Nevin Hardy rocks back and forth in a chair, fidgeting with a charging cube in his hands. Above his desk in his private room is an X-Men poster. He has a collection of comic books and DVDs. On his Xbox he has Netflix installed, which often helps fill his free time.
Hardy is relaxed. He is graduating in May and is ready to move back home. He lives in a residence building with three other roommates. He keeps to himself. No one bothers him.
However, this was not always the case.
“I’ve never had luck with roommates,” Hardy said.
THE PLATTSBURGH ROOMMATE
Hardy attends SUNY Plattsburgh, a university located in Northern New York. When entering his junior year, Hardy was assigned a random roommate.
“I was supposed to have a single,” Hardy said. “However, last second I was given a roommate.”
Hardy’s roommate was a junior as well. At first everything went smoothly. That is until hygiene became an issue.
“He would never clean,” Hardy said. “There was crusty cups everywhere and the room smelled awful. He was not fond of doing laundry.”
Hardy describes his room as being filled with food wrappers, garbage and dirty clothes all packed into one corner by his roommate’s bed.
Another issue was having friends over. Originally, it was not a problem. After a few weeks passed by, the room developed a “stench,” and Hardy began communicating less and less with his roommate.
“He always wanted my attention,” Hardy said. “The few times I tried to bring my friends back to the room, he made it extremely awkward. He would make inappropriate comments and overstep his boundaries.”
Hardy began to find other ways to see his friends and claims he spent very little time in his room. He would sleep, shower and go to class. After class, he went anywhere but his room.
THE POTSDAM ROOMMATE
Throughout all of this, Hardy claims none of it came as a surprise. Hardy transferred from SUNY Potsdam to Plattsburgh in 2017. While in Potsdam, Hardy encountered his first roommate issue.
“It was like living with a poltergeist,” Hardy said. “My first roommate was an odd bird.”
Hardy’s Potsdam roommate would often go through items that didn’t belong to him. He also had a temper.
“I offered him one Canadian cream soda,” Hardy said. “I left for the weekend and returned to find all of my 24 sodas gone. I hid those sodas too, so that means he went under my bed looking through my stuff.”
Hardy often enjoyed eating in his room with his friends. His roommate would yell at him and not allow him to eat with other people in the room.
“It was hard to communicate,” Hardy said. “He would easily get angry. His way of cooling off would be grunting and slamming the door shut when leaving the room.”
Another issue was bedtime. Most nights, Hardy says he was kept up until 3 a.m. His roommate would be up playing video games all night.
“He could play video games all night,” Hardy said. “But I couldn’t have friends over when I wanted.”
Hardy lived with this man for three semesters. He did not want to risk having a worse roommate or move away from the friends he had made on the floor he lived on.
“All my friends decided to stay on the same floor,” Hardy said. “I wanted to be around them and I ended up transferring to Plattsburgh anyways, only to be in the same situation all over again.”
In the spring semester of his junior year at Plattsburgh, Hardy’s roommate left and he had a room all to himself.
For his senior year, Hardy decided to move off campus with a few friends. When asked about advice for college students looking for roommates, he simply smirked.
“Random roommates can be a dangerous game,” Hardy said. “I can laugh about it now, but it really was a horror story.”
APN 