Judging by the odd dream I had last night, I must have fallen asleep watching one of those late-night infomercials. (Or maybe I shouldn't have had that midnight burrito.) At any rate, my subconscious was definitely influenced by years of watching those commercial programs where excitable British men rant and rave about gizmos like The Cucumber Chopper 2200: It slices! It dices! It cleans your room! And improves your GPA!

My dream started off normally enough: I was a park ranger on Mars charged with herding a large pack of vampire aardvarks. (OK, my idea of a normal dream may not be the same as yours.) But then, the dream changed.

All of a sudden, I was one of those charmingly slick infomercial hosts. In front of a large studio audience, I was talking about a revolutionary new product: The Fool-Proof Roommate 9000. This revolutionary robot was the perfect roommate for any college student who's sick of loud snoring and pants hanging on lamps. The Roommate 9000 was polite, clean and friendly. He could dispense Mountain Dew and brew cappuccinos in his torso. He was the perfect Ultimate Frisbee player and his infrared sensors could detect cute members of the opposite sex from 300 yards away.

As I told the crowd about all of the robot's fantastic standard features, the Roommate 9000 turned to me. He said (in the standard stilted robotic way): "I. Am. The. Perfect. Roommate. How. About. You?"

That was a very perceptive question from a dream robot. Sometimes we concentrate too much about how our roommate will act and not on how good of a roommate we'll be. No, we can't be a roommate on par with all of Roommate 9000's functions (especially the free Mountain Dew part). But his standard features are a good place to start when looking at how we can be better roommates. So, ladies and gentlemen, here are some of Roommate 9000's amazing features:

The nice thing about a robot roommate is that when you're ready for bed, you just unplug him. I wish my roommate freshman year had been a robot.

Anyway, Greg would stay up all night playing games on his computer. Sometimes, friends would join him. This all would've been fine if our dorm room wasn't the size of a walk-in closet. Here I'd be trying to sleep—and six inches away, Greg and his friends were shouting about blowing up intergalactic spacecraft.

The problem wasn't that Greg was a night owl. That was fine. The problem was that I wasn't. So while he'd keep me up in the evening, I'd wake him up as I rummaged through our fridge and ate my very crunchy cereal early each morning.

With the Roommate 9000, you wouldn't have to worry about these issues. You could just program him to sleep when you sleep. Humans aren't so programmable. I couldn't change the fact that I liked to go to bed before midnight. But I could have changed how I acted when Greg was sleeping. The best operating feature you can offer to your roommate is to be considerate and respectful. If you are up and your roomie isn't, be quiet. Use a flashlight. Don't have a dance party. Don't hit the snooze button 17 times. And maybe get less crunchy cereal.

As I imagined the Roommate 9000, I decided his coolest feature would be a little slip of paper that would print out of his mouth each week. On it would be a complete read-out of anything that was wrong. If he needed to be oiled, you'd know it. If he'd like you to stop using his hollow metal head as a drum, you'd find out.

If only all roommates were so clear about their needs and thoughts. For instance, imagine if Greg's roommate would have been the Roommate 9000 instead of me. After the first week, the printout would read: "Need quiet past midnight. Need light shut off. Otherwise, don't mind if you stay up." That would have been a much more rational, productive and cooperative way to function than what I did. I threw a pillow at Greg and unplugged his monitor the next morning.

You have to communicate to be a good roommate (whoo, I rhymed!). If you have a beef, don't talk to everybody but your roommate about it. Tell your roommate in a clear and respectful way that something needs to change. Find a compromise. In my case with Greg, maybe he would have been willing to go to a friend's room to play games. Give your roommate a status report of how you are feeling about the living conditions before you get angry and frustrated. And let them know you want status reports, too.

Creating an atmosphere of honesty and open communication will be a lot easier than figuring out how to print readouts from your mouth.

Robots can get a bad rap. Almost every time we see them in movies they are trying to hunt down and terminate humans. But in reality (or in my dream at least), robots don't hate humans. In fact, they very much strive to get to know us. To that end, one of Roommate 9000's chief programs is a list of questions to find out about its roommate's life.

My friend Jason often asked his roommate Craig what he enjoyed, what clubs we was in, etc. He even joined a couple of campus organizations Craig was involved in. But Craig never took any effort to learn about Jason at all.

What we can learn from The Roommate 9000 is that to be a good roommate, we need to take an interest. Ask about their day. Ask about their families. Talk about what they enjoy about campus and what they don't. Find out what activities they do for fun and join them in doing some of them. Oh, and one sure way to show you will really care about them? Pray for them. In fact, start right now—even if you don't know their name yet.

If I were going to build a real Roommate 9000, I would use a very bendable, adjustable metal alloy so that he'd be flexible (OK, that is a bad pun.) Seriously, whether or not a roommate is physically flexible, a key to good living is to not be rigid about how things are done. That's a recipe for disaster (as opposed to a recipe for pie, which is yummy).

I had a roommate named Mike who was very set in his ways. He and his family did things (like folding laundry, answering the phone and buying groceries) a certain way. And any other way was wrong. I hated when he'd tell me how to do something "the right way." My way was good enough!

Mike wasn't right to be so rigid. But if the Roommate 9000 were real, he'd remind me that the ways I liked doing things weren't necessarily any better. The word that was missing in our relationship was compromise. Instead of leaving nasty notes back and forth about how to put the DustBuster on the battery charger the "right" way, we should have just talked it out. (Of course, if I'd had a Roommate 9000, he could have just charged the DustBuster with his finger.)

Here's an interesting fact: Nine out of ten machines are very accepting of who we are. (I asked the appliances around my house. That darn toaster is so judgmental.) Machines will work for us no matter what we're like. I don't think the Roommate 9000 would be any different. Unfortunately, people aren't always so accepting.

I had one roommate in college who I now realize I didn't treat well because of some different beliefs we had. I didn't show him the kind of unconditional love and respect Jesus calls his followers to show. I'm not proud of that.

I like to look at being a roommate like being a believer. I don't deserve to have God's forgiveness and grace because I fall short of his love. But he gives it to me anyway. As a roommate, I will also fall short. I'll mess up. And so will my roommate. But in modeling God's love, I am going to try to treat my roommate as I'd like to be treated—with grace, forgiveness, respect, patience and sympathy.

Of course, that simple idea puts us one up on the Roommate 9000. Neither he nor that jerky toaster can understand those very human and very awesome emotions.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today International/Campus Life magazine.
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