NutellaBS Contest Entry

Craig Nubert is a Huge Nerd

"I can't be late for class on the first day!" Nutella thought as she entered a light jog. She had been a bundle of nerves for the past few days in anticipation for her first day as a college student. In fact, Nutella was only running late because her anxiousness did not allow her to get a good night's rest. On the other hand, her anxiety was now giving her the adrenaline she needed to make it to the lecture hall on time. "Excuse me! Sorry! Coming through!" Nutella said as she squeezed past a crowd of mingling students leaving from the previous lecture.

"Made it!" Nutella breathed out as she took one of the few remaining seats, located towards the front of the room. After confirming with another student that she had indeed entered the right room for the lecture, she got out her notebook for, well, taking notes. At that moment, the professor started his lecture.

"Good morning, and welcome to Cyber Security 101 - Introduction to Cyber Security." The professor said with a bit of enthusiasm, which was expected for the first class of the semester. "If this is the wrong class, it is up to you to sort that out. Otherwise, I look forward to teaching you all this semester. I hope you will find the material in this class as fun as I find it, but I'm afraid that this first lecture is going to be a bit boring as we need to go over a bunch of information about the class itself."

As promised, the lecture was very boring. The information was very useful, and Nutella was glad she was able to write down a lot of it, but it had to be the most underwhelmingly-dull college experience she would ever have. Thankfully, the class itself looked like it would be very fun; The professor and his teaching assistant seemed to be genuinely excited for the semester. On that note, the teaching assistant seemed like quite the character. Nutella recalled his introduction:

"Hi, my name is Craig Nubert, and as the professor said, I am the teaching assistant for your class this semester. I'm mostly here to answer your questions about the class: The syllabus, the coursework, the material, et cetera. My office hours are listed on the syllabus, and please feel free to use them; it gets very lonely in that room. In fact, to encourage you all to use them, I've been given permission to give extra credit to anyone who beats me in a game of Tetris during my office hours." The last line was delivered with just about the smuggest expression Nutella had ever seen on anyone's face.

A wave of murmurs passed through the lecture hall. They were probably all thinking the same thing Nutella was: 'This guy is a total nerd.' Nutella didn't want to judge, though. Craig was obviously good enough to become a teaching assistant, so she made sure to keep an open attitude towards him. "A word of warning though:" Craig said once the murmurs died down. "I am a total nerd and will beat you at Tetris. Any Tetris: Welltris, Wordtris, Facetris, Hatris, if it involves clearing sets of falling things, I am probably better at it than you are."

"Without getting too personal, that's all you need to know about me. Oh but on a side note, if anyone happens to know anything about acoustics, I've had an idea for a Soprano Kazoo for a while but I haven't been able to get it to work. Back to you, professor."

During Craig's first office hours there was, of course, a relatively large group of people in attendance. It was to the point where a couple people had to stand in the door frame despite the office itself being very packed. Nutella was only going to introduce herself, but that seemed a bit out of the question now. She figured she'd watch a bit of Tetris just to see if Craig was as good as he said he was. Sure enough, his office had a video game console with Tetris already up. "Alright, there's probably too many of you for me to get through right now so how about I try and discourage you guys? This one allows up to four people to play, so I'll go up against three of you at once. And let's get some experienced players too - who here knows what a T-Spin is?" A few students raised their hands and Craig simply picked the three that were the closest to him. And after a bit of messing with the controls and settings, the game started.