Evan Makes Himself Scarce

We haven’t seen Evan in the house for a few days now. I left a little telltale on his bedroom door, but he hasn’t opened the door for three days now! I went in this morning half expecting to find him dead on his bed with a half empty bottle of sleeping tablets strewn about him. No such luck.

I know he takes sleeping pills too. He offered one to my other flatmates boyfriend and it knocked him out cold. My flatmate works in a hospital and reckons they were some pretty strong stuff. Maybe he's working on his ambitions to become a famous film star?

I found some of my DVD’s in his room. Half of them were out of their cases so I re-appropriated them. I also went through his DVD collection and grabbed anything that I thought was mine. I say thought here, I have a lot of DVD’s, maybe I’ve just added a couple unknowingly!

Not having Evan in the house has been good. With no hot water on he can’t invite his girlfriend over. I’d say he’s probably staying over at her place at the moment. Go help her neighbours if she lives in a flat! Maybe he’ll move in with her and sort out all of my problems, though I’ll still betaking him to court to get my money out of him.

I sent Evan a text yesterday reminding him that he hadn’t paid last fortnights rent plus he now owed for this fortnight. No response. This morning I checked my account again and there was no payment. I sent him the following message:

“Still no rent in my account. I hope having another person support you make you feel like a real man. By next Thursday if you aren't out of here I'll be lodging a possession notice on your room. The sheriff will be round to escort you and anything you own from the premises. I suggest you make other plans before that happens.”

Again there was no response which is why I decided to do a corpse check of his room. Eventually if I don’t see him again I’ll  send a bill to his work and let him know that he’s not untraceable. I may need to do some more secret ops missions into his room for intelligence gathering.

Pity his crap isn’t worth more or I’d be letting you all know about a great garage sale I was planning on! If anyone out there is interested in large piles of dirty socks and soiled underwear please let me know. There’s also a neat tapestry going cheap!

Evan Gets Into Some Hot Water - NOT!

Anyone that knows me would reckon that I’m fairly accommodating to visitors. If you need to crash the night or just use the facilities then I’m more than happy to lend you a key, a towel and make you  dinner. I draw the line at foot rubs, but that’s a long story involving a clown that I met at day-care when I was five.

Unfortunately at the moment if you’d like to have a shower at my place then you’d better rock up between the hours of 6 and 10 pm or you’ll be in for a cold surprise!  Unfortunately this is the time that Evan is usually at work. Poor Evan, he misses out again.

Apparently my constant flow gas hot water heater doesn’t work to well if you remove the fuses from it! These fuses aren’t apparently obvious either. You have to pull the unit apart and then uncouple them from a mass of very dangerous looking wires. It’s not obvious that they are even fuses to begin with and the mess of wires in there isn’t for the faint at heart.

I figure that Evan hasn’t the brains nor the inclination to figure this out. Even if he did he’d need a new fuse to make it work. Last I checked a new fuse could set you back as much as $2 at the local servo. Even if Evan could be bothered to walk to the servo to get a fuse I doubt he’d part with the cash. I’d like to see him attempt it however as it’s a lot easier to evict someone after they’ve electrocuted themselves. I wonder if there’s a specific council pick up day for dead flatmates?

I’m fairly sure that Evan figured out the new washing regime at home by his exit from the house yesterday. The front door slammed so hard that I heard it from the back of the house. I hope that Evan’s bad mood had nothing to do with not being able to take a shower before going to work. It would tear me up inside to know that he didn’t get to leave the house all happy and clean.

The Washing machine is still as he left it and the last load of washing is still sitting on a rack in the kitchen. I checked the fridge today and he hasn’t touched the bread that’s been in there for 5 days. That must be a gastronomic record for him. I’m waiting for him to realise that you can use the electric grill on the oven to toast bread with. If he does then I’ll be fixing the oven as well!

I did notice yesterday when I got home that there was evidence that the lounge room had been used. He’s obviously reverted to watching shows on the projector through my DVD player. Good luck finding it today as it’s not connected to the home theatre anymore. There’s now nothing for him to do in the house but sleep and read. The only books I’ve seen in his stuff had half the pages stuck together!

And not that I was going through his stuff mind you, a curious box suddenly appeared on my work bench one day that just happened to be full of porn. Errrck. One thing a guy doesn’t want to rummage through is another man’s spank bank. It’s bad enough that I get to listen to him ploughing away at his part car alarm girlfriend most nights!

Tomorrow is rent day. Evan is already 2 weeks behind, though he reckons he’s paid up. I’ll be interested to see if he deposits anything in my account tomorrow. Actually, even when things were good I didn’t get my money on the day it was due, but I’ll be checking anyway to see. Evan now has one week left before eviction day. After that things in the house are going to get a bit weird!

