A PC and 3 hours- A Flashback!!

Its crazy the way things are changing! 2 years ago i used to be some1 who wore a uniform shirt and some torn local jeans to college on uniform days or some t-shirt with some bizzare writings (which annoys most people) to go with a pair of cargos which had at least 10 pockets and some of them so huge enough that one can easily hide a bottle of beer in it...!! Today am promoting brands sitting all formal in an office building and stare at a monitor and do what they call "Work" simply because it pays me... What used to be fun few years back is now all stale and i yell at god "Is this why u made me pass engineering for??!!. I was so happy even with those suppliy papers!!" I could hardly spent my 3 lab hours in college with patience and now i am speniding more than 8 hours in front of a system not even knowing by end of the day ,how those 8 hours flew by me!

The 3 hours of lab sessions we had in College was typically spent like this :

Get in 20 minutes late in the lab.
If u r superlucky then the ma'am would tell you to get out..!! Happily you go out either to hostel for an afternoon nap or to the internet surfing centre or to your favorite food stall outside campus (Thambi's food stall in our case :-)) and spend your time lavishly. And about the attendance, just an SMS to the most daring mimicry artist in class to call your proxy -"Dude, Roll no.47. If possible, then tonight dinner my treat. If not then leave it".This trick was possible during the early days of the semester when teachers hardly know your name, roll number or recognize your faces.

And if you are not that damn lucky then ma'am would allow you to enter lab and then 3hours of super boredom! Even net access is restricted in labs. But thank god Linux games were enabled. One very tough game of Sudoku, for beginners like us would easily take up 2 hours to fill in. And thus by the end of our Engineering most of us were sudoku Champs!!And in between these 3 hours there would be minimum 4 breaks of 15 mins each we take in the name of drinking water and to use the restroom, though the truth would be to roam around the campus and eye-siting the most beautiful girls in college even if they are sitting inside classes.Doing the programs and showing the output is done by the bhuji's.Once that was done our job was to master the art of FTP. How to copy those programs to your system ASAP and by the end of the day to show the output by slightly fine tuning the best brainy's code here and there :). Life was heaven! Hail the guy who invented FTP-he would be the guy blessed by most number of students in the world.

P.S : There were copy CATs who had better lab grades than these so called techie brainies for their internal assessments coz the way these CATs would manipulate the code was such that, the output would look like a masterpiece. They had artistic talents when it came to formatting and doing the cosmetic works on the codes!!

And lab exams.. All of us would top them on par!! Again the dark hands of we CATs come to play. The day prior to Lab exams days were the most important day in terms of arrangements for us. By around noon 10 -15 of us would go to the lab in the name of preparing and practicing the programs for exam and then copy bulk folders of these programs to each and every system available in that lab (Again hail FTP) because we dont know which bloody system we are gonna get tommorrow for the exam.Why take a risk, spread them in all systems, be safe!! Once that is done, we go to hostel and While all the buji's study sleeplessly for the exam, we sleep peacefully or play cards or listen to the love story of some heart broken room-mate till sun rise next day. That day morning ,we allow no god to have a peacefull long extended sleep. WE pray and pary and pary like hell for just one thing "God, whatever may happen let the questions be the same as the lab assignments.If it changes then all our hardwork yesterday will go in vain". And most of the time our hardwork pays off!!

Whenever it doesnt pay off we had our savious in the form of 'partial output'. The art of picking any program already in the system exam backup folder, Modifying the print statements in such a way that it resembles the output of the given question and then showing it to the invigilator.. since its almost similar to the required output we get partial output marks which is more than enough to pass :-). Sometimes some smart asses type these print statements such that it will give exactly what the doctor ordered. And they walk away with a full output seeing which the less luckier lots fume with jealousy and murmuring : "Bloody lucky b*****d!! Come to hostel tonight @#$@$ , we'll pulp you like cotton!!".

Ohh.. those days when we cursed those 3 hours of labbing and we boasted of our bold adventures prior to lab exams as if we won World war - III, i thank you "lord of time" for those were indeed the best times we ever had with PC's!!