My name is Bond... James Bond

I am an utter genius. I am also cunning and slick, but most importantly, I am a genius. Why? With my dating/social life starting to pick up momentum, I find myself troubled by a slight hurdle - the dormitory. They've stressed - on more than one occasion in person, through numerous letter drops, and posters on the elevator doors - that we must not, under any circumstances, allow anyone to stay in our room. They say that this will result in immediate removal from the dormitory, and our university and embassy will likely be informed. Anywhere else in the world, and neither the university nor the embassy would give a toss, but this is Japan. Notifying the university alone will result in hassles of an unimaginable, unfathomable scale.

This, then, presents a slight problem - how do I get Ms. X into my dormitory without unleashing the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse? Well I've managed to work it out - thus the whole bit at the start about me being a genius.

The question that needs to be asked is - how would they know if you bring someone back your room? Well, they have guards here at night, and they lock the doors, so that you actually have to bang on the window to wake the guard up to get him to come and open the door. If you have a Japanese girl hanging off the arm, the guard will probably put two and two together, and work out that she isn't coming over here at 2am to help you with your Japanese lanaguage study. But supposing you manage to come back before the 'curfew', how would they know? They have video cameras. And this is why I am deserving of all this self-congratulatory praise - because I've just worked out where they are.

I was inspired after watching James Bond on TV to go off and do some reconnaissance. I know where some of the security cameras are, but its the ones that I couldn't see that concerned me - like one of my teachers used to say "It's not the rock that you see infront of you that causes you to trip and fall flat on your face..." This being the sum total of all that I learnt at high school, I wasn't about to readily ignore it. So I went and spoke to my friend Dozey.

Dozey is the security guard that sleeps all the time, but he can't be trusted to stay asleep and often wakes up at completely awkward moments - say, when you're trying to get a photo of him sleeping, for example... Anyway, just to be on the safe side, I wake him up with a rap on the window, he wakes, startled and asks me what I want. I hand over a slip of paper saying that some certified mail has been delivered to me and that I'm to collect it from him (which there was, I just hadn't bothered to collect it yet). As he goes off to get the certified mail, I lean over the desk and look at the security monitor - there are 7 cameras in operation, and there is a 4 second delay. I don't know why that last bit of info is important, but it sounds cool. I worked that out because a friend was on the screen at the time buying a drink from the vending machine, and at that exact time I could see him walk around the corner. Thus, using my brilliant powers of deduction and superfast calculator-like mind, I worked out it was a 4 second delay. I'm sure that info will come in handy at a later date.

At any rate, I now know how to get into and out of this dorm undetected. Let the games begin!