Hostel Collapses! More than 50 laptops feared damaged and destroyed!

30/01/2010 The Windy Hos­tel, Indian Insti­tute of Con­sul­tancy, Delhi: At 11.05 a.m. today morn­ing a hor­ri­fy­ing acci­dent occurred because of gross neg­li­gence by engi­neers at Windy Hos­tel, IICd. The hos­tel had been under­go­ing ren­o­va­tion for over a year and work had recently started on a new block today. Stu­dents were still resid­ing in the 4-story hos­tel on the top 2 floors while the bot­tom floors had been vacated.

In order to com­plete his work on time, the con­trac­tor had allegedly told the work­ers to demol­ish the lower por­tion of the build­ing and start ren­o­va­tion work on it, with­out con­sid­er­ing whether the already con­sid­er­ably weak­ened, 40 year old struc­ture could take the weight. The inevitable occurred, with the top two floors crash­ing down and bury­ing and dam­ag­ing many laptops.

In the words of one of the sur­viv­ing stu­dents (who has requested to remain unnamed) “They were destroy­ing the doors beneath our room and the bal­cony start mov­ing wildly, deflect­ing as much as 1 cm. We ran to stop them, but the [exple­tive deleted] work­ers refused to budge.”

The main­te­nance sec­re­tary of the hos­tel was allegedly gal­li­vant­ing some­where in East Delhi dur­ing the inci­dent, meet­ing some for­eigner. On being con­tacted he replied that he had an urgent meet­ing with some­one he could not name — a fact that has been noted by the inves­ti­gat­ing author­i­ties who have taken him into cus­tody. We man­aged to get a state­ment from the Chief Inves­ti­ga­tor, Mr. M. Adi “We have not ruled out the involve­ment of the main­te­nance sec­re­tary, and are also con­sid­er­ing the for­eign angle”, obliquely refer­ring to the recent state­ment by the Pres­i­dent of United States of Pak­er­ica, Mr. Obama Bin Bush.

Being a hol­i­day, most of the stu­dents were sit­ting in their rooms dur­ing the acci­dent, appar­ently try­ing to block their inter­net access so as to be able to pre­pare for their upcom­ing exam­i­na­tions. A quote by one of the IICians from our archives: “Our pro­fes­sors believe that we can obtain every­thing we need to learn by surf­ing the inter­net — in fact they main­tain a check to see that all stu­dents down­load at least 100MB of data every day to ensure they are spend­ing enough time on the inter­net. We have learnt a lot but it becomes dif­fi­cult to adhere to this rule dur­ing our minor exams so try­ing to out­smart our pro­fes­sors and block­ing our inter­net access is a favourite pass-time for IICians dur­ing the exam season.”

Most of the stu­dents were taken by sur­prise as the build­ing came crash­ing down on them, and more than 50 lap­tops have been reported miss­ing and are assumed to still be buried under the rub­ble, while 10 dam­aged (2 crit­i­cally) lap­tops have been recov­ered. One or 2 lucky lap­tops sur­vived on their bat­tery life and were dis­cov­ered as they were play­ing heavy rock and could be heard through the con­crete. Wor­ried stu­dents at IIC have kept a can­dle light vigil out­side the lap­top repair shop, with the very best tech­ni­cians of the top lap­top man­u­fac­tur­ers includ­ing Nosy Baio, Sell and Com­pact work­ing tire­lessly to save the lap­tops. More tech­ni­cians are expected to arrive from around the world soon. Exca­va­tion work to locate the remain­ing lap­tops is also underway.

Many IICians are still in shock, with many roam­ing around in a daze. A par­tic­u­larly sad case is that of a few stu­dents, who, being deprived of access to their lap­tops and the Face­book live feed appear to have devolved to ani­mals — with one imi­tat­ing a bull, another squeal­ing in French like a pig and the  worst affected keeps try­ing to fly off the top of the hos­tel and is con­stantly restrained by his friends. It is cur­rently not clear whether he has delu­sions about being a bird or being the Man of Steel (both being able to fly).

What has made this acci­dent even more unique is the fact that there have been var­i­ous reports of the acci­dent being a com­plete fab­ri­ca­tion and fal­lacy as peo­ple have allegedly com­mu­ni­cated with the miss­ing res­i­dents of the hos­tel (using their own lap­tops). In the pub­lic inter­est, we reit­er­ate that the acci­dent has hap­pened and any such rumours must be dis­re­garded as utter nonsense.

There have been sus­pi­cions of para­nor­mal activ­ity at the site of the acci­dent because of these appar­ent mes­sages and the top inves­tiga­tive news chan­nel in India — Indi­aTV — has sent its best reporter to find out the truth. The ini­tial find­ings of the reporter will be pre­sented on tomorrow’s prime­time show at 8 p.m. — “IIC ke khooni engi­neer”. Insid­ers (who wish to remain unnamed) have said that such a tragic part­ing of nerds with their com­put­ers can cause their ghosts to linger on till they man­age to com­plete their last wish: to update their sta­tus mes­sages. Only then will they be able to pass on to the after­life. As always, there are many skep­tics who have denounced this the­ory, claim­ing that the ghosts need to play one last LAN game of AoE.

In a sur­prise turn of events, famed teen imper­son­ator and actor Aamir K. and ex-IICian and MBA B. Chetan came together in sup­port of the miss­ing lap­tops. They said that they has put aside all dif­fer­ences to be able to gar­ner even more pub­lic­ity for their film/book as peo­ple had stopped dis­cussing their recent disagreements.