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AITA: Am I the a**hole for refusing to pay a larger fine than my roommate after improperly following dorm move-out procedure?
This is a story from last year, which was my first year in college, living in the freshman dorms. I think about it sometimes and wonder if I was an a**hole for the way it played out.
I was living in a dorm with 3 other roommates, and we had all left for winter break, which is particularly long at our college. Like most dorms, ours had some pre-break procedures that we had to make sure were done before we left for the holidays. We did pretty good following all of these except.. the mini fridge. My roommate (lets call her Emma) and I had left a few perishable items in the fridge, for which we both got fined $150 dollars. Insane, I know.
Now here is where the issue comes in: I had left multiple perishable items in the fridge, while she had only left one bottle of whipped cream.
When we originally received the email from the room monitors about the items left in the fridge, I immediately texted the roommate group chat apologizing for leaving my items and saying that I would take responsibility for my half, but I also asked who had left the whipped cream bottle. Emma owned up as well, but claimed that whipped cream was not a perishable, so I took it upon myself to clarify with the room monitors to ask if it was considered one of the perishable items, and they confirmed that it was.
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Since we had confirmed that we both had left items in the fridge, I texted Emma and said that since the fine was so high, I could pretend like it was me who had left all the items in the fridge, so the fine would just go to me, then after we could split it halfway and each pay $75 rather than both having to pay a whopping $150 to the school.
Now when I said this, Emma said that I would have to pay a larger share of the money because I had left more items in the fridge.... Personally, I think that's BS. We had both failed to check the fridge during move-out, if either of us had checked, then all the items would have been gone. As well as this, if we both owned up to leaving items in the fridge to the school directly, we would have still received the same $150 fine; the school would not have charged me more because I had more items. AM I CRAZY OR AM I RIGHT IDK.
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Anyways, I told her no and tried to explain the way I saw things. It started pretty civil... but then she said that since I couldn't agree to that, she was emailing the school so we would both just pay the $150, and I thought this was extremely petty.
Even though we had a disagreement about it, wouldn't you rather just compromise and be $75 dollars richer than you could have been? I truly just didn't understand her thinking. I was honestly p**sed and said some nasty things to her after this, which I do regret a lot, I should have just left it, but $150 dollars was a lot for me at the time, especially without financial help.
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The real issue here is not even the spoiled food. It is the fact that college students will somehow turn one forgotten mini fridge into a full-scale economic summit about fairness, percentages, accountability, and who technically committed more refrigerator crimes. The school handing out a $150 fine over some abandoned food already feels dramatic enough, especially considering most freshmen are financially surviving on instant noodles and blind optimism.
Once both roommates admitted they left food behind, the situation probably should have ended with a simple “Okay, let’s split it and move on with our lives.” Unfortunately, roommate conflicts rarely stay that simple once money enters the conversation.
What makes this particular fight interesting is that both girls were technically arguing from completely different definitions of fairness. One roommate looked at the situation quantitatively: more spoiled food equals more responsibility, therefore a larger share of the payment. The other looked at it procedurally: both people failed the same move-out responsibility, which means both people share equal blame regardless of quantity. Honestly, neither argument is completely irrational.
If two people leave dishes in a sink, most people do not start calculating soap usage percentages and assigning penalties based on plate volume. But at the same time, human brains naturally start doing weird accounting math the second one person feels like they made a “smaller mistake.”
The roommate’s decision to contact the school and force the full fine onto both of them is really the moment the entire thing emotionally escalated. Because from a purely financial perspective, the compromise actually benefited both parties.
Paying $75 each instead of $150 each feels like the obvious practical solution, especially for broke college students navigating dorm life for the first time. That is why the situation feels less like a disagreement about food and more like a disagreement about principle. One roommate became focused on fairness down to the individual item count, while the other became focused on minimizing damage altogether.
And honestly, this is probably one of the most realistic freshman-year roommate conflicts imaginable. Not explosive enough to become legendary, but stressful enough to permanently change how two people see each other over something objectively ridiculous involving whipped cream and a mini fridge.
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