The Roommate Docket

The device keeps a history. The history is available in the app. Nobody involved appears to have known this.

The log, submitted in evidence by a fourth party who does not live in the house and who found it while trying to fix the wifi, records eleven manual adjustments between the second and the eighth. Seven were downward, four upward. Nine occurred between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Two occurred within four minutes of each other, in opposite directions, which the court reads as two people meeting in a hallway and pretending not to.

All three residents were asked, separately, in writing. All three said they had not touched it. One added, unprompted and at length, that they suspected the device was faulty — a defense that would have been considerably stronger had it not been offered before anyone mentioned a log.

The court wants to be clear that the temperature is not the offense and never was. Three adults are entitled to disagree about a house being 68 or 71. That disagreement is trivially resolvable by a conversation lasting under two minutes, and the reason it has not been resolved is that a conversation lasting under two minutes would require somebody to say out loud that they are cold, which in this house has apparently become unsayable.

So instead there is a covert nightly campaign conducted by three people who like each other, each convinced they are the only one doing it, each quietly building a theory about which of the others is responsible. Six days. Eleven adjustments. Zero words exchanged on the subject.

Verdict: guilty, all three, for the lying rather than the temperature. Sentence: read the history together, out loud, once. The court predicts the reading will take about ninety seconds and end in laughter, and that the thermostat will be set to 70 and left alone for the remainder of the tenancy.

Six weeks of escalating notes were submitted in evidence. Not one mentions the actual grievance, which appears in the final note's postscript and concerns a birthday.

The escalation is instructive. Note one, on a Tuesday, is cheerful and signed with a smiley face. Note three introduces underlining. Note five is typed rather than handwritten, which the court regards as a significant procedural escalation, and includes the phrase “as previously discussed,” which is false — nothing has been discussed, four notes have been left.

Note six carries the postscript: “Also I didn't say anything at the time but it was weird that you didn't come to my birthday.”

There it is. Six weeks, six notes, one paragraph of actual content, arriving last, in smaller handwriting, prefaced by an admission that it was withheld.

Verdict: dismissed. Refile under the correct heading. The court further observes that had the postscript been note one, the dishes would have been done within a day, because they were never the complaint and doing them was never the remedy.

She has a drawer, a toothbrush, a preferred mug and opinions about the couch. There is no threshold in any lease this specific, and there does not need to be.

The defense argues that she is a guest and that guests are not billed. The court accepts the principle and rejects its application. A guest is present at the invitation of one resident and at the sufferance of the others, and the sufferance is renewed each time because the visit is finite. Six nights a week for fourteen months is not a series of visits. It is a residence with a technicality attached.

The court is also unmoved by the argument that she “barely uses anything.” Utilities are the smallest part of this and the plaintiffs know it. The actual grievance, which they have been too polite to state plainly and which the court will state for them, is that a two-person household became a three-person household without anyone being asked, and that the asking is the entire issue.

On the remedy: the court has deliberately not awarded arrears. Fourteen months of back-billing would be justified and would end this tenancy inside a week. The plaintiffs did not object at month two, which is when objecting was cheap, and the price of that silence is the fourteen months.

Verdict for the plaintiffs. Remedy: a third of the utilities, effective now, and no discussion of the last fourteen months, which are gone.

Three weeks have passed. Two messages have gone unanswered. The plants are being watered by people who did not agree to water plants.

Verdict: thirty days' written notice, then they are yours. The plants were yours the moment you watered them the second time.