When living away from home, there was a long list of awful roommates that I met. There was the mold-lord, abandoning dishes in the sink until they turned from white to a sickly gray-green colour.

There was the mermaid, who loved taking hour-long showers that left the rest of the house bathing in glacial-temperature water.

One time I got really unlucky and had a roommate who left coke out on the table the weekend my parents came to visit.

However, none of those sadists came close to this next roommate. I must have done something horrendous in my past life because hell hath no fury like the snore-master that I lived with.

Sure, I can throw out dishes and ask the neighbours to borrow their shower.

Heck, if I was more alert at the time I could have made up a story about how I spilled some sugar on the coffee table. But when I went toe to toe with this poor man who had clearly ingested an industrial sized chainsaw, all hope was lost.

It doesn’t matter how many times I woke him up, within minutes he was back at it, revving his eight cylinder diesel engine of a nose and clear cutting a goddamn forest at three in the morning.

Maybe if the snoring were the calm idling engine of a hybrid Prius then I could tune it out, but when that engine was a Harley Davidson attempting to break the 0 to 60 record, what could I do?

Most of you are probably rolling your eyes wondering why I didn’t just put in some earplugs.

The funny thing about earplugs is that while they dulled the sounds of the lawnmower Olympics going on in the next room, they made my own breathing sound like gale force winds. Obviously that wasn’t going to work.

The strangest thing about the ordeal was that my life-sized vuvuzela horn roommate was actually a pretty light sleeper, as long as the noises weren’t his own. How is it that this guy can sleep through an entire fleet of F-16 Fighting Falcons going to march five into battle, but when I have my television volume set to 10 he wakes right up?

What kind of ungodly freak of nature was I dealing with? It’s like I had the Manhattan project happening in the room beside me every night.

I swear that I’ve been to fireworks shows that were quieter than my house was. But what could I do? I had signed a lease and couldn’t find anyone to sublet.

Well, I did what any self-respecting millennial would do this this situation.

I ran away from my problems.

I packed a suitcase, emptied my beer fridge and started couch surfing for as long as I could at friend’s houses. I slept on futons, air mattresses, Lazyboys, hardwood floors, kitchen counters, bathtubs, heck I once went to class five hours early so I could nap at my desk. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than slowly going insane from sleep deprivation.

My condolences go out to the unfortunate souls who end up living with this entire high school marching band of a man. Your sacrifice means that the rest of us might make it to graduation. Thank you.
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