'My manager asks Karen exactly what she wants': Helicopter parent refuses to accept dorm roommates for her college-aged son

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Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
May 18, 2024 11:00 AM EDT

Being a helicopter parent to a toddler is one thing, but if your kid grows up and you're still acting that way, it's going to get awkward real fast. 

When you're raising a toddler, it makes sense to keep a close eye on them. They're whirling dervishes of destruction who can color your couch with markers one minute and climb inside the dishwasher the next. But over time, you've got to let your kids gain independence by seeing the world on their own. Too bad no one ever told this college kid's mother, who is still apparently running her son's life like she's glued to his side. 

One Redditor headed to the r/ChoosingBeggars subreddit to share this wild tale of the "choosing beggar mom" who's getting far too involved with her son's life. He hasn't actually gone off to college yet, since he's still trying to figure out which roommates to live with. Most of the time, you're just randomly assigned a roommate. They either become your best friend, your worst enemy, or someone who's just kind of there. You don't know what it'll be until you live with them. No matter what happens, it's important to learn how to get along with all different types of people… too bad this kid might never get the chance to do that if his mom doesn't lighten up a bit. 

Next up, this dude was irate when a pizza delivery driver kept insisting on speaking to his girlfriend, plus trying to give her a note! 

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    Cheezburger Image 9924106496
    via Marcus Loke on Unsplash
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    CB Mom Almost Ruins Housing for College Aged Son Before I start, let me apologize for the "long-windedness" of my story. It required a bit of explanation about the context and my job.
    via u/[deleted]
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    I work in property management as a consultant In a college town on the East Coast of the US. As you can imagine, it's a lot of young people. Oftentimes a lot of college kids won't understand a lot of concepts like guarantors, conditional deposits, and so forth. I personally enjoy it a lot, especially as a full-time student myself. I love being able to interact with people my age, it's easier to connect, and I get a lot
    via u/[deleted]
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    of joy from helping people understand things like this. It's makes a lot easier since I worked in a banking for a little while. While a lot of people might think that this "lack of understanding" would cause a majority of the issues and "problematic" people we have to deal with, I would argue the opposite. In fact, I tend to deal with a particularly higher number of entitled parents rather than students. Like your typical
    via u/[deleted]
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    helicopter parent who still desperately tries to control every aspect of their little angel's life, often at the expense of the student. Anyways, I had an interaction earlier that I think took the cake for one of the MEANEST parents that I've met. Not in the traditional way of yelling, screaming, and whining until your ears bleed, but rather, bullying completely random college-aged people.
    via u/[deleted]
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    We're coming to the beginning of the summer, which means that "college housing" (for those who don't know) is wrapping up. This is because a lot of people (students and parents) prepare for the next school year during the previous school year. This includes choosing classes, getting jobs, and, importantly, finding housing. This is especially
    via u/[deleted]
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    so for upperclassman (sophomores, juniors, and seniors), who don't live on campus as much (it's possible, but off-campus housing is often nicer and you don't have to share a bedroom/dorm).
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    Because of the fact that we're coming to the end of our leasing period, we're quite short on available housing. We sell 1, 2, 3, and 4 bedroom houses. The leases last for a year and we often have people renew. That's good for us as it means we have to sell less, it's bad for the college students who want to live
    via u/[deleted]
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    where we are because we're a small community and places within the community are often pretty competitive. With that being said, there is a somewhat common situation that presents itself. This is when a student renews their lease (for example in a 4 bedroom home) while their other roommate(s) don't. For more context, each person signs
    via u/[deleted]
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    an individual lease. This means some people can stay in a house. while other people leave. In order to deal with this, my complex tries their best to "roommate" match. Essentially, try to match hobbies, interests, and personality types to minimize the conflict between random roommates. However, bear in mind this is not a "requirement".
    via u/[deleted]
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    We cater to a lot of students, but we aren't a student-only housing complex. With that said, one of the incentives to roommate match for my complex is that they make more money from the individual leases (more people that sign-on the more money), however, it's worth noting that this benefit does NOT extend to us as employees. We don't make
    via u/[deleted]
