“My former roommate was mansion-rich. I really loved her to death, but she was just so tone-deaf with some things.
A new house we all moved into ended up getting fleas, and we had two cats, so it was difficult to get rid of them. She suggested just throwing out the furniture and buying new stuff instead of the big bomb we were gonna use. We laughed before realizing she was serious. That wouldn’t work because fleas don’t just live in furniture. You can’t just toss out furniture and buy all new stuff?! That’s wildly expensive and an insane response. She offered to buy all the new furniture, but that was just such an overreaction and we liked our furniture, so of course, we weren’t going to do that. So she just ended up doing it in her room.
Another time she almost burned down the house cooking steak because she refused to use pans, and only cooked stuff on sheets of foil. She did this every day, so grease built up at the bottom of the stove. Thank god I skipped class this day because she comes out and tells me the oven is on fire, all calm. I quickly come over to help. She’s suggested we get some water. I’m like NO. Get the flour, I’ll put it out. You don’t put water on a grease fire, it’ll only get worse. So I put the fire out, and we air out the house. I go back to watching TV. She comes up like a half-hour later and is like, ‘Hey, do you think it’s cooled down enough so I can finish cooking?’
I’m like, ‘No, we need to wait until the oven is fully cooled, then clean it out completely before cooking again. Otherwise, another fire could start. We don’t have any more flour or a fire extinguisher.’
She actually fights me on it for like an hour, gets mad, says that if the house burns down she’ll just buy new stuff. I say what about the cats then? She eventually storms out to go buy oven cleaner (I had to give her a specific list of what to buy), and she gets it and starts cleaning the oven. I eventually take over since she was doing such a poor job (even though she was trying), and I just wanted to go to bed without worrying about the house burning down.
I’ve got lots of stories like that, but those are probably the best. She really is a good person, but just having been raised in such a rich and lavish lifestyle, she just was so oblivious of some things and would not understand other perspectives sometimes.”
