John had been staying in a single room on campus for most of his university life. However, during his last semester he was allocated to a double room and was told that his roommate would be an Indian male student. Initially he was sure that he would get along with his roommate very well. They were from the same faculty, and he thought that would make them bond more easily.
When John first started sharing a room with Kumar, he felt that he couldn’t have asked for a better roommate. Kumar was funny and charismatic. He even helped John to collect hall meals on several occasions when John had classes.
But after a week, John began to feel strained. Being an orderly person, he could not stand Kumar cluttering the room with his stuffs. Furthermore, Kumar had a bad habit of slamming the door loudly. It did not help that Kumar was a nocturnal person. Many times John was startled awake in the middle of the night by the sound of door slamming.
Soon after, John’s sleeping quality deteriorated. He was having troubles focusing in class and always felt tense when he returned to their messy room. Even though he tidied up the room every now and then, Kumar always managed to mess up the room again later. Also, he couldn’t help but feel that perhaps Kumar was taking advantage of his willingness to clean the room.
Fed up, John confronted Kumar one day. To which Kumar responded flippantly, “Relax dude, you are such a neat freak!” He also insisted that he didn’t slam the door and that John was silly to get startled so easily. John was so angry that he walked out on him.
If you were John, what would you have done?
