Roommates are some of the most fascinating people you will ever be forced to meet in your life. You can choose to love them, dislike them ("hate" is a strong term) or neither, because you may never see your roommates in a given time period. And that's cool, too; to each his own. But roommates teach you how to cope and get along with people that you may have never expected.

Like I never would've thought I would get along with a tinkerer.

The tinkerer always enjoyed making and innovating from things you never would've thought from paper clips to string to Jolly Ranchers to left over Chick-fil-A cups. He was always coming up with something. Which is exactly why I should've seen this coming.

March 30 -

We usually stayed up late watching our favorite shows: for me it was Breaking Bad at the time, for the tinkerer, I was never sure. It kept changing but the most consistent I was able to observe were TED talks. As I finish my last viewing of The Adventures of Heisenberg and The Pink Man I see that he's still watching his show. Then I fall asleep.

The next morning -

I get up for my eight o' clock class, the exhaustion biting me like a wasp with too much caffeine. As I head out the door, the tinkerer is sleeping, completely veiled by his blanket.

That afternoon -

I come back from my lunch and I notice a sticky note on the door. It says:

"Worked on homework all night last night. Didn't sleep. Sleeping now so please be a bit quiet. Thanks."

So I think to myself "okay, buddy, okay." I mean, I don't mean to brag, but I am a considerate roommate. If he asks me to step out really quick I'll step out really quick. If he wants to show me a movie, I'll watch it with him. If he invites me to rob a bank, I'll negotiate with him for at least 60/40 favoring me, and then I'll join in.

So I do what I need to do, and I leave without saying a single word.

That night -

It's eight in the evening. I haven't been home all day and I was ready to just spend the night going back to seeing the one who knocks. Yet to my surprise, the tinkerer was STILL sleeping. So I get kinda concerned, right? I'm like Is this normal? I know it's not, but I can persuade myself to say that this is normal? Eventually, I do and I go out again to get a double shot espresso. Why I did that at eight at night still eludes me to this day.

Later -

I finished my drink just as I opened the door, and the tinkerer is STILL freaking sleeping. And it's officially ten sharp. So I observe him for a little bit, just making sure everything was okay. But as I observed him, I realized nothing was okay. Because the tinkerer was lying still on the bed. Which means, I couldn't see his body go up and down. Which means, I couldn't see him breathing. Which means, there was only one reasonable explanation: my roommate kicked the bucket. I thought how is this possible? He is healthy as a horse! How would he have died? Work exhaustion? Addiction? Choosing to transcend and leave his physical body behind?

I don't know. I didn't have the answers. But I wanted them, like Sherlock Holmes before he was twenty, I was ready to start a very amateur investigation. So I do a very professional thing to check if he was dead: I poke the bottom of his foot. If he wasn't dead, he was asleep, and he was a heavy sleeper. Calling his name out would not work in any way, shape or flipping form.

So I as poke his foot, professionally, I notice something with my Sherlock Sense. It was light. I thought to myself maybe feet are little bit lighter when someone dies. That's just a side effect. But as I push further into the foot, it doesn't even feel like a foot. That's when my curiosity led me to lift the blanket and discover the truth.

What I found, consisting as a compilation of pillows, articles of clothing, cardboard boxes and sandals, was that the tinkerer set up a decoy when I went to class and disappeared.

But he's done stuff like this before, and every time he did, he was always waiting in a corner or under the bed or in the shadows for an opportunity to jump up and surprise me. But I was gonna beat him to it. I ran all through the suite, checking the bathroom, the cabinets, the beds, closets, everything. He was not gonna get the last laugh this time!

Then I come up with a plan, and I pull out my phone texting wildly. Then I hit send and wait for a sound. BTW the text was:

Dude where'd you go?

I waited for a couple of minutes, and at this point things were quiet. Everything was waiting the same way I was. Then my phone goes off. And the response was:

Hahahahaha! I left for the weekend. Check the back of the sticky note.

Outraged, I rip off the note, spin it around and see that there was another note waiting for me:

APRIL FOOLS!!!

So, moral of the story, if you want the last laugh on your prank setting roommate, make sure you know that it's April first before they do.