dresser. Refuse to discuss them.
39. Paint your half of the room black.
40. Whenever he/she is about to fall asleep, ask questions that start with “Didja ever wonder why….” Be creative.
41. Shave one eyebrow.
42. Put your mattress underneath your bed. Sleep down under there and pile your dirty clothes on the empty bedframe. If your roommate comments, mutter “Gotta save space,” twenty times while twitching violently.
43. Put horse radish in your roommate’s shoes.
44. Shelve all your books with the spines facing the wall. Complain loudly that you can never find the book that you want.
45. Always flush the toilet three times.
46. While you’re roommate is there and you are not, secretly order a pizza up to him using his name.
47. Buy a copy of Frankie Yankovic’s “Pennsylvania Polka,” and play it at least 6 hours a day. If your roommate complains, explain that it’s an assignment for your primitive cultures class.
48. Give him/her an allowance.
49. Listen to radio static.
50. Open your window shades before you go to sleep each night. Close them as soon as you wake up.
51. Cry a lot.
52. Send secret admirer notes on your roommate’s Email.
53. Talk to yourself loudly in front of your roommate. After a while, begin discussing your roommate with yourself.
54. Complain of having a terrible virus in your system and cough at your roommate frequently.
55. Tell your roommate that it’s your birthday–every day.
56. If you get in before your roomate, go to sleep in his/her bed.
57. Take your roommate’s pillow and put a water ballon inside of it.
58. Play blackjack with yourself and scream loudly about your losses when you bust.
59. If your roommate goes away for a weekend, change the locks.
60. Find out your roommate’s post office box code. Open it and take his/her mail. Do this for one month. After that, send the mail to him/her by UPS.
61. Create an imaginary cat for a pet. Talk to it every night, act like you’re holding it, keep a litter box under your desk. After two weeks, say that your cat is missing. Put up signs in your dorm, blame your roommate.
62. Call safety and security whenever your roommate turns up his/her music.
63. Follow him/her around on weekends.
64. Sit on the floor and talk to the wall.
65. Whenever the phone rings, get up and answer the door.
66. Whenever someone knocks, answer the phone.
67. Whenever your roommate is walking through the room, bump into him/her.
68. Stare at your roommate for five minutes out of every hour. Don’t say anything, just stare.
69. Tell your roommate that someone called and said that it was really important but you can’t remember who it was.
70. Let mice loose in his/her room.
71. Give each of your walls a different name. Whenever you can’t answer a problem, ask each of your walls. Write down their responses, then ask your ceiling for the final answer. Complain to your roommate that you don’t trust your ceiling.
72. Take your roommate’s papers and hand them in as your own.
73. Skip to the bathroom.
74. Take all of your roommate’s furniture and build a fort. Guard the fort for an entire weekend.
75. Gather up a garbage bag full of leaves and throw them in a pile in his/her room. Jump in them. Comment about the beautiful foiliage.
76. When you walk into your room, turn off your lights. Turn them on when you leave.
77. Whenever you’re on the phone and he/she walks in, hang up immediately without saying anything and crawl under your desk. Sit there for two minutes than call whoever it was back.
78. Insist on writing the entire lyrics to American Pie on your ceiling above your bed. Sing them every night before you go to bed.
79. Burn incense.
80. Eat moths.
81. Collect Chia-Pets.
82. Refuse to communicate in anything but sign language.
83. Eat a bag of marshmellows before you go to bed. The next day, spray three bottles of whip cream all over your floor. Say you got sick.
84. Wipe deoderant all over your roommate’s walls.
85. Leave apple cores on his/her bed.
86. Don’t ever flush the toilet.
87. Hang stuffed animals with nooses from your ceiling. Whenever you walk by them mutter, “You shouldn’t have done that to me.”
88. Insist that you are a vegetarian and protest anytime your roommate eats meat. Then leave “Slim Jim” wrappers on the floor and lie on the bed holding your stomach everytime your roommate walks in. If he/she asks about the wrappers, say you know nothing about them.
89. Every time your roommate walks in yell, “Hooray! You’re back!” as loud as you can and dance around the room for five minutes. Afterwards, keep looking at your watch and saying, “Shouldn’t you be going somewhere?”
90. Trash the room when your roommate’s not around. Then leave and wait for your roommate to come back. When he/she does, walk in and act surprised. Say, “Uh-oh, it looks like, they, were here again.”
91. Put your glasses on before you go to bed. Take them off as soon as you wake up. If your roommate asks, explain that they are Magic Dream Glasses. Complain that you’ve been having terrible nightmares.
92. “Drink” a raw egg for breakfast every morning. Explain that you are in training. Eat a dozen donuts every night.
93. Every Thursday, pack up everything you own and tell your roommate you’re going home. Come back in an hour and explain that no one was home. Unpack everything and go to sleep.
