Thank baby Allah that the quarter is finally over. Because no one thanks baby Allah. It’s always baby Jesus, or Big Allah. Does anyone know what Allah was like when he was a baby? Golden vomit? I think Jesus vomited gold, but I can’t be sure.
I digress.
Yesterday I survived my ultimo college nightmare. For the first time in five years of post-high school education, I left a paper at home on the day it was due. Not just home, either, but on my hard drive. I hadn’t even given it a final edit.
I walked up to my professor, who was standing at the front of the class while everyone was chowing down on all the food they brought for the last day; it was noisy and everyone was distracted.
“Hello,” I said. “My college nightmare has just come true. I forgot my paper at home, on my hard drive. I am an idiot.” I smiled like a dope, because it is the thing to do in situations like this.
“Oh, that’s alright. Just email it when you get home.”
Which was great, but “getting home” didn’t really happen until eleven that night…because my cool professor from last quarter was having a celebratory pub night. What could I do? He said I had to go…as the incoming V-P it was my DUTY to meet-n-greet his evening degree students.
It was also my duty to drink a really horrible lemondrop and then spend the rest of the night drinking beer out of my tiny sticky martini glass.
So I sent it last night when I was still wobbly. I would feel better, guilt-free actually, if he hadn’t agreed to be my thesis advisor just the day before I forgot to turn in my last five-page paper for his class. I am absolutely certain he’s patting himself on the back for that decision now. The decision to supervise me doing real research and churning out 50-100 pages. Yeah.
An excerpt of my forgotten, very tedious paper that is about the structure of a certain thesaurus:
“The AAT mostly operates on post-coordination. When a user enters a term into the search box, the ‘terms are coordinated at the time of searching’ (Foskett, 1996, p. 97.) This means that the AAT finds text that is the same as what the user entered, or makes sense out of a combination of terms, such as a Boolean query. I searched
in grad school, one semester I came down with the flu the last week of classes. I was late turning in a large research paper, but had gotten permission to bring it by my prof’s office and leave it. In a feverish fog, I grabbed the stack of papers off the printer and put them in a Manila folder, rushed up to campus and left them in his mailbox, just before the office closed. I went back home, and there on my desk was my research paper. I had no idea what was in that folder I had just left! I had printed all kinds of things that day off the web, including personal email.
I sent my prof. an email, explaining what had happened – and asked him to please not retrieve the folder over the weekend! He sent back a humorous reply, stating his curiosity about what was in that file, but agreed to leave it in his box until Monday morning! I was there when the secretary showed up to unlock, and replaced the file with a copy of my paper.
Are you sure you sent the right file to your prof.?
Yes! He sent me an email this morning, hooray!
That’s a great story.
Man, Boolean queries are cool.
Oh, professors don’t care. They’re usually too drunk to notice. There are those few evil ones who enforce rules rigidly.
Daintily–I do like your story! Man, I woulda looked for sure! Maybe he had more will power than me.
First visit to your site … you rock. Absolutely. You’d have to, for me to go back and read every freaking post you’ve ever posted.
But then, I’m a sad induh-vid’al t’night.
But you’re still a cool chick.
Hi, Just. Welcome to the Jungle. :)
Very nice blog. I totally agree with your thoughts.