House guest from hell
BY LANE NICHOLSInviting out-of-town house guests to stay is a small kindness fraught with risks and untold opportunity to spectacularly backfire.
While most of us are suitably house trained to behave ourselves when staying at someone's home, others are like feral mongrels set free from the pound and determined to mark out their new territory with any body fluid they can muster.
While sipping a red wine on Saturday night, a friend filled me on her own personal horror story - one strangely linked to my last blog post.
Her husband's mate was visiting from Aussie. She made a cosy bed up in the spare room and the trio spent a fun filled night together on the razz.
The next day 'Bob' packed up and shot through early to catch his flight home.
My friend duly went to clean her departed house guest's room and found the duvet she'd provided had mysteriously disappeared.
"The rotten sod," she thought. "He's nicked my bedspread."
A week later a mutual friend travelled to Melbourne to stay with the bed linen thief and was asked a strange favour.
Bob said he'd "accidentally" packed my mate's duvet with his own belongings and asked if his own house guest would mind taking it back.
The mutual friend obliged and returned the misappropriated bed ware to its rightful owner the next day.
And this is where the story gets really grubby.
She found he'd urinated in it the previous weekend, felt too ashamed to come clean with his hosts, then returned it a week later - unwashed.
I had an old friend come stay with me in London. Known for his love of the bottle, Rick got completely annihilated at the pub so I took him home and put him to bed.
As luck would have it, my female flatmate (a total cow) was away in Spain so I gave pickled Rick her comfy futon.
That night, he wet himself in a drunken stupor, but to his credit, owned up to his wee indiscretion the next morning.
We simply washed the sheets, turned over her mattress and never mentioned it again.
I remember visiting a mate in Wellington many years ago with a few friends and knocking back a couple of drinks.
One of our posse consumed one to many. As the rest of us chatted, he leaned forward, opened his mouth wide and vomited for what seemed an eternity directly on to my mate's living room rug.
Though disgusting, the rest of could do nothing but roll with laughter.
Speaking of vomiting - I'd just got together with a lovely young lass and suspected it was true love. I'd pretty much moved in to her Terrace flat but the relationship was still in its romantic infancy.
My mate Vaughan won $100 bucks on the pokies (a small fortune to two 20-year-old hospitality workers) so we hit the town for an intoxicating night of celebration.
I ended up crashing at the girl's place but (fortunately as it turns out) she had decided to spend the night at a friend's.
I woke up to discover a sticky wet patch in the bed where my girlfriend would usually have been lying and the remnants of last night's takeaway dinner caking her sheets.
Thank God she was elsewhere.
Have you ever regretted inviting a friend to stay or humiliated yourself in someone's bathroom sink, walk-in wardrobe or spare room?
Share.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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Apart from a kid stamping chewing gum into our carpet we've never had any bodily spillages. The worst thing I've had is a good friend who cheated on her man (who we thought was great) by shagging another friend of ours in our spare bed. This was even after I'd said to her "please don't cheat on your man in our house, it's not cool". The next day when I again expressed my disgust, they did nothing to acknowledge it and instead spent several hours snogging on our couch. In the end we kicked them both out and said if they wanted to break people's hearts they could do it elsewhere. Not a nice situation to be in, and much harder to clean up than misplaced urine.
One night booze crashers are ok - but the rules are they sleep on old blankets that can be thrown in the washing machine or even better hosed off. Second rule, they don't stay for breakfast! if you really have that killer hangover alcohol will be seeping out of your pores and you will stink! House guests who are "drunk crashers" must leave ASAP! But the golden rule is clean up after yourself!
Perfect rule for those pesky overseas visitors - three nights. You can stay three nights and that is it! Any more than three nights and you start to think "gee is was nice to see you but it is going to be just as nice to see you go!". Not that we don't love our overseas guests but admit it they do tend to stuff up the morning routine, use your favourite coffee cup and usually leave their travel stuff from one end of your house to the other!
