@Anguauberwaldironfoundersson Shared living is a goldmine of CFery, and your post has unearthed many in my memory. One of which...
I went back to uni as a mature student, needing to live in shared accommodation. After some not ideal living situations, I found a room in a shared house with 3 young professionals around my age. It seemed perfect; they were fun, kept working hours, socialised together on occassion. We had the odd mutually agreed party but nobody was blasting music on a school night at 3am or anything.
It rolled along well for my final year of uni until 2 of them decided to leave. They'd all lived together before I'd got there and I just took it in my stride but the other remaining housemate was really upset. These were her friends and they'd conspired to leave and rent elsewhere locally, together, without her. And she had no idea why.
They told me that, although they liked her, they were fed up of her messiness and lack of cleaning. We'd agreed a cleaning schedule between us but they said she'd not kept to her share, despite reminders about it. At this point they felt not living together would be better for the friendship. It wasn't something I'd noticed if I'm honest. I spent a lot of time at uni and working to fund it, and when at home the place was clean and not overly messy. I did my share to clean up and assumed we all had. I felt for her a bit. We all managed to remain friends, with them giving her some other explanation and me not passing on what they'd said.
The two of us remained in the house. We had a decent rent and good landlord who gave reidents the say on potential new housemates and rent was on the room, not a share of the house. Previous housemates had stayed friends with current ones which reassured me we wouldn't get stuck with arseholes and they'd assured us rooms hadn't stayed empty for long. I didn't think we'd have too long to wait for other good housemates to move in and split bills with. In the meantime, me and remaining tenant sat down and looked at bills and we agreed to keep the current set up and not use more as it was already a 50% increase in costs for each of us while we waited for new housemates.
During this time my housemate lost her job and decided to set up her own business. Having graduated I was working in a call centre on minimum wage to tide me over whilst applying for graduate jobs. Money was tight so sticking to bills was important. However the previous set up of heating on for an hour in the morning while we got ready for work and a few hours in the evening when people got home wasn't apparently working for my housemate who was now wfh to set up the business. I remember coming in and the large 3 floor house feeling toasty after work in a way that would only happen if the heating had already been on for hours. I tried to discuss it with her again, on multiple occasions, but she would tell me she had Raynauds and always felt cold. I tried to make helpful suggestions; put an extra jumper on, work in the living room with the fire on instead of heating the whole house, turn off radiators in the rooms not being used, go out to cafes or the library for some of the time to work, get an electric heater for your room, hot water bottles, heated blanket etc. No matter what I suggested I'd come home every evening to a toasty house on all 3 floors, quite often with gas fire and electric heater on in addition to central heating. I'd turn it down or off in an attempt to rein in the upcoming bill so wouldn't actually benefit from much of it myself. We were now a good number of weeks into being just 2 tenants with no sign of anyone else taking the rooms.
One weekend we were both away. I'd left first and also got back first. I open the front door and it was like walking into a blast furnace. She'd put the heating on and up, after I'd left, the gas fire and electric heater also on, blazing away all weekend with nobody in the house. I clearly hadn't been getting through so asked to have a chat. I explained, again, that even if the bills came in exactly the same as the previous one we'd still be paying twice as much as there were only the 2 of us to split them between, which was a lot. But it was unlikely to be as little as that because we'd had the heating on so much more than for the previous bill. It could easily be double the last bill which would mean each of us paying 4 times more than last time, which I couldn't afford. I gave a breakdown of potential costs (I had no idea exactly how much she had the heating on when I wasn't there) to make it clear the bill could be a great deal higher this time. I explored the options with her. Agree on the timed heating, stick to it and split the bill equally between us. She could agree to pay a higher percentage of the bill if she wanted the central heating on outside of agreed times. I'd happily adjust the actual times too, say put it on at 3pm and off again at 6pm so it's warm for you in the afternoon and for me getting in, for example. Again, offered up the list of suggestions such as work some time in library, etc. Basically I really tried to be reasonable, fair and proactive while trying to avoid a bill neither of us could afford. She decided she wanted to split equally, and all the right noises were made. But day after day I'd come home to the overly toasty house and know that she'd completely ignored everything we'd discussed. I tried explaining on several more occasions what we could be in for, all falling on deaf ears. And we'd still had no takers for the rooms. I'd have said yes to Fred and Rose West by point if they agreed to pay bills, so worried was I about the inevitable high bill.
Sitting at work one day a text popped up from housemate. "The gas bill has come, sh*t, it's £900. What are we going to do?" As if it were a complete surprise. Bear in mind this was over 20 years ago. You'd only expect a bill like that if you lived in a mansion then. It was more than 6 times the amount of the previous bill. I replied, "I hate to say I told you so, but..." When I got home I agreed to pay an extra £200 on top of the half of the amount of the previous bill, which seemed more than generous to me in the circumstances, and left me broke, but said she'd have to foot the rest. She argued it wasn't fair and we'd agreed to split equally! I stood firm because frankly I had no more money to give and had explained that exactly this would happen on an almost a weekly basis since the others had moved out. As I hadn't been in the house 10 hours a day I could only take her word that she was going to stick to our agreed heating schedule. She hadn't done that, which also wasn't fair. The fair thing to do was pay what we agreed, and I'd already added a load more on top! Reluctantly she conceeded to this.
Some weeks later a previous tenant came to visit, having stayed in touch with CF housemate. I'd met her a couple of times before but she wasn't my mate. I agreed to drive us all to IKEA (at my expense, nothing offered for petrol) and we'd had an nice afternoon picking up bits and having lunch. On the drive home the visiting girl decided to bring up the bill, which had nothing to do with her obviously, and had a huge go at me for not agreeing to split it equally with CF, who'd obviously whined on about how awful I'd been. I particularly liked the CFery of being nice to get the free trip out, only bringing it up on the way home. I shut it down and said it was between me and CF and we'd come to that agreement but I'd happily discuss it with CF again if she asked me to. She didn't.
I'd like to say that was that with CF but it wasn't. Mexican bin stand off came next, but that's a whole other tale of CFery, and my own stupidity for giving a CF a second chance and not taking heed of the original housemates warning.