Having a twin is one of life's great social experiments, and most twins will tell you that the cases of mistaken identity never really stop being funny. A slightly awkward hello in a supermarket, a confused look across a restaurant, the occasional double-take from a stranger. Harmless, mildly entertaining, great story for a dinner party.
One woman found out the hard way that her twin had neglected to mention a rather important detail to her colleagues, and the man who paid the price for that omission had absolutely no idea what he was walking into.
More info: Reddit
Having a twin has the potential to be one of life's greatest forms of entertainment, even if you aren't trying
Image credits: Magnific / Magnific (not the actual photo)
One half of an identical twin pair saw a man across the store smiling at her, following her around, and eventually making his way to her car in the parking lot
Image credits: New Africa / Magnific (not the actual photo)
She had her pepper spray ready, aimed at his face, because she was not taking it without a fight
Image credits: REDfox / Magnific (not the actual photo)
The stranger was quick to react, complimenting her on the wonderful presentation she had given recently
Image credits: exteriordesigner
After her brain was done calibrating, she realised the poor man was confusing her with her identical twin sister
The narrator was doing her weekly grocery shop when she noticed a man she had never seen before smiling at her from across the store. She glared back and hurried through her shopping. He appeared in her checkout line, and she started getting genuinely freaked out. By the time she was walking to her car and he came rushing out after her, she had her pepper spray out.
The look on his face was pure horror. The horror of a man who had absolutely no idea why a woman he recognised from a work presentation was about to chemically ruin his afternoon. He managed to get out that he had just wanted to say hi, that it had been a while, and that he wanted to ask how the UX Research Education Program was going. The narrator was visibly confused.
She lowered the pepper spray, but it still took way too long for the whole thing to click into place. She was not the UX Researcher he had seen present to his engineering team. She was the UX Designer who happened to be her twin sister's exact physical copy, living in the same city, shopping at the same grocery store, and confusing the hell out of everyone around.
They both burst out laughing, and she apologised on behalf of her twin, who had apparently never thought to mention to a single colleague that she had an identical sister living nearby. In her twin's defence, she acknowledged, it is genuinely quite difficult to work into a professional conversation the disclaimer that your double lives locally and carries pepper spray.
Image credits: Magnific / Magnific (not the actual photo)
While twins start from a single fertilised egg and share nearly the same genetic blueprint, they are not actually 100% identical. Subtle differences arise through early genetic mutations, changing gene activity, and different life experiences, meaning that up close and in context, most twins can be told apart by people who know them well. To a stranger in a grocery store, however, the distinction is essentially invisible.
Actor Rami Malek famously impersonated his identical twin brother Sami in college to deliver a Greek tragedy monologue on his behalf, allowing Sami to get the final points he needed to graduate. If a performance arts professor cannot tell the difference, a software engineer who attended one UX presentation really had no chance.
Twin advocate Mikhaila Friel, who is part of an identical twin duo, has a list of things she wishes people would stop saying, including referring to them collectively as 'the twins', asking which one is the smart one, and telling them they are basically the same person. They are two distinct individuals who happen to look alike, which is precisely the point.
The man in this story was not wrong to recognise a face he had seen before. He was simply missing the critical piece of information that the face came in two versions, one of whom had a very different professional background and a very different tolerance for being followed through a supermarket.
Do you have a hilarious story of twin-ception to share with us? Tell us in the comments!
People in the comments somehow found a way to take offence and called her out for attempting to use pepper spray when in a situation they deemed non-threatening
