Before we had e-mail through ORU, I used America Online. To get free time I encouraged some people on my floor to sign up as well. One guy (who will remain anonymous) went AOL crazy and would spend more time online than eating, sleeping, and studying combined...well maybe not quite, but close.

Anyway, one night as I was walking by this guys room (we'll call him Buck), I stopped in and asked who he was talking to. Buck had met a girl who lived in California in a chat room and they had gone into a private room to chat. I looked over his shoulder and saw the name of the girl he was talking to. As I left his room and headed back toward mine inspiration struck.

I dialed into AOL and sent a private message to the girl. At first I was going to pretend that she was talking to a criminal or something, but then I got a different idea. I told her that I knew Buck and if she wanted to have some fun I'd tell her things and she could pretend that she was reading his mind. She had just jokingly told him that she was a psychic so that sounded like a good idea to her.

Buck had a blue pickup truck that was broken down in the parking lot. As this girl (we'll call her Jen) was talking/typing to him she casually asked if he had gotten his blue truck fixed yet. When he asked how she knew, she replied, "I told you, I'm a psychic."

"Oh yeah? We'll tell me something else."

"Your birthday is the 2nd of May and you are from Washington."

"How do you know all that?"

"I told you....I'm a psychic"

This started at midnight. Several people came by my room and find out what we were doing. Since some of them knew Buck for longer then I did they helped. Soon Jen was telling Buck the color and model of the car that he had rented to take a girl on a date 3 years ago! Buck started asking Jen questions, but people in the room knew the answers to most of them.

A couple times I went down to Bucks room to see how he was taking it. He was having a hard time believing Jen was psychic, but he was amazed at how much she knew about him. About 1 am I decided I'd had enough, so I'd make it real obvious.

A couple days earlier I was jogging out on Riverside and had met Buck and a girl who we'll call Betty rollerblading and holding hands. Betty was on our sister wing and as far as anyone knew they weren't dating or anything like that. In fact no one knew that they were even interested in each other.

I told Jen and so she asked Buck how it was going with betty and if they had enjoyed rollerblading hand in hand out on Riverside. I figured that would do it. He'd realize that it was me, so I went down to his room. When I walked in he looked at me with an astonished expression on his face and said, 'Mark, she knows about things that only YOU know about!"

I decided to wait because the next day we both had private lessons from the same teacher. I wanted to hear what Buck would tell the teacher.

The next day in chapel we had a lady who said she was a prophetess and was talking about how you should stay a way from the psychic powers of the devil. Buck looked at me with real big eyes. He was afraid the lady was going to point him out and say, "You've been talking to a psychic!" I was sitting next to a girl on the sister wing, so I told her what we had done.

After chapel I returned to my room for 20 minutes and then went to lunch. Buck was sitting at our table talking to the girl from the sister wing. He was very animated as he typed on an imaginary computer. The girl had her hand over her mouth to try to keep from laughing.

I decided I couldn't wait to tell him because he would tell too many other people and really embarrass himself much worse than I wished him to. I explained that I had been in another session with the Jen and that she wasn't really psychic. At first he didn't believe me. I had to explain how I knew everything Jen had told him and who had told me.

All in all he took it quite well. The guy who didn't take it well was the person who had come to use his computer after we had all logged off. Buck told him what had happened and he began casting demons out of the computer, praying over the room, etc.

There is probably some sort of moral to this story, but I'll leave that to the reader to find.