Eulogy

My Flatmate has moved out and scooted back off to America. His student visa had expired and he couldn't find any work worthy of the name here, even though he's become very attached the Australia. He left behind a bed, a table, a lamp, a rice cooker, a guitar, a big stack of unreadable business ethics textbooks, half a packet of Tim Tams, and nearly $300 in loose change.


He had this aversion to small currency. I'm planning to spend it on his half of the phone and electricity bills, and anything left over is going into the Blandwagon Overpriced Coffee Addiction Fund.


He was a good Flatmate, if not without his little foibles. He always turned on the mixer tap on the kitchen sink halfway between hot and cold, even though this had no effect on the water temperature and stressed the gas water heater. He used up the ink in my printer and never offered to contribute to replacing it. He opened up dubious attachments while using my computer and infected it with viruses. He generated vast amounts of rubbish, and could go through an entire roll of toilet paper in a single day. And he made this irritating ticking noise when he was mildly stressed.


But these are tiny non-issues, more than offset by his amenability to having my friends come over at a moment's notice and watch DVDs until the early hours of the morning, his dedication to cleaning the bathroom, and the fact that he took the garbage out to the bins about eight times for every one time I did it. He was an ideal Flatmate and I have absolutely no hope of replacing him with someone better or even equivalent.


This has been brought home to me by my Houseguest, who's now been here a week. He ties up my phone line with incessant internet use, changes the settings on my computer so that I can barely work out how to turn it on, and spent yesterday evening lying on the floor in front of the TV, farting up a storm, so that when I got home and opened the front door I had the impression that a small animal had died inside the airconditioning ducts.


I'm going to be in such trouble when I get a REAL Flatmate From Hell.