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Bhaarati Bagal (last name pronounced "buggle") was a beautiful young boy born in Bhopal, India in 1979. In 1984, the Union Carbide chemical facility there leaked 40 tons of methyl isocyanate into the atmosphere, killing somewhere around 4,000 and injuring hundreds of thousands more. Bhaarati should have been dead. The chemicals left him comatose. His parents wouldn't let him go -- the chemicals rendered them infertile, and Bhaarati was their only child. They had the affluence and influence to have him tended to by India's finest medical personnel. Most of Bhaarti's body was too poisoned to heal, so they began to amputate. When they were done, the only thing left of Bhaarati was his right arm, straight to the armpit. But much like how a chicken can still live with its head chopped off, Bhaarati kept on chugging. He learned how to walk and communicate with his parents. It was at this time he grew fond of computers. He could type nearly as fast as his parents could talk. In a continued effort of living a normal life, Bhaarati got a degree in computer science at the India Institute of Technology, and then moved to RIT to earn a masters degree. But this doesn't really explain what a shoe-wearing armpit was doing sitting in front of a computer in the lab.
The smell was terrible; this thing's armpit flew in the air like a flag. He (it?) was vigorously typing C code at an ungodly rate. His single hand strummed his one-handed Dvorak keyboard with otherworldly grace. It suddenly stopped, as if interrupted. The arm straightened up to attention, the palm faced out like in a stopping gesture. The whole arm spun in its chair towards Ken. The fingers then closed and opened in a greeting.
"Oh shit, it recognized me!" Ken thought to himself. He managed to say, "Um, hello? I need help with a CS4 project." It did not come out so naturally; Ken had to cough every other word from Bhaarati's odor. The arm seemed to listen. The palm turned around, and the hand gestured him to come over, using its index finger. Ken's tried to walk over to the source of that terrible smell. Everything except his nose complied, with the resulting walk combining stepping forward with leaning backwards. He made it somewhere around half a minute later, at a mind-numbing speed of one foot every five seconds.
The hand pulled over an adjacent chair and pointed at the seat. Ken assumed was he meant to sit there. Sitting down, Ken, pulled out some code prints and set them on the desk. Bhaarati, in a way that seemed instinctive, lunged towards the documents. His fingers walked across the code. He stopped for a moment to get a pen, and wrote, "What is the error?" in the margin.
"Ummmm, multiple declaration of elevator, first referenced in ElevatorSim dot cpp." Ken said, "The error comes up in Init dot cpp." The hand's finger started stroking its palm, like it was pondering. It paused, and with the pen, commented, "Linker error" in the margins, underlining it for additional effect. They remained motionless for a moment, both expecting the other to communicate something. Eventually, the hand wrote, "Did you #ifndef ELEVATORSIM_H ... #endif etc?"
"Yeah, and ...", Ken started, but paused to stifle vomit. He continued, "... elevatornum is defined in there." The hand threw its pen down and thumbed through Ken's documents. It was not satisfied, and wrote, "Where is ElevatorSim.h?"
"Oh ... um... I'll have to get it off the computer..." Ken said. The hand, with a flick of the wrist, pointed in a direction towards Ken. This was confusing, so the hand repeated it. After Ken realized the hand wasn't pointing at him, he turned around and saw a computer in the corner, behind the door. It was quite clear Bharaati wanted him to use that machine. While logging in, Ken was pegged by a crumpled up piece of paper. This startled him, since he hadn't been pegged by crap since high school. He turned around to accuse Bharaati, who was pointing at the paper on the ground. Ken opened it up, and saw "talk bbb9311@lompac.cs.rit.edu" scribbled on one of his source printouts. He typed this in, and found himself in the UNIX talk program. The screen was split in half, with one half dedicated to whatever Ken typed, and another half dedicated to bbb9311, who was probably Bharaati.
Bhaarati: paste ElevatorSim.h in your half. Middle-click works.
Ken spit the offending code in, and there was a pause. Ken turned around to see Bhaarati stroking his palm again. Then he started typing again.
Bhaarati: Is elevator supposed to be global?
Ken started typing a response.
Ken: I am pretty sure. Problem is, I'm new to C++ and the professor doesn't really help.
Bhaarati: OK OK you define elevator globally here typed as an object (a class) then you use it as a data type in Init.
Ken: What?
Bhaarati: You're using a variable as a data type. That would be like ... "I know a Fred named rabbit."
Ken: Oh is that so?
Bhaarati: I would get rid of that global. You're professor will kill you for that.
Ken: Nice of him to tell me.
Bhaarati:WELCOME TO RIT HAVE A NICE STAY they don't tell you anything here.
Even walking armpits from India can be sarcastic. Ken did a quick code change and found everything was compiling now. He turned around and said, "Well, thanks for everything..." Bhaarati turned back in his seat and waved farewell.
On
the way out, Ken turned to the garbage can and threw up in it, just like
everybody else that came in there before him. And so Bhaarati saved another
kid from flunking his computer science class, at the cost of their lunch.
I guess the moral of the story is: you don't need a brain to be a nerd,
just an armpit.
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