Evan's All Washed Up

There are three things that Evan does in the house. He watches the TV shows stored on my server, he makes toast and he washes his clothes. Now these seem like normal things, but this is all he does and he does these things a lot!

I'm not sure how many clothes one person can wear in one week. I generally wear the same jeans for most of the week and I change my T-shirt once a day plus my work shirt once a day. This doesn't make a lot of clothes so I use the washing machine about once a week. Even must be moonlighting as a male model or something cause he seems to need to do at least three loads of washing per week. Maybe he just loves a good wardrobe change every hour. I'm not quite sure.

We have a nice big backyard too with a clothes line in it. This is a bit too passé for our Evan however. He likes to keep an eye on his wet underpants and so everything gets dried on a drying rack he keeps in the dining room. Nothing makes my muesli more appetising first thing in the morning that the sight of Evan's damp knickers.

I've left subtle hints about this, like moving the whole thing into the laundry, or even leaving it in his room, but it just comes back like an annoying case of herpes. And it's not just that he dries stuff there, but that he leaves it there for well over a week after it has dried! Even when I moved the rack into his room he just left the clothes on it. His room isn't that big, the rack would have been so annoyingly in the way that a normal person would have just done something about it. But for a week after it just sat there in his room! You'd think that not being able to walk into your room properly would encourage you to put your undies away, but not for our Evan. Who says pot smoking lowers your productivity?

So while his washing is hanging out in the kitchen, Evan likes to make toast and use my projector to watch episode after episode of downloaded TV series. The collection I have is quite large so one could easily spend day after day going through it without pause. This suits Evan just fine. You'll often find him passed out on the couch with the projector still running and some show just mindlessly blurting away at him. He leaves his crumbs and plates in the kitchen for the cockroaches and the washing up fairies to play with while his undies gradually fossilise awaiting the joy of once again being wrapped about his nether regions. (urrrrrrh, image...)

So I decided that since I own the washing machine, the toaster and the router he had no right to use them. I also own the fridge, but I haven’t quite figured out what to do about that one yet.. maybe later. As for the other stuff, easy. I hardly use the toaster, it’s handy, but I can go without it for a fortnight. That was easy, I just hid it. The router was also pretty simple. I did the router in stages to see what would happen. First I disconnected him from the Internet while leaving him connected to the router. I liked this method because it meant that his IPhone would connect to the router first but get no signal. Otherwise it would just go straight to mobile mode. But I discovered that it still gave him access to my file server. This was no good. So I just changed the password.

Evan was in his room at the time as I soon discovered. Within about 30 seconds of changing the password I hear him come out of his room. We hadn’t spoken since our convo through the door, so he wasn’t about to ask for my help with it. Usually when the router stops talking you have to unplug it for 10 seconds and it’s good to go. I reckon Evan thought that this was a normal outage, but wasn’t about to try and fix it as I was sitting in the office. With no means available to make himself toast, he decided it would be a good time to do a load of washing.

It should be noted here that Evan’s last load of washing was still drying in the kitchen - actually, it was well dried by now and at the time of writing this is still sitting there. Out he comes with a new basket of soon to be forgotten Long Johns and dumps it in the machine. I’m doing my best at this point to just listen in and not laugh at him. He fills the machine and pours in his powder. Dial turn, Click, Nothing. Turn, Turn, Click, Nothing. Unplug, change points, Click, Nothing. Lid goes up, Lid goes down, Nothing.

What Evan doesn't know is that the washing machine is now missing a few vital components. I disconnected the main power line from the circuit board, and just to be safe I removed a rather large capacitor from inside the unit. I'm not quite sure what function this little baby performs, but I'm fairly certain it's vital to the happiness of a washing machine.

 He can’t ask me about it even though I’m only 3 metres away. I slunk off into my room to “do something” which involved point and whispering to my girlfriend about the hi Jinx in the other room. OK, yes I’m being callous here, but there are only so many pairs of wet undies a man can take before he gets a bit postal.

Eventually Evan left the laundry situation and went back to his room to get ready for work. I sauntered over to the machine to check out his handy work and found the machine full of his washing and powder. He’d changed all the water settings, moved the plug and then just left it with the lid open.

After Evan went to work I took out his clothes and put mine in. My girlfriend wouldn't let me touch her till I'd scrubbed his dirty underwear off my hands with solvo. She watched me lather up and everything! I hung my stuff out and put Evan's clothes back in the machine and left it open as he had left it.

The next day we had builders in to fix a window. I asked them when I got home if my flatmate had been in. I got a bit of a weird look off them and they explained that he'd been through, tried the machine and left again. Not sure what he'd said to them, but I could tell they knew all was not well in the house. Apparently he'd tried their vacuum cleaner in the wall plugs to determine if there was power going into them. There was, but no washing for poor Evan.

