Some aspects of student house-sharing are more guaranted to cause stress, stomach ulcers, hernias, rifts, stabbings and other unpleasant social phenomena than others. Leaving a polite amount of milk is irritating, surreptitiously moving a girlfriend or boyfriend into the flat can annoy and completely failing to wash up ever is virtually guaranteed to grate (and probably cause an outbreak of salmonella) but as unpleasant as these acts are, they all pale into insignificance in comparison with the true student horror - the ritual splitting of bills.
Students, as you may already know through experience or observation, do not have much money. Educational priorities such as indian wall hangings, hair dye, beer and recreational drugs often mean that a student will reach the end of term eating spaghetti and vinegar, or fluttering eyelashes at mum & dad. You can bet that beer consumption will not decrease, though - there is always enough cash for a cheeky pint.
In an example of supremely bad organisation, the end of term generally coincides with the arrival of bills - phone, electricity, gas - unlike rent, which is usually (wisely) paid in advance, when students are relatively flush - or at least were, when grants were doled out on the first tuesday of term - “What’s this? Free money? Why thankyou! (Mine’s a pint of cider)” - the arrival of bills in the skint dog-end of term, however, is a nervous and fraught time, which inevitably leads to The Great Division Of Bills.
Each bill will have been issued in one person’s name, which means that they will be the one who gets chased by the bailiffs for failing to cough up. Although equally, risking a bad credit rating (and surviving) as a student tends to go down well with mortgage lenders when you get old and fat and boring (two years after you graduate). Go figure.
But the person with their name on the bill will have it in their best interests to divide and pay the bill as quickly as possible, which means that in their house-mates’ eyes they magically transform from NiceResponsibleFriend into EvilBitchTryingToScrewMeOutOfBeerMoney.
Gas bills tend to be the easiest to divide, as no-one can figure out what the complicated measurements and calculations on the bill mean- and besides, it’s only sixty quid, and in a house of six, that comes to just over five pints each, which seems fair enough.
Phone bills tend to be more complicated, though. The simple rule of thumb is that the phone bill will always bear no relevance to what you were expecting. This is because of the second rule of phone bills, which dictates that you will always use it more than you imagine. However, given that only one person in each house-share will have an aging relative in Penrith, it’s relatively simple to figure out who owes for what.
Until, that is, you come to the local numbers. Oddly, it tends to be the pizza delivery number that inspires the first scrap. All of you wanted pizza. All of you ate it. So who pays the 0.042p that the call cost? Likewise, even after everybody has claimed their respective calls and divied up for them, there will always be an outstanding £8.92 which no-one wants to claim responsibility for (or indeed pay).
But you’d think that the electricity bill would be the easiest bill of all to divide up and cough up for, wouldn’t you? I mean, after all, everyone uses electricity, and you kind of need it. But oh no.
In my second year of university, I shared a house in Penny Lane, Liverpool, with five blokes. On reflection, this wasn’t the smartest move I’d ever made, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I vastly underestimated how bad it could be. In the three months I lived in that house, all manner of random and worrying things occurred - which I won’t go into here, as they’d make far better fodder for another story. I moved in in September, and left in January, when I moved to Spain - which may seem a little extreme, but was infinitely preferable to communal living lad-style. For the most part, they were just rowdy and untidy, and I could deal with that at the time, no problem. But when the bills came around, life turned very very bad indeed.
Paul, a long-haired geordie architect-in-training, and usually the most laid-back person in the house, announced a couple of weeks before the christmas holiday that he was going to take a reading from the electricity meter before he left, and then another one when he got back, and that he would deduct that amount from his share of the bill when it arrived next term. Cue bewildered faces in the living room. You *what*?
He explained that it wasn’t fair to expect him to pay for electricity while he wasn’t there, because he was going away for all three weeks holiday, while others (like me) were working right up to Christmas Eve and then dashing home across the Pennines for the festivities, returning on Boxing Day so we could (in my case) flog books to well-fed liverpudlians during the sales. It didn’t strike him as odd in the slightest to ferret about in the cupboard under the stairs looking for the meter, in order to save himself a few pence on the next bill.
Sam, one of two philosophy students in the house (the other one also, confusingly, called Sam, and also with long hair and a band - the two were only differentiated by their accents - Sam S was from Preston, Sam B was from Gloucester) pointed out that he’d been away for a long weekend the month before. I chipped in that I’d been in New York for two weeks in October, and away just about every weekend at my boyfriend’s place. This cut no mustard with Paul, who started making noises about how people would use more electricity in December, because of there being more on television. This was a spectacularly weak argument - but not as weak as the next one he pulled out, about how because the weather was colder, people might use electric blankets, which cost a ton to heat up.
“Hang on a minute,” I said, “hands up everyone who’s got an electric blanket in this house.” No one raised an arm. “Any other heating devices?” Nothing. “OK then, I don’t think we need to worry about that. Next.”
The conversation went nowhere - Paul was adamant about his budget-cutting measures, and everyone else thought he was a loon. So after a couple of days of flogging that particular dead horse, raising his apparent insanity at any opportunity, we took a different tack. Sam put up a sheet of paper on the door to the cupboard under the stairs. I attached a pen with a bit of string. Mike, our resident Welsh (”I’m not Welsh! I’m from bloody Wrexham!”) engineering student sellotaped a calculator to the doorknob. Every time someone left the house, they crawled into the cupboard, took a reading, and noted it down. When they came in, they took another reading, and gradually the page filled up with elaborate calculations of kilowatt hours and units and VAT and all sorts, saved.
Soon, and probably inspired by the coming festive season and frequent indulgence in recreational substances, things got even more ridiculous. Sam B was the first to stand up, halfway through a movie, stretch and say “I’m not watching this anymore. I’m going to go take a meter reading so I don’t end up paying for the rest of this shit.” We giggled, but he went and did it anyway. Soon, we were trying to out-do each other, much to Paul’s bemusement, taking readings when someone used the microwave, boiled the kettle, switched off their desklamp - Mike sat in the dark for two days, saying “If you want the light on, you’ll have to pay for it. I’m happy in the dark, man…” and I caught Sam S using a headtorch to brew up one evening, a spotlight on the mug in the dark kitchen.
The joke stretched so far that eventually there were pages and pages of numbers and ruled lines and workings-out attatched to the meter. Christmas came and went. The bill arrived. We attached the mighty sheaf of calculations to the bill and left it on Paul’s desk, to figure out when he came back from holiday. There was a week of silence, and then he split the bill six ways, meekly, and paid up. The whole incident was never mentioned again.
Who did/do you live with at university, if you went?
