>> As you may know, while I was at uni doing my BSc, I regularly had MSc 
>> students that I'd never met before in my life wander up to me and ask 
>> in broken English whether I could "fix their Java". I have no idea how 
>> the hell they knew my name or my skill with Java...

"Hello? Andrew? You know Java, yes? You fix my Java, yah? No, no, it 
almost work, I say. I just need small fix. You look, yes?"

Typically, their "program" consisted of several files with plausible 
filenames, containing words like "class" and "public" and "int", but... 
it wasn't Java. It wasn't even remotely parsable. It vaguely resembled 
Java, but it was actually gibberish. The only way to "fix" this would 
involve repeatedly hitting the delete key, followed by a lot of typing.

Needless to say, I politely told them to filesystem-check off...

> (yes, by 
> hand, you try drawing the intersection of a cylinder and cone by hand in 
> 3 different projections!)

Are you *kidding* me? Drawing an ordinary circle is almost impossible to 
start with. :-P

> There was only one guy 
> who could do this stuff properly (he did it during a gap year I think) 
> and so as the afternoon progressed each stage of the work would kind of 
> ripple outwards from his desk towards the outside :-)

Heh. Sounds like the "software development project" I did at uni. There 
were four of us, and only I knew how to actually program in any 
language. Fortunately, most if not all of the marks were for producing 
pretty schedule documents, holding meetings, and basically the whole 
project management trip. The actual end product was only about 10% of 
the marks... Unlike me, the others were reasonably good at producing 
lots of whaffly documents. ;-)

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