Training Morons

Continued from where I stopped Mumbai Meri Jaan . That one was abt our life in general. This one is about our training stunts, the reason why we were there. After 3 death warrants and 2 attempts on life, I have decided to use unrelated nick-names for all the characters of my ‘story’ going forward.

We the CETians (14 in number) were split into 3 different batches and they tried to teach us ‘software’. What should I say other than ‘high hopes’? When 4 years of technical education failed miserably in imparting even the slightest bit of knowledge, what were they planning to achieve in 2 months? Anyways, we the obedient learners entered the allotted classrooms, with a zest for more knowledge.... er....fun (You see, I am damn honest, if not anything else :_) ).

The first character of my story is Jack. The one and only Jack who is a master of all trades. The one who automatically switches his medium of communication to Yinglish the moment he gets a call on his cell, the one who supports Indian Music industry by buying all the unsold cassettes and CDs, the one for whom Meera Jasmin was always Mera (hindi for ‘My’) Jasmin, the kind hearted fella who donated his first salary for the noble cause of providing us entertainment, by buying a music system.

I still remember Jack shouting at the monitor once. That was the first time he tried an assignment himself. He put in all his energy and resources on making the server respond with a welcome page. All he managed to get was a 505 error even after his 23rd try. He threw his keyboard away, pushed his chair back, and stood up screaming, “Whats ur bloody big problem? I wrote that sh*&&y piece of code, keyed in all those bloody input parameters, did all those bloody settings changes, now why cant you give me an output?” This he shouted pointing at the monitor. All of us were rolling on the floor seeing him perform =)). After this unsuccessful and over publicized effort to make the comp obey his commands, Jack retired to his fav pastime of searching for mp3s in the Lan or giving us running commentaries about the position and whereabouts of the teacher or the girls of the class or some other equally interesting activity.

Now comes Munna - poet, musician and the creative spirit amongst us. It was a UNIX class and the teacher taught about ‘banner’ command. She asked the class to leave a banner on individual screens when they took a tea break. Entire class obeyed dutifully. While gulping down his tea, Munna remembered about the banner he had put on his screen. He started asking people if they had seen his banner. When they answered in the negative, he was relieved and tried to rush back to the class and change it before others saw it. However, our very own friends made sure all of us saw the banner before Munna could erase it. The banner read "Breaked for Tea". The entire class knew about it, and from that day, for each tea break we took, somebody or the other always tried to put a dummy banner on Munna’s machine, banners like "Broken for Tea", “Having Teaing", "Tea Breaked" and many more... :_)

Jack had a constant companion for all his adventures - Nero. Nero is known for his neurotic ...er... astute brain cells and the way he uses them. He used to listen carefully to all the lectures and tried to finish all the assignments in time. When he was done with an assignment, he would ask Jack (who was busy with his activities mentioned above) to copy the same. Being a quality conscious guy, Jack always made sure he tested the program thoroughly before copying it. It was fun watching Nero doing all the programs and Jack breaking them every single time with the slightest of efforts (like entering an alphabet when it asks for a digit etc etc....)

Another interesting episode was Jack (who hadnt learned Mallu formally as he was ejjucated in central schools) polishing his Mallu skills with sentences like "Da, look... aa frog, jump cheythu going", and he narrating the story of "Lord Ayyappa fetching the milk of the tiger".

The ultimate incident again had Jack at the driver’s seat. It was a Java class. Teacher was explaining about Java API and the classes within namespaces. He described the class library and mentioned that there were a large number of classes catering to different programming needs. One particularly inquisitive soul of our class (a northie idiot) who used to ask doubts every 3.2 minutes, raised his hand, and shot his question "Sir, exactly how many classes are there?" All of us were irritated at that stupid question, but only for a moment, as we heard Jack’s sudden muttered reply "1375, to be précised". Man, it was damn hilarious, all of us tried real hard to control our laughter, some of us were found burying our heads behind the head rest of the chair in front.

We used to copy assignments from one machine to the other through the network. Since we had this fear at the back of our minds that there was some omnipresent, omnipotent Sys Admin tracking each one of the files transferred across the network, we used to rename each of the .java files to .mp3 files before copying. After our training days, when we were assigned to projects, we did the exact reverse. We copied mp3s (which are more sort after then java files once trainees are allocated to projects) renaming them to .java files.

We had like 3 days for a course, then an exam at the end of it. Since none of us used to prepare, exams were always tough for us, and all of us used to head to MeghDhoot Theater for the late night show to wash away the exam blues. So, it was like at least 2 movies during weekdays and another 2 or 3 on the weekends. We had fun during the training days; since we were familiar with most of the courses we had, we used to top the exams and the CET gang was the model gang for the rest of the batch (neighbors envy) – ‘unlimited fun plus academic excellence’. :_)) No no no, I am not boasting, check with any of our training batch girls ;_)))

Addendum - Stuff I forgot to include in the original.

Next character is Sam. HTML class. All sorts of tags were covered, including the ‘marquee’ tag. One of the assignments was to create a homepage for self, using all the tags we learned. Everybody busy at work. After 15 minutes, ppl who looked at Sam’s monitor started ROFL.... A huge H1 header marquee was dancing on the screen with the inscription

EAST OR WEST, SAM IS THE BEST!

HTML class again. This time Jack busy building his homepage. He came up with his version which had a large banner “Welcome to the world of web entertainment”. I think it was Nero who pointed out that it resembled captions on pornographic sites. It was soon concluded that Jack was trying to imitate those sites which he was most familiar with.

Addendum - Something I got as a result of the mail chain which got initiated in our group because of this post. This is in mallu (I apologise to the non-mallus). This was how Jack (supposedly) described himself at the end of the training period. Btw, Ganesh Bhat was our Java teacher.

"java il code ezhuthan paranjappol ariyilla ennu paranjavan Jack...

.java file chodichappol .mp3 file koduthavan Jack

pinne enthallam paranju nadakkunnundu Ganesh Bhat ningade naatil?

Jack-ne thopikkan ningalku aakilla makkale"