h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Seriously, I've done some sharing in my time, and have made various observations, some of which are

1) Never share a house with a Satanist until you are certain that 'do what thou wilt' does not preceed 'and f*ck everybody else'.

2) If you share a house with French chemistry students, you'd better like techno, because you're going to hear a lot of it.

3) Never count on anyone to do their lot of the housework - least of all yourself.

4) Knock on the bathroom door every time.

5) Do not get cable.

6) Share with 1 other or 3 others but never 2 and certainly no more than 6.

But most importantly,

6) Do not rely on the landlord to maintain the property you are sharing. You are a resource, and will more often than not be treated as such.

Hope it helps

Landlords = useless money grabbing scum.

Mostly, yes...
Though I've met one (out of about six) who was really nice. Honestly!

by cable you mean cable TV, right? Why do you recommend not getting it? I'm in the US, and we actually don't have cable in my apt, but everyone else I know does (regardless of their living situation).

1. Landlords

My landlord (and lady) are the parents of my housemate who is also my friend. Consequently we get anything that needs doing done PDQ- they're really good about most things.

The point: It's a pretty good situation if you can work your way into it, landlord- wise: No self respecting parent is going to want their little girl living in substandard accomodation, which means the whole house benefits.

2. Cable

We had to get cable- it came as part of the student telephone deal with NTL, which would have actually cost more if we'd elected not to have cable... Beats me

TK

Why no living with 2 other people?

Perhaps I was a little harsh on landlords in general, it's just that my experiences of them have been coloured by a few really bad ones. We firstly had the guy who stole stuff and then claimed he'd thrown it out whilst cleaning. Next we ahd the guy who respected tennants rights so much that he let himself into the property when he pleased in flagrant disregard of the tennant's right to be consulted beforehand. This guy had the cheek to let himself in and then when he went head over heels down the stairs complain to us that they were a death-trap. The irony is that if he'd told us he was coming round we would have warned him about the stairs as we'd been asking all the previous landlords to fix them to no avail for over a year.

This said the landlady I had at uni was fantastic. She and her husband were well past retirement age and used the income from the property to take holidays as the elderly gentleman was quite ill at the time. They were always there to help and never qualmed about fixing things in the house. They were the best landlord I ever had and they claimed we were some of their best tennants in turn.

so what is the subject heading all about?

See the front page!

I was just about to type the same thing!

Great minds... or mad ones...

TK

oh now i understand