“Mohamed and Megahed through a roommate. He said he didn’t know the roommate’s last name”
OK show of hands here - how many people that had roommates in their lifetimes did not know there name?
It’s not totally clear that the guy was referring to his OWN roommate, rather that to a roommate of Mohamed’s. But to play devil’s advocate, college student living arrangements are often a bit chaotic, with people crashing here and there on a short term basis, and some overlap around beginning and end of summer and winter break, as residents of a house are arriving/leaving. I clearly recall a portion of a summer where I rented a room in a house where several students lived and each dealt directly with the landlord. I don’t think I knew the FIRST names of any of the other students in the house, much less their last names.
In addition, I’ve been renting rooms in my home to college students (of a rather different sort than M & M) and I had a lovely, very responsible young lady there last year who didn’t quite have the first name of the other young lady right, and I seriously doubt she knew her last name. Young lady number one was very busy, econ major, physics minor, working a lot of hours at a campus job, spent most weekends at her boyfriend’s apartment and all vacations with relatives a few hours away. Couldn’t have asked for a better renter, but hanging out with roommates wasn’t what her life was about — she was pretty serious about her goals in life, which may have been driven partly by the fact that her family’s home in New Orleans was destroyed in Katrina.
All that said, I don’t recall a single college roommate I had whose name I would have “remembered” when asked by a journalist covering a high profile investigation into something I didn’t have any reason to think the roommate was involved in. I just didn’t hate any of my roommates that much :-)
“OK show of hands here - how many people that had roommates in their lifetimes did not know there name?”
I had a girl friend of several years, that lived with me in both California and Texas, I never learned her last name, so now I can’t look her up again.
I had a roommate in college that as I sit here now, I can't remember his name.
But that was 22 years ago...and I did know his name at the time.