Twin

It’s 8:00am and you’re woken up by a phone call. It’s your mother.

Oh my god, Andrew, you have a twin at Cal.

The back story

My roommate and I decided to pull a prank on our drawmate. He took some sort of pride in having met President Bush and that moment has been immortalized by being on google. In fact, if you search his name, it comes up as one of the top hits. When he tells his story and people are in absolute disbelief, he tells them to use google. In today’s world, a google search legitimizes almost anything. It is practically the ultimate, unbiased oracle. (I think it is second only to wikipedia).

Well, that was going to be the crux of our prank. We started bouncing some ideas around in the spring and ultimately settled on making fake version of him. Same name. Same interests. Same home state. We registered hisname.com. We decided since we’re playing this semi-mean joke, we’d give him the domain name afterwards. We spent the summer gathering data. I asked a friend of mine if I could use his pictures. We looked into his valedictorian speech and other publications. Things started getting a bit elaborate because there was always this tricky balance of not giving too much. For example, originally, we wanted him to be a graduate student, but then he would expect to find publications. A lot of thought went into this. Probably too much.

The whole time, we couldn’t get too many people involved. We couldn’t let something slip on accident or give anything away. Again, this could only be legitimized if his discovery of his twin was independent of anything we had done. We couldn’t tell him to google himself or anything that might lead himself to do so. It was a waiting game.

I don’t think we could’ve asked for any better. Getting a wake up call from your mother telling you have a twin is absolutely classic. He eventually found out it was us after his RCC told him how to use whois. (I knew we shouldn’t have registered with our names.) I don’t know how excited his is to now have the domain name that matches his name. It expires in a about half a year. But, as one of the people involved pointed out, the story of his drawmates secretly re-creating a fake version of himself online to be discovered by his mother will live forever.