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    commission, so for us it's really just trying to be nice when we do it, because it is a considerable amount of extra work. Just because we try super hard to make people happy, it's doesn't mean everything always comes to fruition. People fight, don't get along, or just don't "match". We understand this, but we try our best.
    via u/[deleted]
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    Anyways, we received a call from a mother earlier today, she'd been trying for weeks to get her son (a renewing resident who currently lives in a 4 bedroom by himself who roommates left after the lease ended), lets call her Karen. Let me stop here and say that I don't blame the son at all for his mom's behavior.
    via u/[deleted]
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    Sometimes it's hard to control or think of the actions of the person/people who raised us as "wrong". Especially as the son or daughter of a person. Karen had been trying for weeks to find roommates for her son. A stipulation of our leases is that if you knowingly resign a lease knowing that your other
    via u/[deleted]
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    roommates will not be renewing, that you are either willing to take the given roommate assignment (which again, we try super hard to match as best as we can, but are not "required" to), so in the case of Karen's son, 3 additional roommates. Karen had been shooting down all of our roommate matches for weeks.
    via u/[deleted]
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    She had given one of my coworkers an earful when she found that she would not be the one officially approving or denying each applicant for her son (again, they are not "their" rooms to choose, they only pay for 1/4 bedrooms and within the unit). Following hanging up in her (my coworkers) face, it would
    via u/[deleted]
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    seem that Karen decided that was either going to find her son the perfect roommates or get the whole townhome for her son, but either way she was NOT going to pay the nearly $2400 for the four bedrooms (each room is roughly $599).
    via u/[deleted]
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    So as mentioned, good ol' Karen continues to shoot down every one of the roommates that we find for her son. Also bear in mind that we are NOT associate with the university, so the people that we are giving her are other applicants that we actively have to SEARCH for in order to find. But as mentioned Karen shoots one after another down. Finally,
    via u/[deleted]
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    my manager asks Karen exactly what she wants (what kind of qualities, person, etc.). Karen wants a graduate student or young professional for her son. This in itself is not an unreasonable request, not everyone likes to party (despite the fact we are a party school) and we do try to accommodate requests such as these.
    via u/[deleted]
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    Today, three young applicants come along (actually, one came a few days ago, one yesterday, etc.). We'd been compiling this list of people to go into the home who met Karen's specifications for roommates. We were essentially going above-and- beyond for no reason other than just being patient with her demands (sounds dumb, but other customer service people get me ;) ).
    via u/[deleted]
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    So, today, my coworker calls Karen and explains the good news that we have found roommates that fit her specifications. Karen inquires about the qualities of the applicants, what they do, are they in school, etc. My coworker proceeds to explain that two of the students are graduate students, and one of the people is a young professional (fresh out
    via u/[deleted]
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    of college). The ages were about the same between residents, gender and personalities. matched, and the specifications set forth by Karen were pretty much met. However, upon hearing that the other roommates were grad-students, Karen very suddenly exclaimed "ew, I don't want my son with a bunch of nerds, find him someone else".
    via u/[deleted]
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    Like she's never met them, she had barely even heard about them. We had just pitched the idea to her, and they met HER specifications, and she has the gall to say that they're "too nerdy" for her son. I took over the call and ended it somewhat professionally as my coworker was about to (reasonably) lose it.
    via u/[deleted]
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    The guys were perfectly nice and seemed friendly, had similar hobbies, among other things. It's such a shame to see a GROWN- ADULT (Karen is 55 according to her profile with the company) bully actual college students.
    via u/[deleted]
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    Especially completely and unnecessarily calling them nerds (which, for the record, just wasn't true, as when I met one of the guys he was JACKED), and even if he was, why do you have to say it?
    via u/[deleted]
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    Anyways, sorry for the super long rant, shoutout to my fellow college students, we'll see how it goes tomorrow when I get back to work (c'est la vie). TL:DR: Karen complains that the roommates we found are too "nerdy" for her son, despite asking for their type specifically.
    via u/[deleted]

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karens students choosing beggars mother parenting entitled roommates mom college karen college student choosing beggar
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