It may be familiar to a number of you. There are struggling grad students on these boards, I know it…
Last night, I took a trip down the road to the underworld.
I lost a chapter of my thesis, thanks to Mirco~1 Word. :mad: Thankfully, I had a hardcopy of most of it. Unfortunately, I had to sit at this freakin’ box-of-hell (computer) for three hours to retype 63 pages of brilliant (ahem) discourse.
I’m still not done. I need to hand this draft to my advisor on Monday. This is not going to happen.
In this trip to hell, I saw the devil. He looked somewhat like Fenris…
Elly
(I now plan to write a new mythology series - the Grad Student Eschatological Myth handbook. The Loss of the Thesis would be among the first written.)
Ugh, I’ve had nightmares about this happening. Sorry it happened to you! You’ve provided me a reminder to back up everything again today.
If that happened, I swear I’d pawn my wedding ring to pay someone to retype the hard copy for me. I couldn’t bear to sit there, inefficiently pecking away, seething with every word…
Autosave and disks are your friends Elly. I would have retyped it for you, but it would have cost you. <wink>
Look at the bright side. You were able to re-read it and while the rest of us were mindlessly watching a movie and eating cheese and crackers, you were actively engaging in education enhancement.
When I was working on my thesis (at journalism school they like to call it your "Master’s Project, but it’s the same general idea), I had copies of it backed on: on disk, on my home computer, at work, and e-mailed to other people. The e-mail, I have to admit, wasn’t a planned back-up, it was more like “Here’s my draft, could you proof it for me becaue I’m going blind here?” But it did leave a copy of the work on yet a third machine.
Once while I was early on in the project, my machine froze and poof! there went a bunch of work. I now save things obsessively.
Elenfair, I find that rewarding myself with a big vat of unhealthy food helps me recover from academic disasters. And I have a ferret named Twitch. That is all.
Hell is much better than it used to be, I think.
Ok, word processing programs suck, but man, can you imagine back in the day when our older advisors had to handwrite and TYPEWRITE the things, and have decent drafts and sentences before even begining to type? That sounds absolutely nightmarish.
And another nightmare scenario-- imagine life before the photocopier. It makes my head hurt to think of it-- spending all that time in the library, on their hours, actually reading a book and taking notes by hand without being able to make markings in the margins and not even being able to do it on your own couch with a beer! Now I’m pissy if I can’t find a good double-sided-feeder copier that doesn’t jam. Imagine scribal culture, circa 1400. . .
Art History related nightmare scenario #3-- imagine before color reproduction, or any of the reproductive techniques we have now, when you would have to connoisseurially (a word?) compare paintings on the basis of copies in wood engraving of them? Aiee!
OTOH, you were given time to do these things, because it was accepted that you needed to rewrite everything by hand.
You would be able to spend long hours pouring over your research, instead of being expected to dash it out. You had to be selective in your research and not xerox everything and end up with 10 times the amount of information your really needed.
And with correcting manuscripts being so easy, every nitpicking b-----d will be happy to show you every perceived mistake and error, because, hey, five minutes at the computer, and you can print out a new copy.
…and so Orpheus descended to the Underworld in the company of his Computer Hacker and snatched the Lost Chapter, Eurydice, from the Hard Drive of Hades. But as he was about to Back Her Up he happened to glance back at her, and she was lost forever…
There used to be a slew of urban legends (if not myth) about lost theses.
A couple I remember went like this:
a. Student finally finishes typing up his thesis and looks for a safe place to put it. Decides on the freezer. Goes out to celebrate. Comes back and finds that his thoughtful landlord has finally gotten around to replacing the old freezer. All the old food is there, the five year old cans of frozen orange juice, even the ice cube trays. But no thesis.
b. Student goes to Europe, finishes thesis, mails it to advisor, and continues to travel and enjoy self for a few more weeks. Comes back, visits advisor, asks “What did you think of it?”. Advisor sez, “What did I think of what?”.
c. Any number of horror stories about the grad school rejecting painstakingly typed and drawn theses for ridiculous reasons, e.g. the wrong paper, margins fractionally too small or too large, etc…
All of these legends arose from the sheer drudgery and terror of having to craft an essentially flawless document using typewriters. (Even when I did my thesis in '92, the requirements were all written for typewriters and were essentially idiotic when considered in the context of laser printers and word processing programs.) Once computers came into play and was relatively easy to make backup copies, a lot of the trauma of completing a thesis vanished.
Of course, even the computer age has its traumas. In grad school, I knew a student who was trying to clean up his directory using Unix and typed rm * .old instead of rm *.old. (The former deletes the entire directory, the second just deletes files with the .old suffix.)
I’ve now become a compulsive back-up gal. I back up to CD-RW, and have given a copy of stuff to my dad. I backup to the school server, my off-site server, and my other computer.
What a pain in the hindquarters, though.
The ironic thing is, the section I was writing (and lost) was on eschatological myths…
And there appeared a great wonder in Heaven, and upon a golden throne sat the Lord, my Academic Advior-- He shone of tenure, and in his left hand he held a mighty pen, and his pen was as adamantine, and he said “I am the Alpha and the Omega-- can you hand in a draft Monday? Thou hast pleased me, as you complete this task within normative time.” And I beheld to his sides a host of Readers and Committee Members. And I wept much, and trembled greatly.
And Lo, I heard a terrible crack, a noise as thunder, and out of the grid came a great spark, and a voice said “No Man shall know the day nor the hour of the Power Surge. The good shall save often, the wicked shall know my wrath.” And a great wailing came out of the lab, and the multitudes cursed.
And Endnote 4 synched not with BHA, and many miles did I walk across the desert, a fiche-reader to find. And as the second seal opened, I heard the second beast say, overdue fines double during finals week, and I wept.
