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WotD: Freeloader
Freeloaders are a roommate’s worst nightmare. Believe me.
There’s nothing worse than someone who drinks your alcohol, watches your TV, eats your food, uses your toilet paper, and never cleans up, contributes to the grocery bill, or replaces anything.
In a nutshell, a freeloader is a person who uses and abuses your hospitality without any thought of sharing the cost or taking any responsibility.
During a ten-year span of my life, I was a backpacker.
Wow! Now that I think about it, I’ve spent about 25% of my life doing nothing, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
I enjoyed my time riding the train across Canada and seeing the aurora from the sky car I’ve experienced…
Woah, sorry, I’m going off on a tangent here.
I should be getting back to the matter at hand. I’ll save my backpacking stories for another day.
What was I writing about?
Oh yes, freeloaders.
I’m one of those lucky guys who has had the opportunity to backpack with his wife.
My wife and I spent a year in NZ (Enzed), Kiwi shorthand for New Zealand.
While we were there, we made quite a few friends and one enemy.
This guy was a world-class freeloader.
We were in a sharehouse with a Chinese dishwasher, a Japanese dental technician and a Kiwi guy.
I have no idea what he did.
The Kiwi guy was the freeloader who we nicknamed ハリネズミ (hedgehog) because he only came out at night, and we rarely saw him.
Anyway, as I said, ハリネズミ only came out at night when everyone else was asleep, but we knew he had been there because there were dirty dishes in the sink and our food was gone.
He never apologized, paid for anything or ever cleaned up.
To make a long story short, we put a chain on the fridge and hid the microwave on the garage roof.
I also turned off the main water supply for the house when I went out.
Within two weeks, ハリネズミ, the freeloader, was gone.
I don’t know where he went, and I never cared.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 75.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.