Roommates.

One of the things that everyone should know at some point in their life: Never let your friends move in with you! It does not matter how desperate or sad they may seem. Them moving in will only invite pain and misery upon the entire household.
Ravyn and I learned this the hard way recently when our friend Melanie moved in. She had recently been living in Arizona and had moved back to New Mexico after getting out of a bad relationship. She had moved in with a friend with benefits and her boyfriend just over the mountain from Albuquerque.
One day Ravyn gets a call out of the blue from her telling him she's back in town and would like to see us. We drive the 30 miles over there and hang out for a bit. It was nice seeing her again.
Less than a month later, this supposedly perfect relationship between Melanie and her girlfriend has gone askew when the girlfriend's boyfriend decides he hates Melanie and wants her out. Melanie calls us in tears telling us how she has to be out by that night. We feel sympathetic and agree to help her out.
It sounds like a good deal at first. I will help get her a job at the restaurant I work at. She has been receiving food stamps and will help us with that. She says that she wakes up everyday at 6 a.m. and makes breakfast and she does all of the cleaning at her girlfriends' house. She says she can take the bus to get to and from work. We agree that we can all get along because she can help out in the apartment and pay $50 a week in rent.
This arrangement was good for about the first month. She got the job at Bravo. She helped us get groceries with her food stamps. She... trashed our computer room when she moved into it. Ok, so two out of three ain't bad, right?
Well, when she got the job at Bravo and was no longer unemployed, she called to inform the food stamp office. They told her they would cancel them and that she would have to reapply. No big deal, right? It was. Two months later and she still has not even bothered with them again.
She did live up to the promise of making breakfast in the mornings. It is only for herself though and she has an issue about actually cleaning up the kitchen after herself.
Remember the bad relationship she had just gotten out of? She decided to give this woman our phone numbers. She would spend hours on our phones screaming at her or being screamed at. She even had her ex send her a Sprint phone so they could talk. She would cry and get angry everytime she spoke to her but she wouldn't hesitate to run to that phone every time her ex called. She also would cry about how much she missed her girlfriend who had thrown her out without blinking and how much she cared for her and how she was waiting for her girlfriend's boyfriend to get a job so she could go back and live with her girlfriend again. So much drama.
Oh, and remember the whole using the bus thing? Yeah, she's lived with us since Febuary and has used the bus less than ten times. She doesn't seem to understand that we did not agree to be her chauffeurs for everywhere she wants to go. The 50 dollars a week does not include gas prices for driving her everywhere.
Now she is staying with her new girlfriend most of the time and just comes home on days she works doubles so her girlfriend doesn't have to waste gas driving from the back end of Rio Rancho into the center of Albuquerque. She only made about 60 dollars on her paycheck today and because of this she does not believe she needs to pay her rent. Must be nice to have such an awesome living arrangement.
Point of the story: Don't let anyone move in ever.