Woman says she stopped answering her roommates’ calls — and the whole mess exposed how bad the living situation had really gotten
In a Reddit post that started over something as basic as house keys, one woman said she had reached the end of her patience with the people she lived with. She wrote that she rented a house with her friend and that friend’s sister, but the real problem was bigger than just the official roommates. According to the post, the friend’s boyfriend had basically been living there rent-free, eating her food, using the spare key, and leaving it in a way that kept her from getting into the house with her own key after long shifts at work.
She said the setup had turned her into everybody’s unpaid doorman. The sister and the boyfriend refused to get their own copies made, even though she said she had already lent out her own keys for an entire week so one of them could finally go get one. That still did not happen. Instead, they kept relying on a spare key left out for emergencies and, when that failed, they would call her to let them in through the yard gate at night. She described coming home exhausted, only to find herself locked out because somebody inside had left the key in the door on the wrong side.
Eventually she decided she was done making their problem her problem. One night, she said she got home first, realized she was the only one there, locked up, went to bed, and ignored the boyfriend blowing up her phone. It was raining, and she said he ended up having to go back to his own place a few miles away. After that, she noticed the spare key suddenly started getting put back where it belonged. Then the same thing happened with the sister. She wrote that she left her phone in her room, ignored the calls, and later let her in after she had apparently been stuck outside in the cold for about an hour. The woman admitted she was “mildly amused” and said she was planning to keep ghosting those calls until they could show her they had actual keys in hand.
But the update made it clear the key issue was only the surface problem. A few weeks later, she said she confronted the roommates directly after more food went missing from the fridge and the calls to open the gate kept happening anyway. She described the conversation as a disaster. One roommate allegedly sat there with her eyes closed, then took a shot at her job when asked to pay attention. When the woman brought up the boyfriend taking food, she said the roommates brushed it off as a misunderstanding tied to buying items in bulk. The meeting did not solve much. For a while, they barely spoke face-to-face, and then, in a move that somehow made the whole thing feel even more childish, the roommates started putting stickers on everything they owned in the fridge.
Even then, she said her food was still being eaten. The only obvious change was that the roommates finally stopped calling her to come open the gate. According to the update, they later texted asking where she got her keys made, which made it sound like they still had not actually fixed the problem on their own. By that point, though, the woman had already started pulling away from the situation for good. She said she bought herself a mini fridge so she could stop dealing with the shared kitchen drama and had started actively looking for a new place to live. She called the ending anticlimactic, but after everything she described, it sounded less like an anticlimax and more like somebody quietly deciding she was done being used.
Abbie Clark is the founder and editor of Now Rundown, covering the stories that hit households first—health, politics, insurance, home costs, scams, and the fine print people often learn too late.
