In a fortnight I move to an undistinguished town in the middle of Germany, to bring enlightenment and English to the uncouth. I’ve been looking at accommodation websites, sifting through the weirdness for acceptable digs. The real difficulty isn’t the flat, it’s the people. Terrible flatmates are an affliction and a curse. I particularly detest slobs.

I have developed useful tactics over the years, to keep slovenly flatmates in line. I freely offer them here, in the spirit of universal brotherhood and global warming:

Slobs are a great problem indeed. There is no point asking them to clean their dishes or throw out the decomposed meat: they regard these requests as obscene and eccentric. You must clean up after them. Do so. At first they won’t even notice — these scum live in squalor not because they like it; they don’t even notice it. However, after a while, dimly, they will perceive a certain alteration in the flat — fewer flies, maggots, less green stuff pulsing in the fridge, more clean dishes, an empty sink, a non-adhesive floor, and so on. It is possible they will at this point wonder what is happening, and they may even realise it is your work. They will shrug and accept that just as their mothers tidied up after them at home, so in adult life someone will always follow them about, cleaning up their filth and taking care of their problems.

Slowly, increase the celerity and extent of your cleaning operations. At first you will only clean your flatmates’ dishes when you need a clean plate, or while waiting for the kettle to boil. In the second stage, you will relentlessly patrol the flat, high on amphetamines, cleaning up disorder and dirt as soon as it transpires. Shock and awe. Your flatmates will, for example, put a cup of tea down, go to answer the phone, and then return to find the cup has gone. Puzzled, they look about, then decide the fairies must have taken it. They go to the kitchen to make a new cup of tea, and find the self-same cup, spotlessly clean, on the drying rack. They begin to wonder. They begin to fear.

And this is only the beginning. Your cleaning operations will take on uncanny, ninja-like power and penetration. You will lurk in dark corners, totally invisible until a flatmate puts a fork down, and then with a paralyzing ninja scream you will leap out of the shadows, slap your flatmate aside, seize the fork, and bear it off to the kitchen, to be cleaned with iron wool and sulphuric acid.

Finally, you will intervene in your flatmates’ sex lives, leaping out of the shadows (with a ninja scream) in order to pick up discarded bras and pants, condoms, sex toys, mid-coitus. You will rearrange your flatmates’ limbs into more orderly sexual arrangments.

You will intervene to prevent dirty sex.

Eventually, your flatmates will realise that they’re just going to have to tidy up after themselves and act like responsible adults, or ninjas will happen and dirt will be cleaned and if people die in the course of your operations, then that’s not really your fault. You’re just trying to make the flat look nice, and you can’t expect niceness without a little windpipe crushing and shuriken-hurling, so what are they complaining about anyway. Goddamn hippies.

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: advice, diatribes, terror & war // 2 Comments »