Nine point someone

Last weekend I was reading the novel "Five Point Someone" by Chetan Bhagat. The book is about 3 guys from IIT (Top league Engineering College in India) and their pranks at school. Reading through I remembered one of my own pranks. It’s not as funny as Chetan Bhagat's autobiographical story, but you guys will definitely enjoy it.

Ideally in GCET (my college) all labs close at 6 PM. I along with group of friends were in the college web-site development group, hence had some computer administrative rights as well as a key to the computer room to work late nights. More than work, the free internet attracted us at nights and certainly the air-conditioned room was like heaven in summers!

Coming back, my close friend Harry (I shall not refer real name) was a techno geek. Somehow browsing through the underground websites he found a software which tracks your key strokes and transforms them in a doc file. Hence to test the software Harry loaded it on couple of computers in the lab, including the lecture's computer in the side cabin. (Yes the foolish peon had given us keys to our lecturer's cabin!!). The software runs in background so no one could know about it. The next day Harry was overjoyed to find out our lecture's password. We all were thrilled as well as amazed at this finding!!!

Later on, it was Harry's birthday and the rest of us thought of giving him some unusual gift!! " The next mid-term's question paper” It was easy, we all knew the password. All we had to do was login using lecture's password and browse through his documents, which we easily did.

As a birthday gift Harry got the most unusual gift he could ever imagine in his life (Let me tell you no one of us saw the question paper until now). Late night after the 12' O Clock party Harry and I went to our usual hang out place. The Sardar Patel Memorial, about 5 km from our college. It's dark and peaceful out there with no one around …

Suddenly something happened and I felt, it’s wrong to steal the question paper and ever much worst to hack someone's password!!

As a good friend and philosopher I told Harry that we had done wrong, hence should not look at the question paper and also remove the software from all the computers. Harry always listened to me and somewhere his conscience also bit him so he tore off the question paper without looking at it and decided to remove the software from all computers( Mind you Harry had a Nine plus GPA and he was not a Five point someone!).

The following night five of us were there in the lab and Harry announced his intension which was graciously accepted by rest. So he opened lecture's cabin and started the network connection to log in to the system and then remove the software.

Unfortunately that day one of our senior professor was also working a night out in his own private cabin on the other side of the building. As bad things are destined to happen, He could see the lecturer’s computer up on his network and got suspicious, so he came running to our lab. The door was locked but prof also had a key! When our professor entered the room, he saw Harry standing in front of lecture's computer typing something. Hell broke out… and we were in big shit!!

Professor asked for our IDs and lab keys... and asked us to see him first thing in the morning. That night was terrible… and I really don't have words to describe how it felt…. But next morning Harry went to Professor’s cabin and made up a story that he was logging into the system to get some web-site related stuff which we could not get from our own computer. All techno theories which I did not understand at all. Somehow the professor knew Harry was making up all this but then the professor also liked Harry as he was a nine point someone and kind of a good guy by nature. So instead of suspending us he left us with just asking to write a written apology!!!

Wow… we all were out of this mess with minimal damage… really the nine point something GPA does count!!! Also, it was funny that we were not caught trying to steal but were caught trying to fix our mistake!!