94. Every time you wake up, start yelling, “Where am I?!” and run around the room for a few minutes. Then go back to bed. If your roommate asks, say you don’t know what he/she is talking about.
95. Draw a tiny, black spot on your arm. Make it bigger every day. Look at it and say, “It’s spreading, it’s spreading.”
96. Buy a McDonald’s “Happy Meal” for lunch every day. Eat the straw and the napkin. Throw everything else away.
97. Buy a plant. Sleep with it at night. Talk to it. After a few weeks, start to argue with it loudly. Then yell, “I can’t live in the same room with you,” storm out of the room and slam the door. Get rid of the plant, but keep the pot. Refuse to discuss the plant ever again.
98. Buy a Jack-In-The-Box. Every day, turn the handle until the clown pops out. Scream continuously for twenty minutes.
99. Hang up pictures of chickens all over the room. If your roommate eats eggs, yell at him/her and call him/her a cannibal.
100. Buy some knives. Sharpen them every night. While you’re doing so, look at your roommate and mutter, “Soon, soon….”
101. Bring in potential “new” roommates from around campus. Give them tours of the room and the building. Have them ask about your roommate in front of him/her, and reply, “Oh, him/her? He/she won’t be here much longer.”
102. Pile dirty dishes in your roommate’s bed. Insist that you don’t know how they got there.
103. Collect hundreds of pens and pile them on one side of the room. Keep one pencil on the other side of the room. Laugh at the pencil.
104. Feign a serious illness for two weeks. Have a priest come to your room and visit you. Write out a will, leaving everything to your roommate. One day, miraculously “recover.” Insist that your roommate write out a will, leaving everything to you. Every time he/she coughs, excitedly say, “Oooh, are you dying?”
105. Live in the hallway for a month. Afterwards, bring all of your stuff back into the room and tell your roommate, “Okay, your turn.”
106. Keep a tarantula in a jar for three days. Then hide the tarantula. If your roommate asks, say, “Oh, he’s around here, somewhere.”
107. Tell your roommate, “I’ve got an important message for you.” Then pretend to faint. When you recover, say you can’t remember what the message was. Later on, say, “Oh, yeah, I remember!” Pretend to faint again. Keep this up for several weeks.
108. Bowl inside the room. Set up tournaments with other people in the building. Award someone a trophy. If your roommate wants to bowl too, explain that he/she needs bowling shoes.
109. While your roommate is out, glue your shoes to the ceiling. When your roommate walks in, sit on the floor, hold your head, and moan.
110. Make a sandwich. Don’t eat it, leave it on the floor. Ignore the sandwich. Wait until your roommate gets rid of it, and then say, “Hey, where is my sandwich!?” Complain loudly that you are hungry.
111. Punch a hole in the T.V. Sit and watch it anyway, complaining about the poor picture quality.
112. Collect potatoes. Paint faces on them and give them names. Name one after your roommate. Separate your roommate’s potato from the others. Wait a few days, and then bake your roommate’s potato and eat it. Explain to your roommate, “He just didn’t belong.”
113. Fill an empty shaving cream can with whipped cream. Use it to shave, and then spray some into your mouth. Later on, complain that you feel sick. Continue this process for several weeks.
114. Cover your bed with a tent. Live inside it for a week. If your roommate asks, explain that “It’s a jungle out there.” Get your roommate to bring you food and water.
115. Keep a vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room. Look at it with fear for a few days. Then stay out of the room entirely, opening the door only a crack and whispering to your roommate, “Psst! Is it gone?”
116. Break the window with a rock. If your roommate protests, explain that you were hot. Open and close the broken window as you normally would.
117. Throw darts at a bare wall. All of a sudden, act excited, telling your roommate that you hit the bullseye.
118. Call your roommate “Clyde” by accident. Start doing so every so often. Increase the frequency over the next few weeks, until you are calling him “Clyde” all the time. If your roommate protests, say, “I’m sorry. I won’t do that anymore, Murray.”
119. Hire a night watchman to guard the room while you are sleeping.
120. Move everything to one side of the room. Ask your roommate if he knows how much an elephant weighs, and look at the floor on the empty side of the room with concern.
121. Practice needlepoint every night. At one point, grab your thumb and scream, “Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!” Cry hysterically for a few minutes, and then go to bed. Sob and sniff all night.
122. When your roommate comes in, pretend that you are on the phone, screaming angrily and shouting obscenities. After you hang up, say, “That was your mom. She said she’d call back.”
123. Every time your roommate comes in, immediately turn off the lights and go to bed. When he/she leaves, get up and loudly yell, “Okay, guys, you can come out now.”
124. Start wearing a crown, all the time. If your roommate tells you to take it off, say, “What do you think you are? A king?”
125. Sit in front of a chess board for hours, saying nothing, doing nothing. Then, look up and say, “I think this g