Bad Idea #5 - Cleaning muddy boots in a bathtub that already has difficulty draining.

I mentioned before that my roommate was largely responsible for clogging up our shower drain. At first I considered the possibility that he was clogging it up with his body hair or something, and I didn't worry too much about it - I just bought Drano and unclogged it from time to time.

One Sunday, though, he turns to me and says "oh by the way, the drain was clogged again this weekend. There was even black oily stuff coming up." Puzzled an a little bit worried, I allow him to continue. He concludes, "I guess I shouldn't be scrubbing my boots in the bathtub anymore."

5. Cleaning boots in the bathtub, clogging the drain. Repeatedly.

I can understand clogging the bathtub exactly once with dirty runoff from cleaning boots. After the drain fails to clear, that's usually a sign to not do anything that may clog it up again. And then I realized that every time I was going outside to rinse mud off of boots, he was scrubbing chunks of mud off in the bathtub, DESPITE the fact that he knew our bathtub wasn't draining properly.

Sometimes I wonder what's going on in his mind.

Bad Idea #4 - I'm going to sleep at 8:30, and by the way, I'm a light sleeper

My roommate and I normally wake up at around 4:50 AM. This means that we generally go to sleep pretty early. But my roommate takes this to a pretty extreme level:

4. Trying to go to sleep every night at 8:30 PM

Wow. And I mean wow. To make things worse, he becomes irritable when I choose to stay up as late as, say 9:30PM, leaving the light on and doing things like opening/closing drawers, using the bathroom, and typing too loud for his comfort. Basically, he's just as annoyed at me for being up as I am annoyed at him for going to sleep that early. So it's even. Except for the tiny detail of how NOBODY sleeps this early, and it is reasonable for me to do stuff in my room until 9:30. And it wouldn't be so bad if he only did this once or twice a week, but he does it about 4 times a week on average.

Of course, there was the one night when I was just minding my own business, doing some work on my computer, when he just started giggling and laughing. I looked at the time on my computer - 9:50 PM. I give him a confused look to convey "what could be this funny?"

Him- "Oh, man, I can't believe I've been in bed for over an hour and haven't fallen asleep."
Me - "Maybe you should go to sleep when you're tired, you know, after the sun goes down."
Him - "No, I'm really tired. I just can't stop thinking about sex, though."
Me - "Uh, ok. I don't really know what to tell you. Show some discipline, I guess?"
Him - "You can't control your thoughts! Maybe if I were a Buddhist monk."

My conclusion from all this? I now worry a bit about his mental discipline in general, and his impulse control in particular.

It could be worse.

Before I get into other bad ideas by my roommate, I'm going to discuss things that other people have done, that I'm thankful are not things that my roommate will ever do:

I have a friend who got locked out of his own room two days in a row. The first time he got locked out for the entire night until around 11AM the next day because his roommate had a girl over and fell asleep. Because they argued about it during the day, the roommate locked my friend out AGAIN that evening out of spite.

Across the hall live two of my buddies. They bicker constantly, and wake each other up at night for the slightest of reasons. One of them makes weird sounds and faces, farting and belching all day. Also, he has no intention of ever getting a cell phone or computer, and yet he spends quite a bit of money on Alf, Fraggle Rock, and the Muppet Show DVDs.

Most of all, I'm glad my roommate isn't just plain crazy, like the guy who used to live down the hall from me, who would cry and shriek at anything and everything (from people to inanimate objects) whenever under the slightest bit of stress. My favorite quote from him that I happened to overhear, during one of his panic attacks, was "HOW AM I GOING TO LEARN IN CLASS WITHOUT MY ENTERTAINMENT? I NEED MY XBOX TO RELAX!" He may be the only person I've met in the last 5 years that truly scared the crap out of me. Plus he only seemed to find fat ugly Asian girls attractive. I couldn't understand this.

So, yeah, it could definitely be worse.

Bad Idea #2 - "Using an XBOX will break it" and Bad Idea #3 - "Will you buy a DVD player for the room"

My roommate purchased an Xbox 360 right before we moved in together. He then had the bad idea of only buying one Xbox 360 game, and then forgetting to actually bring it when he moved. But that is not one of the bad ideas featured in this blog post. Soon afterward, my roommate began asking me advice on what to look for in a DVD player. I inquired, "Why don't you just use your Xbox - it plays DVDs." His response was as follows:

