Debugging and The Art of Saving Your Ass

This reminded me of a similar experience while in college. I had written a program for one of my advanced programming practical exam and it worked but i couldn't figure out for the life of me why it always printed "Segmentation fault" (SF) at the end. When the professor came to check whether the program was working (and hence assign the marks), i calmly ran the program. The program was executing and spitting out various results and the professor was nodding his head all along (like a seasoned rap star) until the SF came out. He stopped his head-nodding and slowly lifted his finger (thankfully not his middle one) and asked me "Rejoy, why don't you explain to me how you got this error". So i looked at him, gave my best devilish grin and said "Actually, i typed in:

printf("Segmentation fault\n");

at the end of the program." (Meaning that i deliberately made the program print SF). The guy actually roared with laughter and clapped me on the shoulder. I think i will save this answer for one of my job interviews ;-)