To Kiss An Idol

131 The Solution to Plagiarism

All three members of the Rencontre team stood up and looked at him. Chung-Ho was seated on his chair but turned the same to face the Rencontre team.

“Yes, Choi-ssi,” said Dae.

“Today you will work here. King is too busy to read scripts today, so he asked to inform you guys. It is possible that you won’t see him tomorrow too. Keep reading the scripts and save them for him. Okay?” informed Chung-Ho.

“What?” shouted Nivritti, absentmindedly. She wanted to see the boys and ask them about Young-Chul but her plan failed. No one was replying to her message, nor she was going to see them.

“What? Are you okay?” asked Chung-Ho.

Nivritti realised that her ‘what’ was too loud and out of character. She gulped and replied, “I am fine Mr. Choi. I was just thinking about Mr. Man. He was a bit under the weather yesterday. Is he okay?”

“Oh! Sorry, King didn’t say anything about that. Moreover, I didn’t talk to King himself, his manager informed him. It seems King was too busy to call me himself,” informed Chung-Ho.

“Right!” Nivritti just nodded.

“You can ask Young yourself. You have their numbers, don’t you?” asked Chung-Ho. His comment made all the people sitting in the department lift their heads up and stare at Nivritti. They were shocked to hear that a new girl had the personal number of ASD. In all the years of their careers, only a few had Kyung-Soo’s number but not every member of ASD.

.....

She looked around at every prying face and replied, “it’s okay. I will ask them next time I meet them.” She bowed down to Chung-Ho and sat down in her seat.

“Woah! This department is something else,” she mumbled. “They are acting as if getting a number of ASD is a crime. As if I only have their number. Why are they acting like I am committing a crime when every employee in the script department had ASD’s number?”

She was wrong. She was so, wrong.

Sulking she looked at her laptop when a rustling sound made her look behind her laptop. Her eyes fell on the yellow sticky note stuck to her laptop.

“Right! Let’s do some work,” she motivated herself. She again stood up and called after Chung-Ho. “Mr. Choi!”

“Yes!” he replied without looking at her.

“Could you please come to my seat? I have a question about the scripts. Mr. Seong, Jae-Hwa, you too should come here,” said Nivritti.

“What is the matter?” asked Dae, unconcerned. He just rolled his eyes at her. “What new nonsense she came up with? She thinks that after coming up with an idea, she owns everyone,” muttered Dae to himself.

“If she is asking you to go, go and see what is bothering her. You are her senior, you should help her, Seong-ssi. Why are you grouchy? Didn’t you have your morning coffee?” mocked Chung-Ho.

“Ha-ha,” with a fake laugh, Dae looked at Chung-Ho. “You are too playful, Choi-ssi.”

“Come on!” he wrapped his arm around Dae’s shoulder and pulled him with him to Nivritti’s desk.

“What, Nivritti?” asked Chung-Ho.

“Please read these two,” said Nivritti. She had two different windows open on her screen.

Dae, Chung-Ho, and Jae-Hwa looked at the screen and started reading. The usernames of the readers were different. The scripts written for the members were different. The dates submitted were different but the scripts were the same. There were a few changes here and there, but it was clear that one was a copy of the other.

Chung-Ho was the first to speak, “Wah! How can someone submit this? Do they think we are a fool?”

“Yeah, how can someone think that we would not notice this?” shouted Dae, frustrated.

“Sorry guys! This increased your workload. Now you don’t only have to read the scripts but have to be on the lookout for plagiarism,” said Chung-Ho.

“Can’t we do anything about this?” inquired Jae-Hwa.

“Oh, we have always written every script in-house, so never had to deal with plagiarism before,” answered Chung-Ho.

“He is right. Ahh… this will increase the workload. Moreover, we will have to remember every script we read,” nodded Dae, annoyed.

“I am sorry for not thinking about this issue beforehand. If we would have said something about this in our rules, maybe people would have not done this,” apologised Nivritti.

“Yeah, why didn’t you think that before?” scolded Dae.

“What? What are you talking about?” shouted Chung-Ho. “First of all, Seong-ssi, why is everything her responsibility? We are her senior, why could we think about this? And you,” he looked at Nivritti, “stop talking nonsense. No one can anticipate everything. We never thought that anything like this could happen. Now we know about it, we can start working on solutions.”

Chung-Ho again looked at the screen and asked, “is this the only one?”

“Um… no,” Nivritti moved forward and opened the folder that she made yesterday for the plagiarised scripts. There was a long list of scripts inside it.

“What? All these scripts are plagiarised?” shouted Chung-Ho.

“No, half is original, and half is the copy,” answered Nivritti.

“Wow! People are cheaters!” shouted Chung-Ho. “All of you think about how to deal with this,” he announced in the department.

“Give us some time,” requested Dae.

“Um… CH, I mean Choi-ssi, there are lots of plagiarism checker softwares in the market. Why can’t we get one embedded in our server? IT can work on it if you, HOD would approve,” suggested Nivritti.

“Woah! That simple?” asked Chung-Ho, impressed.

“Yes, there are lots of plagiarism checkers that work as an extension on your browser tab. We can get something like that,” recommended Nivritti.

“So smart!” praised Chung-Ho and patted Nivritti’s head, adoringly.

Dae Gritted his teeth and clenched his fists in anger. Here he was asking for more time but this girl had to speak up. She had to show how intelligent she was, how tech-savvy she was. Of course, she was tech-savvy, she was Indian after all. They are known for working in call centres. So, what a few of them go and become software engineers? If she had an idea already why didn’t she speak before? Why did she wait for Chung-Ho to announce and then answer him? What was she trying to prove?

“I will talk to Hu-ssi and then IT. Any new software, he will have to approve,” informed Chung-Ho. “Good work, very good work,” he could not stop himself from praising her.

“It’s nothing, CH. You are overdoing it,” she replied humbly and embarrassed.

Chung-Ho smiled at her. “Learn to take compliments.”