Written by Kaelyn Spickler
For the last week I have been in quarantine, but I have not been bored! You might be wondering how this is the case, especially if you know me, so let me share.
Last Thursday I got the phone call from Health Services notifying me that I need to quarantine. I slammed on the brakes (literally because I was driving home), and turned around. For an hour and a half I thought of the boredom I was about to endure. When I came back to campus, I realized I lost my Maroon card and with it, my key to get into my room. I waited for my very patient RA to let me in, and a few hours later I got a DM on Instagram saying that my Maroon Card had been found. I explained that I was in quarantine, so he slid it under my door.
This sparked an idea, from my bestie, for the best quarantine social experiment. She suggested I throw the card out of my window every day and see who will return it. Obviously we had a few hopes for how this might turn out, but it ended up being so entertaining no matter who returned it.
Every day I would open my window as far as it would go (three whole inches), and after wiping it down, I would toss it out the window. Most of the time one of my friends were waiting at the bottom to move it to a more central spot on the sidewalk. After that I would look out the window occasionally to check its status. So many times I would see people look at it and walk away. Sometimes a girl would nearly step on it without knowing because she was texting or looking in her purse (all things I’m guilty of too, so no shame), and sometimes there would be guys walking over to the dumpster to throw their trash out, and they would walk just far enough from my card that they didn’t see it.
My favorite pick-up was one I happened to catch. I was on Zoom with one of my friends, and I saw a guy over to my card. He looked at it for awhile, started to pick it up, but then a car pulled up, so he walked away. But, then he came back! I saw him hand the card to one of the girls that hopped out of the car, who happens to be a friend of mine, and I heard her yell my name from my room. Little did she know, I had seen the whole thing.
It was always interesting to see how I would get my card back at the end of the day. A lot of times it happened so ironically, but don’t worry, social distancing was still abided by as the card was simply slid under my door.
Quarantine doesn’t have to be just sitting in bed and staring at the wall. Find something entertaining to do, or test out a social experiment like this one! Stay safe, Maroons!