It's been two days now and the machine is still full of his clothes and washing powder. I hope he knows that the stuff is caustic and will eat through fabric if left on them for too long.

Meet Evan

This is the story of Evan. It is also the story of me, and how I chose to deal with Evan.

At the time of writing this first entry I am still dealing with Evan, so I have no idea at this stage how this will all pan out. I have the feeling that this will become a saga full of japes and knives, so have started this blog to chronicle my endeavours to evict an annoying flatmate from my house and my life.

I'm hoping that I'll be victorious in my efforts, but only time will tell who will come out of this all rosy and who will be sorry they ever met the other. Our roles may swap a few times over the course of this story. This first section may run an little long, but all stories require a firm base.

Evan is 25 and works in a bar. He believes he is special and that he's going somewhere. I believe he's going somewhere as well. I doubt our believed destinations are very similar.

Evan came into my life after he answered an online ad for a flatmate to share a new house I was moving into. There were slight warning signs at the time that I should have listened to, but he seems really genuine when you meet him, so I put them down to just general paranoia. Everyone that meets Evan says that he seems really nice at first. I think this is because he really believes his own bullshit. He generally has no concept of how much of a dufas he really is.

Evan had just broken up with his girlfriend and was living above a local pub when I met him. I was starting to get desperate for a flatmate having had other likely candidates pull out at the last minute. After 3 of these and the prospect of paying $480 a week rent all on your own you start to lower your expectations a bit and take what you can. I already had someone living in one of the rooms, but they were struggling at the time to pay their own rent and couldn’t help out on the vacant room. Evan seemed ok after I met with him, he liked the place and we seemed to get along, so I said yes.

Evan had told me that he wouldn’t be able to get the bond straight away, this should have been warning sign number 1, but he seemed to have a good job, so I thought this wouldn’t be too much of an issue. I was wrong. 7 months later I am still waiting for the bond and am now waiting for him to pay his last share of bills and rent. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So Evan moved in, and moved in, and moved in. This guys has a lot of stuff. Ok, to be fair, I have a lot of stuff, but Evan seems to have made a habit of “collecting” every useless little promotional item over his years of bar work and decided that it was all worth keeping. Every glass he owned had some beer or spirits logo on it, he had boxes of hats, thongs (flip-flops to those from other realms), bar mats, t-shirts and assorted paraphernalia. Most of it was so ugly that I just subtly moved it out of sight.

The full wall vinyl poster advertising some dance night at the club he worked at was my first real indication that our lifestyles were somewhat at odds. This thing was hideous, but he “liked this chick in the picture” and so decided that the lounge room was the place to put it. Coupled with the beer mat being used as a table cover really gave that room a warm and inviting feeling. The table in that room belonged to him, and I didn’t want to go enforcing my aesthetics on him at this stage, so I let it ride. Luckily the poster came down eventually, but the worlds ugliest tapestry went up instead.

Ok, sounds picky. But his lack of interior design skills is not something to start a blog over. Basically he’s just a typical pot smoking 25 year old that likes to party (because he’s  a shift worker that puts him at odds with the rest of the household somewhat), eat your food and not clean up his dishes. Finding him passed out on the couch with my projector still running is just one more tick against him. And I could have put up with all this, but when after 7 months he still hadn’t made any effort to pay the bond, was late on his bills (which he’s disputing!) and then started to become late on the rent as well. When he came home one night and decided to show off his new tattoos that took 5 hours to do and was only half done I decided enough was enough and I would give him his marching orders.

So last Wednesday, after a particular sleepless night due to him coming home at 5am and deciding to wake the entire house by getting his girlfriend to fake her bestest ever orgasm (the noises coming out of his room are comical, not just fake and unnecessary, they’re actually a little scary!) I decided to write him an eviction notice and give him 14 days to vacate. He didn’t take it so well.

I hadn’t sprung this on him by the way. I had repeatedly told him that I need the bond money and that I couldn’t keep paying his late rent. So when it fell behind for the millionth time (what? Me exaggerate?) I gave him the letter. Gave is a loose term for it. I never see him, so I left it under his door.

1am Wednesday night he comes home and get’s the note. With a “What the fuck is this?”  I get  a knock on the bedroom door. He asks if I want to talk about the letter. I say not really, I just want you to leave. The next ten minutes are spent with him yelling at my door telling me that he’s paid up and owes me nothing. This isn’t a matter up for dispute, I have full records. And regardless of the rent and bills he still hasn’t paid the bond.

During our little discussion Evan decided to throw out the gauntlet. He told me I can’t kick him out like this and that if I want him to leave then I’m going to have to “Make him” leave.

Ok Evan, I accept. I’ll make you.