My previous roommate wanted to move into a studio apartment; they recently started dating more seriously. When I was first moving into San Francisco, I was working for a huge company and found them through the internal roommate spreadsheet. Now I needed to search for a new roommate through other public channels.

Facebook served this search fine enough. Though the public Facebook roommate search groups suffer from botspam, enough people use them that I found two compatible roommate candidates.

The first roommate candidate demonstrated that I can have a harmful tolerance for others.

We first planned to tour apartments on Sunday. Since they had a long flight the day before, I offered to tour some later day. They still wanted to tour the apartments Sunday to have something to do, to fight jetlag. Then on Sunday, they messaged that they felt sick, so I canceled our tours. Ok…

I asked which weekday they could tour, since we both had roughly two weeks to find a place. They responded that they could not tour any weekday. Excuse me? Having gone to business school as well, I know you could tour at least one weekday. Even executives make time for important matters, and what could matter more than a place to live! OOk…

So I booked solo tours for Tuesday, and we agreed to call Tuesday evening. That Tuesday, San Francisco experienced historic rainfall. I even got a text alert before my first tour to prioritize staying inside. Yet I biked, soaked to the bone, in that historic rainfall to take videos and photos of three apartment buildings. Then when I called at 6:00, they asked to push back. Then when I called at 6:30, they asked to push back. Then when I called at 7:30, they asked to push back to Wednesday. OOOk…

So we called Wednesday, selected an apartment building, and I filled out an application, submitting the non-refundable application fee. I told them they had to fill out their portion of the application by Friday noon. In reality, we had until Friday night. I just wanted a buffer, given the history of this, well, not-so-reliable to put it lightly, person.

Then on Friday, they told me that they had taken a look at the neighborhood, and saw 3 homeless people! So they wanted to withdraw the application. Honey! In San Francisco South of Market, where you wanted to live, only 3? OOOOK!

So we stopped talking, and I learned to cut my losses earlier. I talked to the second roommate candidate, who can communicate, who can show up, amazingly, and we found a nicer place together.