It was
the last day of term. The
exams were over, there was nothing to do, and yet the
evil fascist hordes who ran
Wolfreton School still made us turn up for
lessons.
So there we were in the Sixth-form physics lab, the teacher having long ago sloped off to do some actual work (presumably), and rapidly running out of topics of conversation. Hangman on the blackboard was becoming stale. A new form of entertainment had to be found.
But what?
The battered old 386 in the corner of the lab called out to me. As a joke I hacked out a quick qBASIC program (note, this was in my proto-geek days) that would choose a pseudorandom number, print a name from a list of the students present, then print "must remove an item of clothing". Realising this to be a little too primitive, I adapted the code so that it would pick another random number and print a name, then either "must remove an item of clothing", "must put on an item of clothing", or "must put on an item of someone else's clothing". Hours of entertainment for all the family! And in only a dozen lines of BASIC, too.
Then some idiot in the class started to play it... and before long, we were all hooked. It's suprising what seventeen-year-olds will get up to when unsupervised in a physics lab.
There was no clear winner or loser to the game, but I remember that I pulled out when I ended up wearing trousers, boots and Kasi's bra, and everyone decided that it had gone too far when we got Duncan down to his underpants... he was about the only one who didn't seem to mind.
For all I know the program's still there on the hard disk. I wonder if anyone else has found it, or even played it? (For their sake, I hope not.)
Aah... what price these sacred moments of silliness?