High tech heist

I have always considered my diploma college days very special. I got my best buddies, best knowledge, best environment. Everything is simply "best" about it. Only then a different side of my nature was discovered (by me). We played all kind of pranks, cricket, rebellion against teachers, eve-teasing (:P) & a lot more. But a "heist" that too "high tech" sounds too much, isn't it?

We had a quite big computer lab. It was divided in 2 sections, one having windows network & other one having novell netware. Then, we had just been promoted from novell netware to windows. It was a much needed promotion, why? I think it can be another blog. Coming to point, we were working on windows network for our final year project work. We often needed internet to do more of surfing than doing project work, but we did need it.

Mr. Chopade was our lab assistant. He was a funny & helping personality. He also had a dedicated user name & password for internet access which we called "Magical key". When needed, we used to approach him & he always helped. But many a times, we had to wait as he was in charge of many other things & that would often delay our work. Also, under his supervision, we were restricted to surf Google.com only. This went on for some time we were really sick of not getting access to our email accounts when we wanted (of course for fun).

Soon our minds started working on how to get access to the magical key? We had numerous ideas in our mind, funniest of them was to blackmail Mr. Chopade of a video which he had recorded on lab webcam. Don't think otherwise, in that video Mr. Chopade was seen making all funny expressions, letting his childish instinct out. To tell you, we (my group) shared a very casual relation with him, he was a nice guy. And for the same reason, idea of blackmailing him with video was loudly laughed out.

Though he was nice, he always maintained professional gap & would never share the magical key. Days passed and we were getting restless as we all had taken it as a challenge now. One day, a friend of mine started playing Mr. Chopade's video to steal some chuckles that boring day. We all (again) started enjoying that video and commenting on it. Suddenly one of us almost shouted, "Idea!".

We called up Mr. Chopade & requested him to provide us internet access. He opened login page on server computer & started typing user name. We were standing sideways praying trick to work out.  As soon as he finished typing user name he looked up to verify if user name is typed properly. Then he took a pause for almost a minute. May be he was trying to recollect the password but we were restless as we were in no mood to get caught and loose access to the only lab left for me & my friend.

After a minute or so, he started typing password. Authentication succeeded & he left the lab. As soon as the lab door shut, we cheered & hurriedly went to server system which Mr. Chopade used to login. Actually, we had repositioned webcam attached to server in such a way that it was pointing to keyboard. And when Mr. Chopade was about to come, we had started video recording with webcam.

We played recorded video and it had captured all required information. Then on, when people needed internet connection, they never went to Mr. Chopade. Needless to say to whom they went.