Definition: In this task, you are given a Reddit post as a text. Your task is to generate a title for this text. The title should start with "TIFU by", followed by a situation that caused humor. The title should contain 7-12 words, ideally.
Input: Text: this is a long one, but i promise a story i have wowed friends and colleagues with for decades now so hang in there...

ok, go back in time with me to spring 1994. to celebrate the final season of star trek: the next generation, tv guide was holding a contest that would allow the winner to get to see a screening of the final episode with all of the cast and crew in hollywood. all you had to do was answer the 7 star trek based trivia questions correctly and send your answer to them on a postcard.

now keep in mind, this was before the www and the internet was a harsh wild wild west type deal and we had to scour screen upon screen of green text on crts and dig through the bowels of bbs just to get information. you basically had to know the answers or have an even geekier friend to rely on. i worked frantically all week to get the answers (five came easy, an über-geek helped with one and the last was an educated guess).

the pièce de résistance was that in the rules, tv guide allowed you to not only enter via snail mail and send in a postcard with the answers (at 25¢ an entry for postage), but it being a contest for a futuristic show, they'd allow you to use this new invention called "electronic-mail or email" to send in your entries. being a starving college student with free access to my student email the choice was easy.

the 2nd nail in my coffin was that the rules also stated "enter as often as you wish".

so it was time to write a mainframe program to do my bidding. i had it worked out so that i could type my program and it would send a single entry. all i had to do was type the command over and over but that seemed to slow and i learned to program because i was too lazy. alas, i didn't learn to program as well as i should because my final version was simply two lines of code.

the first line emailed a file containing all the correct answers to the contest (along with my name, address, number, etc.) and the second line just ran the original program. no loop. no if/then clause. just a never ending single-purpose chain. each process sending a single email and then creating a child process to send an email and begatting another email of biblical proportions. effectively creating a dos attack before they were fashionable or even heard of. in my defense, i was a noob and seriously thought that the system would have safeguards in place to stop anything i could do from causing damage. i was wrong.

so the mainframe system that should have been able to handle 10k users all running a single process/program was quickly used up by a single user running 10k processes. all of this happening from little ol' me, sitting in a single-wide trailer with a mac and a phone modem. think wargames, but more white-trashy.

after about an hour, i started getting errors so i killed it and went to work for the night. but when i got off 8 hours later, decided to crank it up until the deadline of the contest later that night in a few hours. my first major sign of trouble was when the error messages starting filling my screen "ucla email system was down". i was on the east coast and had nothing to do with ucla. it seems that all of our email back then was routed cross country to ucla to then make it's way out to the internet as it was.

i promptly pulled the plug but it didn't matter. the program was running remotely on the mainframe, not on my poor mac performa 475. so it continued until it brought down my university.

i was contacted a few days later to come to the student affairs office. i entered and was greeted by the new acting head of the department and felt a rush of happiness. i'd met the lady just a few weeks before due to being caught in my girlfriend's all-girl dorm in the middle of the night and had received the customary slap on the wrist for my transgressions. she mentioned she remembered me and liked me.

then she pulled out a giant stack of files. all about me. i'm assuming they even pulled my "permanent record" from elementary school. it detailed everything i'd done, the contest i was entering, what damage it did to the physical computer equipment of the mainframe (i'm still trying to understand that, perhaps the platters on the hard drives hit full capacity and crashed?), that they had to call in the mainframe programmers all weekend to get everything going again. that they had fixed it in my first hour long barrage and decided to just chalk it up to a stupid student doing something dumb and that i wouldn't do it again. then noted how i came back 8 hours later in the middle of the night and cranked it all up again from scratch.

and by bringing down everything, i mean everything. this mainframe ran it all. student records, employee systems, library information, document retrieval, computer programming for engineers and computer science people, research and development all over the state.

down for four. solid. days. the week before final exams. people couldn't get their final projects done. professors couldn't enter final grades on time. the university was on it's knees.

i was given a six-figure estimate of the damage and was in tears. explaining that i already owed too much money to the university and didn't need that bill. she explained to me that it could actually be jail time, a violation of local, state and federal computer use laws since it had done damage to ucla too. i could be expelled. the whole works were laid out before me but thankfully, i had been a bad boy and caught in the all girls dorm (hell, i practically lived there that year) and she remembered me. and better yet, she liked me.

so, she could tell from the files that i had no malicious intent (several of the mainframe programmers had commented in the report that they too had entered the same contest, but only sent in one entry each). we also had a long discussion about what constituted computer misuse and why you can't have a student handbook that outlines it specifically. 1. you couldn't possibly put everything in written form. 2. there's certain people that you wouldn't want to provide step-by-step instructions on what to do wrong. 3. occasionally someone would come up with a once a decade idea that had never been done before and they couldn't get off the hook just because it wasn't in the list of things not to do. the ending result was that i would be on computer probation for 1 year and not allowed to touch any computers on campus (which meant i could no longer work there as a student in their it support) and that i would do 30 hours community service.

and then she hit me with the punchline. i'd do the community service for her since they were planning on installing a new computer database system and needed someone to help. i fell off the couch laughing so hard. you were caught robbing banks so we want to punish you by making you a bank teller sort of mentality.

later, since i knew most of the it people around campus, i got final numbers from the programmers on how many of my entries probably made it through to tv guide before the world came crumbling down. they guessed between 30k emails. tv guide later published that they'd received 300,000 entries with the correct answers, so instead of having a 1 in 300,000 chance of winning, i had about a 1 in 10 chance of winning.

and no, i didn't win. but wouldn't that have been nice? only ended up serving 2 hours of the 30 since their funding fell through and they didn't get the new equipment and i was told to not call them, they'd call me back.

the following semester when i realized i couldn't register for classes on the mainframe computer system and had to go down to the actual registration office to do it manually. of course all the ladies that worked in there were curious why and when i started to explain what had happened, they all yelled "that was you!?!?!" and i got plenty of icy stares for the next hour as they gave me an ear full about how it ruined their lives that week. they ended up allowing me to access a computer to enter in my schedule. was tempted to tinker with my grades but i was in enough hot water as it was.

my favorite reaction was from my father who was much older (adopted by my grandfather). he said, "well, i guess i don't need to give you the 'i did the same thing as a boy' speech". 

fast forward 9 years as i'm about to graduate and sweating bullets that they're going to snatch my diploma away due to 28 hours of unpaid community service. thankfully that didn't happen.

p.s. i now work at that university as a computer programmer.

TIFU 1994 Edition: How TV Guide, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I crashed a college campus