As for being the "unruly" house guest, yes, I have many a story to tell from vomitting on my boyfriend when staying at his house for the first time while trying to ask where the light switch was for the bathroom. Even worse being that drunk and getting the taxi driver to drop me off at a house, insisting it was the correct house that I was staying at, demanding that the people living their let me in and making myself quite comfortable on their couch - ego ouch the next morning! Another quite common occurance (and a personal favourite of which I have been on both ends of this!) is when your house guest is that munted that they aren't even able to ring the door bell and you find them slumped on the door step the next morning hugging the door mat!
oh oh oh but the classic would be when a girlfriend of mine (kiwi) living in Brisbane had her boyfriends mates come over from NZ for a week. Of course, boys being boys, went out to paint the town red and came home giving it a fair good going over! One of the house guests obvioulsy had to use the facilities during the night and could not find his way. His stumbling around woke my friend up who went out to the kitchen to find her favourite house guest taking a no. 2 under the dinning room table! Needless to say the houseguests didn't stay much longer after that and neither did the boyfriend!!
Happy Birthday Lane. Nice to see that the inner child wont die.
No way! I am the dream house guest. I even supply my own toilet paper and cook a meal (or baking) for the people I am staying with!
Years ago a friend of a friend parked at my house as it was close to the pub and secure. I didn't know him too well but we had a good night at the pub. When I returned home I found him asleep in his car, so invited him to come in and use the spare room. The next morning he was gone - as was some cash I had left on the table. Stink guy.
hmm, havent had any couch wetting incidents thankfully, but we did invite a guy to stay with us for a few days because we met him one boozy night in town, and he told us he was living in his car, and we kinda felt sorry for him, well after 2 weeks i asked the boyfriend to kick him out, as he would sleep in the lounge until lunchtime, food would misteriously disappear from the fridge and cupboard, and when he would run out of ciggies he would go down to the pub and raid the stubbies and pick up half butt from gutters and bring them home and turn them into rollies on the kitchen table, (and to anyone who know who does this, they absolutely STINK)so he seriously overstayed his welcome, so in the end my bf told him to f^* off and dont come back :)
Me and my Pal Mark were once driving through Tawa when we spotted one of our mates staggering down the street, I’ll call him Andy…
We stopped the car ( Mark’s Dads Toyota Crusader ) and picked him up.
While driving this foul stench filled the car. Mark slammed on the brakes, we turned around and Andy had taken a dump in the back seat, his pants were down and a there was this big, black greasy turd spread up his back and all over the fabric of the back seat. We pulled him out and left him the gutter with his trousers around his ankles. Mark spent the rest of the night cleaning the car; I went home and left him to it. He told me it took months to rid the car of the smell and he kept finding bits of dried stool in the plastic of the back seat belt clip. He had to pick the bits out with a tooth pick.
Nothing else to say but "ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww"!
Black Books - where he gets blanked by his friends in the street. Turns out he mistook the cane chair in their kitchen for the dunny, but it wasn't wees :( Hilarious show.
Ah yes. I'm a purpetrator more than a vitim.
I crashed at a mates parents house years ago as a teenager in a right state. He startled me while pissing on his parents tv in the lounge. Luckily they weren't up watching it. I apologised and thankfully didn't fry the tv.
Another mate was house sitting a relatives (again, teenagers) house in the country and we all went round for a rural piss up. I crashed out in one of the kids beds and pissed myself in the night. I made the bed and kept quiet.
I had a mate who was a couple of years younger than us, about 16, he was a chronic pisser when tanked, beds, sofa's, washing machines. He was flatly refused any furniture to crash on as he would stain it so he would often end up in a bath tub.
Finally, at a house party with a keg, some buggar pissed in a near full jug of beer and then set it down. I couldn't figure out why someone would just abandon a jug of beer so picked it up and had a swig at which point a mate who had seen the jug being topped up with urine told me what had happened. I puked a whole lot that night.
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Years ago I got paralytic (alcohol and prescription drugs do not mix). The cops picked me up and a friend told them where I lived so they dumped me on my mate's doorstep. I got up tripped, fell through their front door - knocking it off it's hinges and passed out. Woke up in the morning lying on the door, soaked in my own urine and wondering why my gear was being carried out to the street by his missus.