Jim "Kibo" Parry never really had a nemesis during his RPI days, but there was one hapless student named Harry who often served as his foil. Harry was allegedly intelligent (he'd gotten into RPI, after all), but quite gullible. If you told him something that was even halfway plausible, he would not only believe it, but eagerly spread his new "knowledge" to anyone within earshot. He became the victim of many a prank by Kibo and Todd McComb in this manner. I was fortunate enough to be involved in one of these pranks, which centered around some old campus blueprints that Kibo had dug up.
RPI had a set of over-ambitious campus development plans from the 1970's, called "Rensselaer 2000", which never even came close to seeing the light of day in full form. Kibo got his hands on some copies of the R2K plans which showed, among other things, a second copy of the Burdett Avenue Residence Hall (which was originally going to be named Burdett Avenue Residence Facility, but that's another story) on the site of what are now RPI student apartments. He showed the plans to Harry and convinced him that these plans represented actual future endeavors, and that RPI was going to knock down the currently existing apartments and kick out the people living there while it was building BARH II.
Our victim was somewhat skeptical, but on the verge of believing it - this took place just after the Quad renovations, so RPI kicking students out of campus housing to make room for construction was not unheard of. But he'd been taken in by Kibo a few times before, so he wasn't buying it just yet. Then I stepped in, and asked him, "Say, have you heard about the plans for BARH II? I heard they're going to knock down some of the apartment houses or something."
That pushed poor Harry over the line. He'd heard it from two DIFFERENT people, so it MUST be true! And the administration was denying everything, so it had to be an evil secret conspiracy that they were going to spring on the students when they least suspected it! (This, too, was less incredible than it might seem. It was less than a year after RPI President Dan Berg said, on the record, that "students are transients who have no input". If you're getting the idea that RPI is not the most student-friendly place in the world, give yourself the kewpie doll.) So what did our hero do? He created a discussion in *FORUM (the local cut-rate version of Usenet - this was before the days of workstations at RPI) to alert the whole campus about "The Tute's Secret Housing Plans for the 90's!!!" Presto, instant laughingstock.
To add insult to injury, about a year later, a well-intentioned loser wrote a program that would randomly choose and resurrect old expired topics from *FORUM, in an attempt to spark new conversation. Well, as soon as he ran it, the first topic it found was Harry's "Secret Housing Plans" discussion, which promptly made both the program's author and Harry the butt of even more jokes. The program was quietly shelved after that, to the relief of everyone, especially Harry.
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