A friend of mine and I went to Ibiza in may hoping to land some kind of bar job, thinking it would be pretty easy.

It turned out that we weren't the only ones to have gotten this great idea, and all the bars and clubs in the place had already hired for the summer season, so getting a job was near impossible. After having been there for around 2 weeks we had no money, no jobs, no food and no money to get back home. And we didn't even speak the language..

Desperate measures were needed, So I thought up a plan...

Back home I had been to this club where a guy was running a tequila slammer bar over in the corner of the club - basically just a slab of wood across two upright steel drums, a bottle of tequila, sprite and lemons and a couple of shot glasses. He would fill the shotglasses with half sprite, half tequila, slam them into the table so the sprite fizzed up, and people would gulp it down while it was still fizzing.

I noticed that noone did tequila slammers in Ibiza...

So my plan was to locate the club I most wanted to work in (the one with the hottest and most drunk chicks obviously), talk to the manager and tell him how amazingly cool I was, and that back home I was a huge celebrity with my crazy tequila slammer bar. And that he should be honored that he was the first one I offered to strike a deal with to do my stuff. He would make loads of money, and his place would be the most popular in town because of me and my amazing skills.

I had of course never done a tequila slammer in my life...

So I sent my friend down the club I had chosen pretending to be my manager with a handwritten letter explaining my successful (and faked...) track record as a master tequila slammer showman. He said that I would be along the next day, and that they had 24 hours to consider my offer, or I would move on.

The next day I went down to the club to meet the manager. He was impressed by the letter that I had written, and agreed that I had to be quite a star based on the experience and track record that I had made up the day before. So we struck a deal: I would get a 14 day period to show that I was as amazing as i said I was.

The next day my friend and I set up a bar in the back of the club and got ready for the action. I was scared shitless since I had set pretty high expectations for everyone, and the word had gotten around the club about this crazy guy that was supposed to be some kind of star. To top it off the manager of the bar had brought in the managers of quite a few of the other bars to show off his new amazing crazy new tequila bar. Everyone was expecting a huge spectacle of a show.

Since I had never done a tequila slammer in my life it was pretty obvious that I needed to do something drastic to survive this. So I went for broke and decided to start off by doing the first 10 shots myself, get totally drunk and just go crazy. And pray to god....

It worked: It went totally wild, I ended the night wearing nothing but underwear, having slammed tequilas on the bar, on the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and on peoples forehead. I think I broke at least fifty shot glasses, I was standing, sometimes lying, in a poddle of tequila and sprite. But people loved it.

The difference is intent. And there is a lesson to be learnt for startups.

If you go into a meeting with a customer and he asks for something that you think you can deliver, but are not sure you answer yes. And then you go back to your office, work your ass off and hope for the best. Sometimes you make it, sometimes you don't. This is not fraud, since you think (or hope...) that you can deliver - you have an intent of fulfilling your contract. It is merely pushing the envelope, which is what business people do. In a startup this is needed if you want to get ahead, the odds are stacked against you so you need every break you can get, even if that means exaggerating a bit to land the deal.

Yes, but you don't (or shouldn't) lie to your customer and claim that you have a successful track record of doing exactly what he's asking you to do.

That said, I'm having trouble coming up with a good example of what would qualify here -- the best I have so far is when I was a new graduate student at Oxford and dug through the Exam Decrees And Regulations (also known as the "big grey book") to discover what nobody else in the Computing Lab was aware of: That instead of writing a 50 page dissertation at the end of my first year and being examined on it, I could count the fact that I had a paper published in a major journal as equivalent to holding a Master's degree, and thereby transfer from Probationary Research Student status to D.Phil. Student status six months early and with hundreds of hours less work.

Recalling that an adage that "even a broken clock is right twice a day", I suggested she remove the battery. Then, when the current time was the same as the time on the watch, reinstall the battery.

Several friends and I worked over the summer to set up our linux lab. It turned out the network card device driver, built for x86 boxes, wouldn't work on these 8088 CPUs. So we bought a big pile of old 386 motherboards with CPUs and RAM from a friendly alum for $200. It turned out the 8088 cases were not standard, with metal bumps that would instantly short one of our new motherboards. So we installed them on top of their anti-static bags, with only expansion cards to hold stuff in place. Everything except the server was overtly cheap and flimsy, like the 10-base-2 coax network we used instead of 10-base-T because it didn't require an expensive hub. But everything was also easily replaceable, and we built extras just in case the usual firm smack didn't fix a broken machine.

Then, on our last work visit at the end of summer, we got some discouraging news: the teacher who was supposed to lead CS AP in our new lab had suddenly departed for a better-paying job at another school district. We finished the lab, wondering how we'd get by without a teacher. The course remained tentatively scheduled and for the first few days we tried to teach everyone how to use the OS and compiler while supervised by a friendly but clueless substitute teacher.

Luckily, we ended up with a much better teacher. Brad Kuhn, a CS graduate student at the nearby University of Cincinnati, came to meet us and knew he was our only chance. Though I'm sure he didn't enjoy some of the disciplinary responsibilities that came with being a high school teacher, he shared with us a deep knowledge of CS and an honest passion for free software. (Brad went on to become director of the Free Software Foundation, and is now CTO at the Software Freedom Law Center.) We hung out after school playing netris and debating when (or if) Microsoft would start publishing free software. There was no shortage of disagreement.

At one point there were maybe 5 of use moving this tube slide into place. It was a very big, heavy, very twisty-shaped tubed. And we could feel it starting to slip.

We were all struggling to hold it up. It wasnt working, and there was noone else nearby to help.

Suddenly I leaped up and grabbed a hold onto an edge at the top. As I leaped I could hear and feel people being like "wha..?" because the shape was so strange, it was really hard to tell where the center of gravity was and how to adjust it.

But in that moment, all my physics and calculus classes merged with instinct like never before. I was hanging from this very counterintuitive top edge with all my weight, and it stopped it slipping. The group then had time to organize how to ease it - and me - down.

I use to work at research lab where they named all the buildings after numbers. No rhyme or reason. Building 1 was next to Building 9, which connected to Building 42. For the important buildings, they were named after famous ex-directors. They were building a new building, and I decided to name it after my roommate (who is no director), Ian Montoya (name changed), who also worked there.

The whole campus is connected via walkways between buildings, so you can walk to the cafeteria from your office without going outside. So, you often ended up walking with other employees on your way to lunch. What Ian and I would do when we found ourselves in a cluster was to act out a scripted conversation as if it was normal conversation:

  me: did you hear about that new building they're building?
  Ian: You mean BUILDING 23?
  me: yeah, THAT'S THE ONE.
  Ian: Yeah, what about it?
  me: I hear that they're going to call it the Ian Montoya Building.
  Ian: The IAN MONTOYA BUILDING?
  me: Yeah, the IAN MONTOYA BUILDING.
  Ian: huh, I should remember that, the IAN MONTOYA BUILDING.

A month later the teachers in my AP classes gave me those same tests, unmodified. I did pretty well.

I went to a community college for a year and then transferred over to university to save some money, and it turned out by taking a calculus test with about a month more of material in it, I could get out of an entire extra semester of calculus classes. I taught myself the extra stuff and skipped an entire year of math.

But I have really good eye sight and I could see from the door which movies were playing on the same side of the theater as Spy Game. There's one control point on each side of the theater and so I bought a ticket for a less wanted movie on the same side as Spy Game. Showed my ticket to the guy who let me through. Then I simply walked into Spy Game and found a really crappy seat near the back (all that was left).