The Word of Chaos

In most areas of West Virginia, most high school students have the option of taking technical courses. In my county, these courses are provided by the local technical education center.

Since I was little, I had always loved everything about computers, so when my homeroom teacher suggested I take her husband’s A+ and Network+ courses, I was ecstatic. My enthusiasm for the class helped me to be very successful in the class, finishing the two years of the program at the top of the class. Many of the other students respected my abilities. One of the other students absolutely hated me.

This particular student, who I will be refer to by his nickname Hamburger, really wanted to fit in with the rest of the class. For whatever reason, Hamburger didn’t know as much as the rest of us, so he tried to pretend that he knew all of what we knew plus some. My class and I began to suspect that Hamburger’s claims of his knowledge was a load of crap, but this story was the incident that confirmed our suspicions.

During our A+ class one morning, a classmate found a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 installed on his workstation. At the time, Unreal Tournament 2004 had just been released, so Hamburger took up the task of finding a way to get the game onto a set of CD-r’s. The student workstations weren’t equipped with CD burners; The instructor’s workstation was equipped with a CD burner, but that possibility was out of the question since there was no opportunity for Hamburger to use the CD burner without our instructor around.

I started to ramble off ways that one could get the game to those CD-r’s, but Hamburger wouldn’t accept any of my suggestions.

“Why would I need to bring an external CD-Burner? All you have to do is use CD burner drivers, and you can burn CD’s with a normal CD-Drive,” Hamburger said.

I stared at him blankly for a second. At first, I wanted to believe I had misunderstood him and asked my friend if he had heard the same thing. He had. Hamburger was serious. We let him go about trying his crackpot theory.

The instructor found the copy of the game before Hamburger was able to make it work. The two weeks that Hamburger spent trying to use his method was priceless.

The moral of this story is that idiots will try to do anything.