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Imposter!
by Michael Isner

Everyone alive moves around watching the world from a single vantage point, largely oblivious to what goes on everywhere else beyond their immediate vision and knowledge. Have you ever stopped to consider that the world beyond you may be completely different that what you expect? I certainly never had. That was at least until the Spring of 1991.

That spring was spent in residence at the University of Waterloo. Residence was a lot of fun, you shared your life with a big gang of guys eating dormitory style food and bugging each other with practical jokes.

Occasionally someone would joke to much and lean a garbage can of water against someone’s door at 4:00 and start knocking. When the door was opened, rushing water would fill the room and fights would break out. But for the most part things were harmless.

One night while we all sat in the "all you can eat" cafeteriaI had a big breakthrough. I cupped a little plastic cream container for coffee in the palm of my hand. I loudly yelled.

“Owe…Arggghghghh…. Arghghg. It hurts. Arrhghh. My eye hurts …”

“Something’s caught in my eye”

“Arghghghggg”.

Then I grabbed a fork and poked the plastic creamer pretending to scratch my eye. Squeezing it sent milk flying in all directions across the table freaking everyone out. It was probably my best group reaction. There was a near state of complete panic until they saw me grinning.

Meanwhile as we were hooting and jostling around on the table, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a door open behind our table in the cafeteria. This was a very unusual event, there were three closed doors surrounding the eating area and I had never seen one open in the 7 months I had been at university.

As the door opened a head popped out. And then a hand with a clipboard.

“Frank.” “Frank”

The guy called the name out a few times.

And then out of nowhere this “Frank” guy appeared and went into the room. I pointed it out to everyone.

“Hey guys what’s going on in that room?”

No-one knew. In fact no one cared either. They want back to flicking food and each other and commenting on the girls walking by.

10 minutes later “Frank” left, the head popped out to get “Jeff’ and the process repeated itself. To this day I don’t what fascinated me so much about what was going on in there, but there was some sort of mystery and I was intensely curious.

Next time something different happened. The head popped out and called for “Jonathan”. But no “Jonathan” showed up. The head came out two more times trying to find Jonathan. I started prodding the guys.

“Hey Wheeldon”

“Why don’t you go in there and pretend you’re Jonathan.”

Wheeldon fired back.

“Screw you Isner. Why don’t you go in.”

I turned to Kenny.

“Hey Kenny.... Kenny.”

“Why don’t you do in the and pretend to be that guy.”

Kenny wouldn’t budge.

”Come on Kenny. Don’t be such a little girl. Why don’t you go in there.”

Unfortunately Kenny and Wheeldon were quite used to my antics. They bantered:

“Isner. Shut Up. Why don’t you go in there. It’s your stupid idea. Why are you afraid?”

I’m right back.

“I’m not afraid. You’re afraid. Why don’t you do it….”

“You know what. If you’re so afraid I will go. Just to prove how afraid you really are.”

No one wins at trash talk but it’s certainly a good mechanism to goad each other into doing something stupid. So I walked towards the door.

In my life, I’ve never been a person who lies or pretends. Life is to short for that, I’ve always found the honest path, the path of the straight shooter the way to go. But the taunting of my friends and my burning curiosity had landed me right in the middle of the life of a secret agent. At least for 10 minutes. Surely nothing I couldn’t handle.

I walked into the door.

The room wasn’t too big. There were a two big desks at the front and a couple tables at the sides. A guy and two girls sat behind the desks as though they were conducting some kind of interview. In front of the desk were two chairs. One directly in front of the desk and one slightly of to the side.

I shut the door and walked in. Actually my Mom knew lots of human resources tricks and had told me about this one in the past. The choice of two chairs is supposed to test the confidence of someone being interviewed.

No problem. I walked straight in, sat at the chair right in front of the desks. Everyone smiled. This was going to be easier than I thought.

One of the girls asked me:

“You’re Jonathan.”

“Yes.” I nodded.

“Jonathan Gibbs”.

“Yes. Yes.” I nodded again. Brilliant. This was so easy.

“You live in Barrie, Ontario.”

“Correct.” Getting trickier. I had heard of Barrie, but definitely had never been there.