2. Using an Xbox to play DVDs will shorten the life of the system

I could not understand this belief. I asked him where he read such a thing, and he responded that "that's how my old Xbox broke. I used it as a DVD player all the time and it stopped working in December. That's why I bought the Xbox 360 for Christmas."
Alright - it looks like my roommate has fallen for a classic logical fallacy Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. That is, he believes that because two events occur in sequence, the first event must be the cause of the second. Color me unconvinced. Besides, his sample size is exactly 1. He isn't exactly quoting scientific studies demonstrating that
the probability of console failure increases with hours of use, instead of just the age of system. After all, the Xbox 360, like all other consoles, probably has to pass a test in quality control that probably lets the system play a disc for thousands of hours straight without overheating. Granted, the Xbox does look like it has a few QA problems, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a built in lifespan in hours, like where after 100,000 hours of operation, the console just stops working. This is roughly equivalent to buying a truck to move stuff on the weekends and then refusing to use the truck for daily commuting, opting instead to buy another compact car for passenger driving.
While it sometimes makes a little bit sense, it doesn't make enough sense to justify the added costs, including insurance and parking. He doesn't play his Xbox nearly as much the video game nerds do - I'd say he plays games on the Xbox about an hour per week. That's right. An hour per week. He barely uses it at all.
And also, what was he thinking anyway? Who cares if his Xbox 360 stops working properly 5 years from now? If there are any Xbox 360 games worth playing then (unlikely - how many PS1 games do you play on your PS2 anymore), he'll be playing them on the next generation Xbox anyway.
I gave my roommate advice on things to look for, and mentioned casually that I was considering buying a DVD player capable of playing burned data DVDs with DivX files on it. He looks at me, then says "oh ok, if you're going to buy one, I'm not going to buy one then." I thought the issue was dead, but a few weeks later he asks me a ridiculous question:

3. "So, can I ask you a favor? Can I ask you to buy the DVD player sooner rather than later? I kinda wanted to start watching DVDs on a dedicated DVD player."

You have got to be kidding me. Who the hell asks this? I looked at him, incredulous. I don't ask my friends to hurry up and buy a car so that I can start getting rides from them. It's not normal to ask someone to buy something on YOUR OWN schedule so that you can start leeching off of them right away. After all, I had used his Xbox a grand total of 3 times to watch 3 different DVDs the 3 months we had lived together. I didn't actually feel that I OWED him this favor, because I don't use his television or game consoles.
I don't know why I was so surprised. A month or so earlier, he had observed out loud that he bought all the cleaning solutions (bleach, etc) for the bathroom and bought all the toilet paper, as well as a trash can and trash bags for the room. He then tried to segue this into a recommendation that I buy a computer mouse for his computer. I responded with "you bought that stuff before I moved in. I'll just get that common use stuff the next time around. Plus it's ridiculous to make up for things you bought for the two of us with things that I buy for you. Plus this mouse you want is $30. I don't believe that toilet cleaner, bleach, trash bags, and toilet paper cost you that much." He backed down, of course, but I became wary of his poor sense of appropriate roommate roles. I ended up buying some stuff for the room a few days later, when our shower became completely clogged, probably because of him (more on this in the future).

Clarification

I've been asked the question, so I decided I would answer while this blog is still young.

Do you hate your roommate or something?

The answer is no. I like my roommate, and we get along just fine. I just like to criticize his worldview and way of thinking, that's all.

An Introduction, and Bad Idea #1: Drug legalization

I'd like to give some background. I am college-educated, and so is my roommate. My roommate is a bit older than me, which is why his bad ideas are so unforgivable.

I'm going to toy around with the format of this blog, but I think it will probably stay similar to what it is now. I'll give the terrible idea, and then break it down.

1. All drugs should be legalized and taxed.

Someone needs to explain to me in such a world, how we would prevent the crack cocaine corporations, no longer illicit and allowed to have advertising and marketing, from predatory marketing or something. I mean, look at the market penetration of Red Bull, with their advertising and their Red Bull girls giving away free drinks. Imagine walking into a club with a bunch of sexy girls handing out some new addictive drug protected by pharmaceutical patents, so that the club can start selling it at a ridiculous price the next week. Red Bull is the example - think about that 8 oz can that sells for $2 retail and like $8 in a club, and ask yourself why leisure drug companies wouldn't do the same thing. And then ask yourself if that hypothetical world would be better than ours. I highly doubt it.

Another thing - what happens to prescription drugs? There's no reason for Tylenol 3 to not be available over the counter when heroin is. Unless they're all available only with a prescription, but I don't think that it's what my roommate had in mind.

Basically, there are all sorts of kinks that need to be worked out before we can even call this idea anything other than ridiculously retarded. I don't doubt that most of my initial concerns can be addressed by 'solutions,' but the most annoying thing was that my roommate hadn't thought out ANY of these problems before vehemently arguing that this was a fantastic idea, and that you had to be a retard not to like it.

And this is the pattern - my roommate presents a sweeping, revolutionary idea without thinking about it past a superficial level, and then passionately argues with no evidence, only speculation (poorly reasoned speculation, at best) about what "would" or "should" happen. He ignores evidence against his ideas and openly embraces any supporting evidence.

This blog is inspired by my roommate, who shall henceforth be known as Specialist Ed, or SPC Ed.

I will post about him beginning tomorrow.