Olumurewa Damilola

This is a question that could be lurking behind some of our thoughts as resumption is around the corner. How really are you prepared to meet new sets of individuals with varying personalities and lifestyles? How prepared are you to be accommodative of people’s lackadaisical, sometimes fun, sometimes mystical attitudes? Sometimes, some get so lost in their excitement to meet their new roommates, they forget that sometimes we could be unfortunate to be paired with roommates who are starved of all the good qualities one would expect a normal human being to possess. While some people are actually really scared about the prospect because they don’t know what to expect. Really, the choice of roommates is unpredictable, it often depends on how lucky you are. You could end up with tolerant roommates or troublesome ones.

First of all, everything starts with the registration for your room. Going through the rigid and stressful process of getting a room is enough to drain one of the excitement and prospect of getting a new room and most especially new roommates. The photocopying of documents, the taking of passports, and the long queue never seem to end but you endure, afterall, the process only takes almost half of your day then you get to collect the key to your room. However, the fear and anxiety, mingled with joy of what your room and roommate looks like do not seem to dissipate. One of the reasons you endured the long registration process is that nursing these anxious thoughts created a distraction from the strenuous task of registering.

Then, getting a new room, one may not be lucky to have a perfect room because a fan might be missing, or a bulb light might be unavailable but one could have a near perfect room with just one louvers or two gone at least. The room is just not perfect just like no roommate is perfect. If one is lucky one gets roommates or a roommate (depending on the size of the room) that do not argue over the littlest things. Imagine going through the rigid process of getting a room and you finally get settled in your room but you have to argue about who holds the key, which wardrobe is yours, who owns the upper bunk or the lower bunk, who gets to take the table or who gets to own the chairs in the room. These arguments and not so necessary quarrels sometimes determine the foundation of the relationships. They determine whether you will get along well or you will never until everyone departs at the end of the session.

But if you have luck on your side, you get roommates who are actually less troublesome or not troublesome at all because it varies. You can have someone who stands out in the room as the “bad person” and in another case, the “troublesome” roommate could have an accomplice, and sometimes they could be a gang of three against the whole room. The choice of roommates varies a lot depending on your luck. Also, your roommates determine partly whether your stay on campus for that session would be easy, exciting or rather challenging and boring. Oftentimes, roommates turn out friends or even best friends while sometimes they could turn out to be sworn enemies for life. One either picks one out of the two options or none.

The truth is we can never be prepared enough about the idea of having new roommates because we are dealing with human beings, people who come from different backgrounds, born with different personalities and raised in different ways. For instance, someone living in a room of six might not like to play her music loud because she considers and respects other people’s peace and quiet so she would expect that others to do the same but someone in that same room, a fellow roommate would confidently play her music loud because she does not understand the meaning of courtesy or respect and she does not have the words; tranquility and peace in her mental dictionary. In this scenario, there might be a quarrel between the former and the latter. There are other instances like having a “borrower” in the room or a thief, having someone who talks loud or gossip a lot and there are also some sets of people who have friends coming over like they do not have their rooms. These issues are really a lot to put up with and they could be irksome and frustrating to deal with.

As much as it’s scary to live with roommates, it is also fun and exciting because we get to experience how unique people are with their different personalities and perspectives. In all, people have different life lessons to offer from their various life experiences that one could really learn a great deal from. Also, not all roommates are bad in fact, we have roommates who could end up being our closest friends and allies. The key is to be patient and open minded.