A man accidentally allowed a surprising houseguest to destroy his roommate’s space — but who’s really to blame is up for debate.
The man shares in post on Reddit’s “Am I the A——” forum that his reclusive roommate has an unusual habit: leaving his bedroom window open in the middle of winter, while simultaneously keeping the heat on about 70 degrees. The roommate also removed the screen from the window without explaining why.
The reason for both of those choices became clear after one disastrous weekend.
When the roommate left the house for a few days, he kept the window open as always, the original poster (OP) writes. Hoping to save some energy in his absence, he went outside and closed the window, since the bedroom is in the front of the house and he was able to reach it without entering the room. Unfortunately, that was the wrong move.
“He returns Sunday night, goes into his room, comes out and snaps at me to not go into his room or close his window, then goes back in,” the OP writes. “I text him saying I didn’t go in your room, I closed it from the outside, just trying to save power.”
The roommate then exited his bedroom once again and allegedly screamed at the OP that he had locked a cat in the bedroom for three days and it relieved itself all over his belongings.
The OP says he had no idea that his roommate had been keeping a stray animal as a pet, letting it go in and out through the open window at will.
“I asked him if the landlord knew about this, and he just dodged the question,” the OP writes. “[He] said because he was planning on moving in two weeks (news to me and the landlord, btw) that he didn’t feel the need to tell anyone about the cat.”
The poster argued the roommate was at fault for the damage since he chose to remove the screen on the window in the first place.
Cat peeking from under boxes in a house.
Xiuxia Huang/Getty
The following day, however, the OP got a call from the landlord. The roommate had contacted the property owner and given him a very different version of events,
“Roomy apparently left them a long voicemail saying that I had gone into his room and rearranged his stuff (not true), that a random cat just got into his room this once (not true) and that I shut his window with the cat inside his room, his stuff and the carpet is now trashed, and I blamed him for everything,” the OP writes.
Most of the commenters who responded to the saga were on the side of the OP. “You are NTA [not the a——] but your roommate sounds very difficult to live with,” one person wrote. “Hopefully you will be able to move sooner rather than later.”
Some commenters were suspicious of the OP as well, wondering how he didn’t hear the cat all weekend and questioning whether the cat was actually a stray or just an outdoor cat.
“It’s not a stray cat, and it’s not a feral — it’s his actual pet who lives there, and he probably left it enough food for the weekend,” one commenter wrote. “The cat wasn’t bothered a bit because it lives there… and it did what cats always do when they get locked into a room — sleep, eat, p— and s—wherever it wants.”
Besides the comings and goings of the animal, quite a few commenters were more concerned about the safety hazard the roommate created.
“Forget a stray cat, someone could’ve just entered the house through that window to rob and murder you,” one person wrote. Another added, “Heating bills are one thing, but leaving a ground floor window not just unlocked but physically open when he’s not even home is such a safety hazard. I would be livid.”
