With many professors opting to teach online and most org activities happening remotely, getting out of your dorm room can feel like a chore. With assigned sinks and toilet stalls, even going to the bathroom is no longer a casual activity. This has left many students, such as first-year roommates Jada Markland and Jo June Rawlings, struggling to spend time out of their room.
“Between org meetings happening mainly online and not being able to work in places that aren’t my room, I haven’t left except to go to the Deece. And besides Jo June, I don’t know that many people on campus, so it’s been hard to make a lot of new friends,” Markland commented. “That’s OK, though, because we get along really well and we like spending time together.”
But after close to a month of spending almost every hour of the day together, Rawlings began to notice that something unusual was happening.
“I’d go to the bathroom in the morning and someone would say to me ‘That’s not your sink,’ even though I knew it was my sink,” Rawlings shared. “I thought it was an honest mistake—maybe people in our hallway weren’t sure which one of us was which—but it kept happening and I had to keep saying ‘This is my sink, I’m Jo June.”
Markland noticed the shift, too.
“When we first arrived, no one had trouble telling us apart. But lately it’s been like everyone thinks we’re exactly the same person,” Markland said.
The roommates have not gone crazy—everyone mistakes them for each other because they now look exactly alike. The science works like this: Two people spend so much time together in one room that they begin to take on the likeness of the other. It’s similar to how every dog looks like their owner, except in this case, two roommates look identical. This has created some problems for the roommates.
“They tried to give us a new roommate a while back,” Rawlings said. “Apparently Res Life got confused and thought only one person was living in our room, so they tried to put a third person in here. It was very awkward.”
Markland added, “We’ll get turned away at the Deece if we don’t walk in at the exact same time. If we stagger our entrances slightly, they think we’re trying to game the system and sneak someone in. It’s kind of embarrassing.”
Rawlings chimed in, “Jada is a Chem major and I’m thinking about declaring a Philosophy major so it’s not even like we can do useful things with this like attend each other’s classes when the other doesn’t feel like it or something. What a waste of suddenly being identical.”