In the morning I had my final philosophy discussion of the quarter. During the huge gap in my day, I worked on photoblog and carried out operation overlord with Ross. Finally at 4 I had my differential equations lecture. I've been working a lot of photoblog lately, but I'm going to put it down to study for finals.

Now, regarding Operation Overlord.

Operation Overlord is the codename I randomly came up with today for a legendary prank Ross and I have been planning to pull on Amrinder. This isn't a prank that we came up with and executed during the span of a day, but instead took carefully planning and skillful execution.

This is what we did:

A few days ago I was talking to Ross about emails. I told him how return addresses could be faked to appear to be from another email address, even if you don't actually have access to that address. Most people, not knowing this, automatically assume that if the return address is someone they know, the email was sent by that person. That is not the case.

As we talked about this, I was struck with a mean but genius idea for a prank. Ross had gotten a Student Judicial Affairs email last year after another student cheated off of him on a test, and we discovered that he still had it in his my.ucdavis email account. I suddenly realized that we could modify the email and send it to amrinder from an imaginary person in student judicial affairs.

Ross wanted to send the email off right then with my cell phone number in the email as the SJA phone number. He wanted to see if Amrinder would believe the email and try to call me.

However, I thought it would be mean to do this to Amrinder if we weren't present. Also, if Amrinder panicked and started contacting people at the university offices, then the situation might get out of control.

We then decided to prepare the email in a script, and then run the script to send him an email when we were in the computer labs to see his reaction while reading the email. Since we weren't going to see amrinder for a few days, we carefully planned the mission and left the script.

That was a few days ago.

Today was finally D-day for this prank, and when I was talking to ross about it when amrinder was with us, I called it "Operation Overlord". Ross understood immediately, but Amrinder thought I was just talking gibberish or something. He didn't ask what "Operation Overlord" meant at all.

After we got lunch, we walked back to the lobby of the engineering building (the labs are in the basement), and sat at the sofas to eat. I pulled out my laptop and ran the program to send Amrinder the email. Here's a copy of the email we used:

Operation Overlord Email

When we (or I) finally finished eating, we went downstairs to the labs. I started trying to sneakily convince amrinder to check his ucdavis email, but ross made wild gestures at me for me to stop, and then quietly informed me that amrinder forwards all his ucdavis email to his gmail account, and that he constantly checks his email anyway.

Thus, we pretended to mind our own business while watching him out of the corner of our eye. Lo and behold, suddenly he opened up gmail and saw the email at the top of the list. It read "Student Judicial Affairs - Academic Dishonesty Referral".

As his eyes started reading down the lines of the email, Ross and I pretended to curiously look at his screen to see what had suddenly grabbed his attention. After realizing what the email was, Amrinder started getting worried and wondering out loud why he, out of all people, just received a referral to student judicial affairs.

Amrinder's not the type of person who you would expect to see in student judicial affairs.

Ross and I tried our best to not burst out laughing at the sight of amrinder biting our bait. The prank was really mean, but the three of us have a habit of pranking each other, and this prank just turned out to be one of the larger ones. A while ago the other two took my bike and moved it (lock included) while I was down in the labs.

Amrinder was so focused on the email and the screen, that he didn't notice ross and I high fiving each other, making crazy faces at each other, taking victorious pictures, and grinning as we talked.

In the pictures, it looks like Amrinder is smiling in the first part of the prank pictures, but at that time he didn't know it was fake yet. He must have been a little mad that we were joking around and taking pictures while he was on the verge of having enormous disciplinary actions taken against him.

He started replying to the fake person we made up (Alexa J. Ng), asking her what the whole thing was about.

Finally, just as he was about to send the email, we stopped him an revealed that the whole thing was a huge prank. First he was in disbelief, and then he was angry at us for a while for pulling such a nasty prank on him. Finally, he realized how brilliant the prank was and started suggesting that we prank Ross' computer science programming partner with the same thing.

Oh man.