[shaad]

Some time ago, when Orpheus was having his chicken patties stolen by his roommates from his refrigerator, I promised him I'd post some of my own roommate horror stories from my college and grad school days. Seriously though, these aren't really horror stories, just accounts of some of the eccentric roommates that I've had. So here they are (names have been changed to prevent myself from being sued somewhere down the line):

The Unintentional Pyromaniac or Why I Had 32 Saucepan Lids

During the second year of my PhD at Stanford, the room draw put me in a triple with K, a nice Indian lad doing his PhD in Civil Engineering. We got along famously, except that every other week or so, the fire alarm would go off, and I would rush into our kitchen to see K's food on fire. Basically, K would start cooking something (generally some veggie dish or other), then go off to read a book or surf the Net, and forget about it entirely... until, of course, the smoke set off the fire alarm. He or I was always able to extinguish the fire, but suffice it to say that the saucepan with its non-stick surface was always destroyed. The lid almost always survived. K, being a very decent fellow, would always apologize, and buy me a new saucepan. At the end of that year I counted the extra lids I ended up with... there were 32.