In Need Of Keys
When I was at university, I really wanted to keep up my musical hobbies as I wasn’t doing a music-related degree. The music department would occasionally grant applications to non-music students to use their facilities, so I applied to see if I could get access to their pianos. I was classically trained and qualified, so I didn’t think it would be an issue.
Sadly, they rejected my application on the basis that their rooms were always in use, fully booked, and they had to give priority to their music major. As time went on and my studies got more intense, I felt pretty bummed out that I couldn’t just chill out and play piano sometimes.
One day, I had a class on the other side of the campus. As I was leaving the building, I could hear a piano in the distance. I walked towards where the sound was coming from until I found myself at the front of the music room building. It was literally a block of floors, each floor with half a dozen rooms, each one with a piano.
As I walked towards it, someone held the front door open for me (which required a key pass that only music majors had access to) as they must have thought I was heading in to practice. I went along with it and walked straight in. I surveyed the entire building to find that almost none of the rooms were being used.
I therefore not only had access to the music rooms but a whole choice of pianos as well. As you can imagine, I felt pretty sick that I had been lied to about the availability of the music rooms. They clearly just lied. So, as someone who was paying ridiculous fees for my education and as a student who should supposedly have access to everything that his university has to offer, I started taking advantage of this situation.
Every day, I would wait outside the music building, waiting for someone to innocently walk out while I pretended to walk in. On certain days, no one would come out for a long time. At this point, I would knock on the windows of the ground-floor music rooms and say, “I forgot my key pass, do you mind opening the door for me”?
They would always very kindly open up and never bothered to question if I really was a music student. As this went on, people got to know me. The fact that I could also play piano made it less suspicious that I was just some nobody up to no good. Eventually, it got to the point where the tables would turn.
It turns out that students did indeed forget their key passes and on several occasions I got knocks on the window while I was playing piano. In other words, music students were asking a non-music student for access to their pianos. This went on until the day I graduated.
You can imagine the shock on the faces of the friends I made from the music department on graduation day when they saw me receive a degree in a completely different subject.