It shouldn't have been a surprise that it went this way. The rest of it was much the same. At the beginning, I was told that the thesis was merely like writing five twenty-page term papers. That is all. In the middle, I often was encouraged to have a looksy at this or that source. And at the end, I just needed to print it off. That is all there is to it.
Not exactly. For statement #1, five term papers can be entirely unrelated. However, in the thesis the very first word needs to relate to the last. And for that matter, so do the 36,000 words or so in between. For statement #2, when a professor says 'have a look at this or that source,' what he means is that you need to understand exactly what the said source(s) believes, which in academic circles is no small task. This, of course, is to be done in the midst of everything else, which has already left one in sleep debt. And for the third and last idea, using public printers is never easy.
I came in to print just past 8am and expected to be done soon after. First, before printing, I wanted to tweek my page numbers just so. Took my computer to my friend Mr. Morrow in the bookstore, who changed my footer tab by one tenth. For whatever reason, this one tenth translated to my computer erasing its memory of the two fonts I had used for the thesis. This nice move shortened my paper by 21 pages, rearranged the structure, and turned the Hebrew words into alien symbols. Two hours later, the Mac hotline had me back on my feet, with both fonts functioning and a full 140 pages of thesis. The second problem was that a whole host of folks were also using the printer at that time. Of course, with limited, expensive paper, one has to be careful. No problem, I'll just send my thesis to one of the ancillary trays. Trays set, paper sent. Apparently other students had the same idea. They were using various special settings, so before I cancelled my print job, a few costly sheets of my thesis were used for charts in a counseling paper. I never did like charts. And the third problem came late in the game. After printing off two full theses, a fellow out by the printer unknowingly removed my special paper and replaced it with the regular kind, which had been piled alongside the printer. The poor printer didn't know that my precious paper had been switched, so it dutifully ran off the whole 140 on common stock, which of course is no good to hand in. So I threw it in the circular file and began again. But my account had been drained of money. Off, then, to the business office to recharge the account. And back I came to the computer lab. Wonderfully, only three students were left, and none seemed to be using the printer. Ran a trial page just in case. All systems go, so I loaded the big daddy and sent it on over. The first page, and then the second, came out horizontal, like a chart. But the rest ran off according to schedule. I still don't know why those pages were defective, though I have a theory that the sin embodied in counseling students passed through their papers and into the poor machine, only to corrupt it too.
Around 5pm I packed up and went home for dinner, finished theses in hand. Not exactly the day I had planned, but the thesis was done nonetheless.