“You live in 1589 Gulf Road in Barrie”.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Can you please draw us a map on the paper over there of how to drive to your house?”

Ok so now I was in trouble. Could I call it off? Could I run out of the room? I figured I just do what I normally do in life when I have absolutely no idea how to handle a situation: stumble through it.

So I stood up at the paper drawing random lines connecting and mumbling “this is how you exit the main freeway” and “this is where you turn on old Milwakee road” and “then just turn into my house it’s right there near the freeway. Lying sucks. Once lying starts it’s trapped in perpetual growth like cancer.

“Ok great, thank you” the other girl chirped in a sing song voice. They had looked a bit puzzled along the way but I got through it.

“Now I have a question for you”, she continued.

“What if you jumped off an airplane and all you had was chewing gum, a glow in the dark condom and a baseball bat. How would you survive?”

Weird. This was very weird. These were weird people and weird questions but at least I was past crappy details I couldn’t answer. I jumped back:

“What I would do is chew on the gum really quickly and wrap it around my body. Then I would wave the glow in the dark condom around to attract all the female sky divers close to me and the gum would stick me to their bodies. Then I would wave the bat around to scare off all the other male skydivers.”

Hey stupid question, stupid answer. How can you go wrong…. They smiled that was funny enough.

“Ok”, the other girl started, “This one is more serious. What if you were in charge of a residence and two girls started kissing and everyone was making fun of them. How would you handle the situation.”

Ok I get it. This is an interview for some kind of team leader or something in residence. I made up a bunch of stuff about separating the girls and calming them down and having a talk with everyone else about tolerance. I don’t know… it’s so outside my life who knows what I would do…

There were a couple more questions like that which I coasted through. Then the guy asked me “Are you wearing boxers or briefs.”?

“Boxers.” Ok this is turning strange again.

“Well would you mind doing a dance for the girls and showing them your boxers…. Here, I’ll put on some music for you.” Then he leaned back, turned on a portable CD player behind him and dance music started playing. The three of them stood up and starting cheering me on, the girls hooting.

My mind was rushing 100 miles an hour. First of all this was just #$%%ing crazy. What am I supposed to do in a situation like this? Second, what does this say about life?

While I’m sitting there eating dinner with my friends we are surrounded by secret rooms you never go into where people dance around in their underwear? It’s shocking, you think you understand what a piece of life is like and then you stumble into something that makes you feel it’s complete chaos. Is this what being a spy is? Uncovering complete madness?

You know what. Screw it. I’ll do this. I’m in deep. I’m as stupid as these people. I can do this.

I stood up on one of the tables and started jumping up and down.

“Wooo, Whooooo”. The girls yelled.

I took my belt off and waved it around in air. Just to make a big show I started break dancing on the table and doing the worm. I was never a good break dancer. But I was good at looking stupid.

Finally I took my pants leaving the boxers on, yelling and jumping around laughing as the girls screamed. You know what who cares. This is the craziest moment of my life and I might as well have a fun big joke with it.

Finally I stepped down off the table and put on my pants. Everyone was laughing I think if I actually was Jonathan I might have done a pretty good job of whatever interview they were doing in there.

The music stopped, we thanked each other and I walked out of the room. Then the next round of confusion broke lose.

Jonathan was standing outside the door, drunk and pissed off because my friends told him what had happened. He glared at me and ran into the room.

My friends were jumping and leaning around me is a nervous circle, practically biting their nails and stammering:

“What’s happening in there?”

“What were you doing?”

“Why aren’t you wearing shoes, why are you holding a belt?”

“What…What were you doing in there? What were you doing?”

I’m all calm now. “Easy guys, easy. It’s really funny those people are crazy!”

And then the guy from the room came out, I guess he figured out what happened when Jonathan showed. He ran out the door stopped perfectly still and repeatedly pointed at me.

“You…. You…. You…. You crazy $%#$er”

“You…”

And then he walked back into the room. I never saw any of them again. My friends almost didn’t believe me at first, but what else could have happened? After all I walked out holding my belt.

As for what this says about life, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. But it sure showed me that no-mater how well you know something or somewhere, it’s not always what you think.

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