The University of York community was in shock today after it was discovered the Panopto captions were actually typed out by a man
using the service to send help messages. The service, just assumed to be using a standard auto-captioning system that wasn’t
particularly fit for the purpose of online learning or assisting the hearing impaired, was in fact employing several dudes to write their
subtitles at the start of the pandemic.

‘It started off with 6 of us’ said the anonymous man, recently freed from his shackles. ‘Sure we were taken off the street and forced to
watch hundreds of hours of lectures, but we had a nice little team down there. We got along well, but all good things must come to an
end, and one by one we turned on each other. Bobby the Dazzler had been given the politics and economics lectures and over time
just became the most insufferable shit going, we took the decision to all strangle him in his sleep, ‘et tu Bobby’ style. Desmond
appreciated that reference, ot because he did the history lectures, but because he did the Interactive Media ones and so had a load of
free time on his hands to look at history videos. He eventually died after we were permitted a once-a-year movie night and he started
giving opinions on what film we should watch. Even in his last breath he was still demanding we watch Tenet.

‘Next was Steve the STEM boy. Did you know physics is just applied maths? Did you know chemistry is just applied physics? Did you
know biology is just applied chemistry? Steve did! Oh fuck Steve did. He was wielding the stem knowledge like some form of
Quadrisci Infinity Gauntlet, he was a 50 year old construction worker who was about to discover reddit for the first time before we
finished him off. A mercy killing really.’

‘Of course, all the captions had to be done, so we were given more work to do and mistakes eventually crept in. A typo here, a “their”
instead of “they’re” there, all understandable mistakes when you’re doing two at 4x speed simultaneously. The other two died from
the stress alone, which was inconvenient as I hadn’t eaten the meat off the others yet. But as our overlords seemed not to do
anything to correct the typos, I tested the water. Swear words, profanity, still nobody came to punish me. So for the past year I have
been littering it with clues in hope somebody would find me.’

The anonymous man’s capture was discovered by final year Maths student Gwenyth Bytheway. ‘I was watching and suddenly the
caption said the cosine of theta times i was inversely proportional to the sum of gamma over log n, when instead it as clearly directly
poroprtional. There’s no way a system would make such a blunder unless they were actualy a person putting clues in for help!’ said
Gwenyth, who missed the first three minutes of continuous ‘HELP ME I AM LOCKED IN A BASEMENT UNDER FLARES’ as ‘everyone
skips those bits anyway.’