The teacher who couldn't close my game

In 11th grade, in 2001, I brought my own game, Space War, to the Progmeistars courses. I sit there playing. The teacher, Sergey Melnik, comes over: “No games here, get programming.” I keep sitting.

He pushes me off the computer and presses Escape — no menu. The computers ran Windows NT 4, and the game ran in DOS mode under it. He presses Ctrl+Alt+Del — nothing happens. He sits there scratching his head: how did we manage to intercept Ctrl+Alt+Del in NT 4? He tries different combinations, presses the Windows key — nothing.

In fact we had simply swapped the keyboards of two neighbouring computers. It wasn’t me playing: I was only sitting there pressing keys, while my friend at the next computer, Zonik — Pasha Burakov — was the one playing. Every time the teacher pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del, Zonik barely managed to close with his mouse everything that popped up on his screen.

Melnik never figured it out. Afterwards we all laughed about it together, him included.