What happens when your college roommate ‘horror story’ goes viral

[Independent voter]

Lots of drama between dorm mates. Has social media helped? No, pretty much the opposite.

Girl posts her complaints about her roommate to twitter, it goes viral. Roommate reads tweets. Roommate tells RA room smells like weed and on and on.





Much more to read at link

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ry-goes-viral/

Angry tweet made by roommate with her picture

Jessica Taylor hated that Nikki, her college roommate, kept the light on to do homework late into the night. She needed to get to sleep at 11 p.m., and couldn’t with that bright light shining just feet from her pillow. Nikki, meanwhile, was very tidy, and couldn’t stand that Jessica’s side of the room was so messy and cluttered. She suspected that Jessica was the one responsible for a mysterious stain on the carpet, and she thought her sleep-deprived roommate should just buy a sleeping mask if the lights bothered her so much.

“Right off the bat she annoyed me,” Jessica told The Washington Post. For the first few weeks of college, however, the mismatched roommates tried to keep the peace. “When we moved in, she was pretty nice,” Jessica said.

Time went on, and neither Penn State freshman talked to each other about the increasing tension between them. Instead, one of them — Nikki — found another way to vent: She told the Internet about it instead.

“Two weeks down, and I already hate my roommate,” she tweeted in early September. Later that day, she tweeted again: “My roommate situation is a horror story.”

[The true story behind ‘Zola,’ the epic Twitter story too crazy to be real]

Jessica and Nikki were well on their way to becoming each other’s college roommate horror stories by then. Bad roommates — and the ugly fights that come with them — happen to the best of us in college. But the feuds don’t usually play out on social media, with various snipes gathering 100,000 retweets. And that’s exactly what happened after Jessica found her roommate’s Twitter account.

“today i found all the subtweets my roommate has made about me, so i printed them out and hung them up in our dorm ❤️” Taylor tweeted Tuesday afternoon:

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
uncle jessy @jessyjeanie
today i found all the subtweets my roommate has made about me, so i printed them out and hung them up in our dorm ❤
2:41 PM - 27 Sep 2016 · State College, PA, United States
109,220 109,220 Retweets 318,078 318,078 likes
About five minutes after tweeting her handiwork, Jessica told me, that tweet started to go viral. So she tweeted again: “To add on to how s[—-] my roommate, she called the cops on me yesterday bc i had weed and she hates me.”

Another tweet contained what appeared to be images of text messages between the two roommates, detailing the fight they had just before Jessica tweeted about her revenge.

“Yeah i shouldn’t have tweeted that but I did so that’s that,” Nikki texted her roommate after being called out for her subtweets. “This is going to be really uncomfortable if you keep feeding the fire.”

In the exchange, Nikki says she didn’t go to the “police,” but did report the smell of weed to their hall’s RA, triggering the involvement of campus law enforcement. “When I walk into the room and it smells like weed yes yes it does effect me,” she texted Jessica.

“How??” Jessica replied. “I mean literally if it bothered you you have a conversation with me about it not call the police lol.”

“Weed is illegal don’t have it in the room or I will tell the RA again,” Nikki responded. “It’s up to them what to do from there and if they call the cops that’s not my problem nor do I care.”

Suddenly, thousands of strangers on the Internet were following every detail. And most of them were rooting for Jessica.

“It felt good to be able to complain about her, so that people could understand,” Jessica told me.

The “roommate horror story” is a viral genre at this point, and Jessica’s story isn’t even the first one this year. A few weeks ago, a UCLA freshman tweeted out a image of a dramatic email she received from her new roommate before they even arrived on campus, an email that New York magazine described as “more dramatic about bunk beds than anyone has ever been in the entire history of humanity.”

[Rudkobing]

*cough*TheOddCouple*cough*

[Sunseeker]

My dorm experience was great. Room with the RA. Best situation ever. You're basically best friends with the dorm cops. You get away with everything and typically get much better accommodations. Also, universities almost always provide students the ability to switch dorms exactly because of shit like this.

[Forgettable]

Sounds like the typical drama I avoid at all costs.