Housemates from hell

August last year was a particularly bad time to be looking for a flat in Singapore. Property prices were going through the roof and, with them, rents. A four-room flat that would’ve cost just S$900 a month in rent a few months back was already going for $1,400.

Still, I was lucky. I went to Singapore with a “live-in” partner in tow – the talented Mr ManF. The company hired us at about the same time and gave us a relocation allowance of S$10,000 each. Between us, we had S$20,000 to spend on finding a flat, furnishing it and generally finding a place to park our assess in after a hard day at the office.

So, we wound up getting a pretty decent five-room flat for $1,700 a month in Woodlands.

The place is just 45 minutes from the office by train, 30 minutes by cab, and five minutes to the nearest MRT station. There’s a small mall across the street that has everything in it: a wet market, a grocery, two 24-hour convenience stores, ATMs, a 24-hour payment centre, two coffeeshops, two salons, an optical shop and a dental office.

Our unit is on the 11th floor and has an unobstructed view of the Seletar expressway. The owners, a retired couple moving to Australia, left most of their furniture with us: sofas, a dining set, a 29-inch TV, air-conditioners, beds and working tables for each of the three rooms, a heavy-duty washing machine and dryer, a stainless steel ref with a big freezer and drapes for the windows. (Pity, the guy took with him his glass-encased scale model of the battleship Yamato; that would’ve have made a really cool divider.)

It was a great deal, we thought. When we began telling people where we lived, though, we got something like this:

“What?” they’d blurt out with the look of incredulity you’d normally see in someone talking to a person who just tore to pieces a winning lottery ticket. “Woodlands? Why so far?”

For someone who’d lived through Manila’s monstrous traffic jams and apocalyptic floods, 45 minutes to anywhere is a walk in the park. Here on the other hand, 45 minutes to anywhere may as well be an eternity. It’s like living in Fairview, Quezon City and working in Amadeo, Cavite.

So, since most of our friends are living on the other side of the island, they’ve been avoiding our place like we had the bubonic plague. We’ve hosted at least two parties where only one or two of the people we invited showed up, even with promises of a lavish feast of adobo, nilagang baka, and a hefty mix of diced manggang hilaw, bagoong, sibuyas and kaunting sili.

Still, I really can’t complain. It could’ve been worse. I get along well with my "mate", although he likes walking around the flat wearing only his skimpy shorts with those preposterous Spongebob Squarepants and Superman prints.

A number of Pinoys working here, on the other hand, have to live with "housemates from hell". These are creatures that spring out naturally from an arrangement inherent in having to share space with someone you really don’t know well but have to get along with. Kailangang makisama.

The arrangement is usually cordial at the beginning. Then, some misunderstandings occur over mundane things like an uncollected tissue paper lying on the floor. These little things pile up as each day goes by into huge mounds of discontent until all those pent-up emotions explode into a full-blown conflict that can only be resolved if one side yields the territory.

It starts out usually as a gentle reminder:

"Uy, mare, paki-tanggal naman ang mga nilabhan mo sa washing machine bago ka lumabas ng bahay. Salamat, ha. Ingat."

After a month and a half, though, it escalates into something like this:

"Eh, letse naman! Tatlong araw nang naka-tengga ang mga damit mo sa washing machine, eh. Hindi na tuloy ako makapaglaba. Ilang beses na kitang sinabihan. Lumayas ka na nga dito at maghanap ng mga kasama na kasing burara mo!

Here’s a list I grabbed from www.pinoysg.com of a few petty things that normally lead to an i'll-never-again-talk-to-you-til-the-day-I-die feud among Pinoy housemates here:

* Strands of black, curly hair gathering on bathroom floors – and even on kitchen sinks – that later manifests itself into a furry, gooey creature;

* Locking oneself up inside the toilet for an eternity and not giving way even when a housemate is clearly in a bowel-busting, poise-threatening predicament;

* “Paranormal” housemates straight from The Sixth Sense who keep insisting they see dead people;

* Swiping someone else’s food from the fridge without asking the person who toiled through the night, investing blood, sweat and tears into his special delicacy of scrambled eggs and bacon;

* Leaving the lights and heater on through the night;

* Leaving the doors open;

* Waiting for the garbage to pile up, hoping perhaps Oscar the Grouch would pop out of it suddenly to spew some expletives; and,

* Using groceries and supplies like they were manna from heaven and not bothering to restock them.

I, of course, realise that these occur not exclusively here. We see these things happening among people who share a dorm in a university or a bedspace in some apartment in Sta. Mesa. The big difference, though, is that for most OFWs like us, it's rarely an option to just pack up our bags and head home to mummy and crash in our old rooms while we find a more suitable place. For most us, it's one more hell we'll just have to live through.

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