As usual, I have no idea why I am writing this.

Before I begin the story, I should clarify something. My friend is one of the Literary Representatives on student executive at my school. The duty of the Literary Reps is to produce Drumbeat, the school newspaper. What most people don't know is that I am the one who assembles the paper into the finished format, and that I do the final editing.

The other tidbit of background is that this same friend ran in the preliminary election for co-president, and lost.

Anyhoo, tomorrow is the election for next year's co-president. Today, we released the election edition of Drumbeat; it essentially consists of each of the four candidates' pictures and a small few paragraphs about them. These articles are submitted by the candidates to the Literary Reps.

Usually in the election edition of Drumbeat, the articles are transplanted raw into the paper and unfortunately end up with a glaring number of grammatical and spelling errors. We have been notorious this year about proper spelling and grammar in the paper this year.

Well, changes needed to be made to each article as I read over them and corrected them, and I decided to try a little trick.

In the corner of each candidate's picture, I hid a small number. No definition or explanation for it was given anywhere, it was just a mysterious little number in the corner. This number was the number of corrections I had to make to that candidate's article. My intention was to explain to only a few people what the numbers meant and to see how fast that information could spread.

I asked my friend if it was alright to do the numbers, and he said it was, so I kept them in. I brought in the finished paper on disk today for him to get printed off and copied.

My friend, following standard procedure, showed the paper to the staff sponsor and the student activity director for the final go-ahead. The activity director asked my friend what the numbers meant, and he told him. The director thought it was funny, and allowed them to go into print.

During this brief exchange, another member of student executive had been eavesdropping.

Later in the morning, during the Executive's meeting time, said eavesdropper asked my friend what the numbers meant. Unaware of the eavesdropper's presence earlier, he answered with the traditional vague answer. The eavesdropper then responded with something along the lines of, "oh, why don't you just tell them what it really means" in the sort of way that implies she's exposing fraud. So my friend had to explain what the numbers were, and he got a talking to by the activities director along the lines of "it's ok if you want to do these things, just don't tell anyone about them." (My friend had only told two people what the numbers meant; a trusted friend and the activity director.)

Despite my offer, he also refuses to put the blame on me, the true mastermind of the plan. Perhaps it's to cover the fact that I do part of his work. (Which I don't mind, mind you. I enjoy it.)

--Pliff"why'd I write that?"ilif