"I have immunity to certain house rules" - certain house mates' attitude's PART I

Of the two A4 pages worth of house rules, two of them are as follows:

1) "Residents are responsible for keeping the common areas clean and hygienic, with chores assigned according to an agreement made mutually made by all the current residents of the house.  This is particularly important in the kitchen, bathrooms and garbage area."

2) "Keep noise down to reasonable levels at all times.  After 10:00pm, any sound generated within your room should not be audible by other room."

It is the latter of these two rules I shall be commenting on first, as it's more personal.  (btw, the word "latter" does not mean "the last on the list," like many people believe - using it to make themselves look intelligent - but in actual fact means "the second of the two.")

First of all, I should make it known that in 2009 when I originally attempted university, the bedroom of the place I was staying in had a wall in common with the very big, very flat +103com television, that, so long as the owners of the house were home, was turned on, and very, very loud - I could literally hear every word, every sound, and every note of any program that was on; it was torture, and what I have come to deem "inconsiderately loud" (in that the owners took no consideration of the fact that they had students staying with them).

Keeping that, and the house rule I have listed as "2)" in mind, you'll be glad to know I was quite pleased when I read that rule, thinking I'd finally be able to get sleep at a decent hour of the night, so I could wake up early and refreshed the next morning (I generally like to go to bed at around 10:30pm, but admittedly, some times I'm in bed as late as 11:30pm).

The first few nights I noticed that my Ugandan house mate liked to have his music up at high levels (because obviously everyone else in the house has his taste in music) often leaving his bedroom door open when he's in the kitchen so he can hear his music.

I also noticed that after 10pm it only got turned down ever so slightly, with it still being loud enough to hear from my room.  Perhaps not loud enough for me to hear exactly what song was playing, but loud enough for me to hear that there was a song playing.

I thought I'd let it go for a few nights to see if it improved, and last night was by far the worst with the music being easily loud enough for me to tell exactly what song he was playing, which carried on until around three in the morning.

So annoyed was I by this that around 1:48am, after having already woken a number of times to the same piece of music being played over, and over, and over, that I got out of bed, turned on my computer and emailed my landlady about the situation.

I don't know if she mentioned anything to him about it when she was here this morning.

I don't hear any music coming from his room right now, but that's partly because of got my window open and the sound of traffic tends to drown everything else out ...

Okay, I just closed the window and laid on my bed as a test, and while I can hear it, it doesn't seem to be as loud as it was last night, however, right now it's only 9:34pm, so it still remains to be seen whether or not he has this attitude of thinking that this particular house rule doesn't apply to him.

I'll keep you posted.

- Ian (the guy in the Mario hat).

Who clogged the toilet?

Can you believe that after only having been here one day, I was accused of clogging the toilet? (Because none of the other house-mates owned up to it)

Here's how it happened:

It was about four or five in the afternoon, and I decided to go to the local shopping centre and buy a waste-paper basket, a bath towel and a laundry hamper, as they weren't provide as standard in my room (Remind me that if I ever rent out a house to students, to have coat hangers, wast-paper baskets, and laundry hampers as standard with the room - as for the bath towel, I just simply didn't have room to pack one).

I got to Go-Lo and thought about whether it would be worth buying one or not given my impending move in about two weeks - because my landlady was unable to sign the Rent Assistance Certificate as owner ship of the house was currently being transferred from her husband to her mother-in-law.

I ultimately decided against it, and went and had a small cheeseburger McValue meal with a Sprite at the McDonalds in the shopping centre.

After I was finished, I casually walked home, came in, sat down and started using my computer as usual i.e Chatting on MSN, watching YouTube videos, etc.

After about fifteen minutes of coming home the was a knock on the kitchen-side door of my room (my room has two doors - one that goes to the front of the house and the outside world, and one that goes to the hallway which leads to the kitchen ... which in turn leads to the back yard) so I got up to answer it and saw my Ugandan house mate standing there, who then began a conversation that went something like this:

"Are you a student?" - at this point I thought he wanted nothing more than a little socialisation to get to know the "new guy" a little better.

"Yeah, I study over at UNSW."

He then went on to tell me that "...in this house, we clean up after ourselves..." - I was somewhat puzzled at this point, wondering why he would want to tell me something so seemingly random.  "You might not know, but on this toilet you really need to hold down the flush."

"Oh yeah," I started thinking to myself "that's just like the one we have back home" (referring to the toilet back in parents house in my home town)

Continuing, he told me that he comes and goes from the house during the day, just like all the other house-mates, and that when he got back at 5:30pm, he had to use the toilet quite badly, and when he got to the toilet, it was clogged, his exact words being " ... and it was nasty!"

At this point he accused me of clogging the toilet (Believe me, I'll be the first person to admit that I've clogged a toilet) under the assumption that "None of the other house-mates owned up to it, so therefore it must have been you."

Note that he had ample opportunity to come to me at any time before seeing any of the other house-mates, and yet still chose to come to me last.  Suspicious, no?

Thinking back, I also found it odd that the big middle eastern guy from Room #1, just as I'd answered the knock from the Ugandan guy popped his head out his room for no apparent reason and said "Oh, hi Ian!"

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You'll remember in an earlier post how great I thought it was going to be to live so close to the university, right?  Well, given the events written above, these days I just take my netbook to the library between classes and do whatever needs to be done while I wait for my next class to begin.

Now I generally only use the toilet here before going to bed at night, and when & if I need to go in the middle of the night.