"Tentative Manipulation"

I remembered this suddenly and I couldn't resist putting it down.

I was pretty bad at college at lab work. In Intermediate Chemistry I would routinely work back from the expected answer and fudge my observations to get the right answer (with a little offset of course). This became so necessary that I even came up with a title for it: "Tentative Manipulation". I had a rough section with this heading somewhere where I did the calculations required and came up with the provisional 'observations' that I would need to use. A friend (Sridhar of BVK College Intermediate -- if you see this and remember it, drop me a line!) saw this once and gave me a hard time about it. Until he did that, I didn't realize that there was something a little precocious about it.