If you can't find a "bird" class in your senior year of college, you probably don't deserve to graduate. It's the class you can fly through without doing any effort, which rounds out your credit count and polishes off any requirements.

Andy deserved to graduate. The CS department at his school switched from PASCAL to C++ his senior year, which opened up a few intro-level classes to him. A basic course in a language he already knew was a formula for an easy "A". The tail-wind in this "bird" course was the professor- he was going to a bigger and better school the following semester.

This gives us the following formula: ten bored college seniors, plus one professor that doesn't care what happens, plus material that was trivially easy, plus one networked computer lab. These components, when mixed, can yield one and only one result: a semester long LAN party.

For appearance's sake, Andy dropped the odd assignment into his network folder; the folder stored a library of every program he had every written during his time in college. The rest of the time, it was Quake 2 and Starcraft. The only real challenge was not shouting across the room at each other during class time.

Installing a game on a school computer was very much against the computer use rules. Andy and his friends knew this, and followed the letter of the law, in complete violation of its spirit. They installed the games on ZIP disks, and nothing ever touched the computers' hard drives.

Imagine his surprise when he was called into the Dean's office. "It comes to my attention that you've been storing games and other software on the network," the Dean said. "Misuse of computing resources is something we take very seriously, and piracy even more so." The dean clasped his hands together, leaned across his desk, and intoned, "This could have an impact on your graduation."

Andy knew there were no games on the network. Not from him, anyway. So he asked, "What games do I have on the network?"

The dean examined a printout. "Doctor Fingal, the network admin saw you playing games, and scanned your network folder. So let's see." He adjusted his bifocals and read, "BlackJack.exe, Craps.exe and SlotMachine.exe are the very obvious ones. Oh- BubbleSort.exe- my kids play that one."

"Those aren't ga-"

"PowerLaw.exe- this is my piracy concern. Our pre-law program spent a large sum of money getting a valid license for that program."

"No, it's-"

The dean continued. "And, of course, Toom-3.exe. I can't say I approve of those violent video games. In any case, there are many more on the list. It's quite the rap-sheet you've put together, Andy."

"None of those are games. Those are class assignments. Look, you can run them yourself!"

"That's not necessary," the dean replied. "Regardless of what you call them, we need them off your network drive. That, and a written apology, emailed to my office, and I think we can put this whole ugly incident behind us. Assuming we don't have any more of these events, I think we can forget it this once, and make sure you still graduate."

Given the options, Andy moved all of his assignments to another ZIP disk and purged them from his network drive. As a result, there weren't any assignments for his C++ class when the professor went to check for his work, and he received a C-— just good enough to graduate.

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!