Dear Dr. Perfect,

My roommate will shove a load in the washer and leave the apartment for hours, sometimes not coming home until the next day. When I ask if I can transfer her clothes for her, she gets pissy. 

Even though I only do laundry once or twice a week, it feels like an ever-smelly issue. After a few hours, the wet clothes mildew and the machine is near where I sleep.

What, if any, are my civilized options?

A roommate at civility’s edge

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Dear Unfortunate Roommate,

Extended periods of cohabitation can be trying. 

As the old saying goes, you never really know someone until you live together. By then, it’s too late. It’s like walking on eggshells across thin ice atop more eggshel.

My brief stint at Oberlin studying anthropology involved rooming with this imbecile who fancied himself a horticulturalist. He turned our dorm into a pot farm replete with foul-smelling marijuana permeating the air. The stench covered my clothes, and the trauma lingered for several years after. I drew the line when he started baking pot brownies.

“If I have to smell one more of those stupid brownies, I’ll bash your head in,” I told him, holding his prized glass bong.

Some years later, I roomed with a self-proclaimed “ladies’ man” in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He asked me not to enter the apartment if there was a sock on the door. Fair enough, I thought. I soon realized that he hung a sock outside the door regardless of whether anyone else was there.

“I’m on to you, you bastard,” I seethed. “You put one more sock out there, I’ll bash your head in.”

He proceeded to pile-drive me into the vinyl floor of our studio apartment. I got a couple of good shots in before the concussion. Might have even ruptured his kidneys.

Your roommate is woefully inconsiderate and probably not ready to live on their own. Consider taking their clothes from the wash and lighting in the fire pit outside.

I once shared a dorm at Harvard with a young Tommy Lee Jones. He constantly rehearsed these plays or whatever the hell he was doing. I said, “Hey, Hamlet. Give it a rest.” We got into a fistfight.

In the end, it’s only temporary. Roommates prepare us for long-term cohabitation with our eventual significant others. You’ll be able to put up with anything by then.

Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.