From: learnd@lafcol.lafayette.edu (Dave Learn)
Newsgroups: alt.prose
Subject: A Student's Nightmare
Keywords: story, short
Date: 17 Aug 92 17:40:50 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Lehigh University


     This was it!  I was finally finished with my twenty-page INDS paper        
for "Television as a Cultural Institution."  All I had to do now was            
print it, sign it, and turn it in.  With a sigh of relief, I popped the         
disk into the drive.  My fingers danced across the keyboard: B for word         
processing, A for WordPerfect.  With a scan of my disk and a tap of the         
enter key, I was off and running.  I was in WordPerfect.                        
     Anxious to be done with it all, I hit F5 and went to retrieve my           
paper.  After I pressed R to retrieve my paper, a bitter gall rose in my        
stomach.  The death knell of my paper sounded across the monitor in five        
fateful words: "Data error reading drive A."  I winced in shock and             
students all around me recoiled at my cries.                                    
     "Aigh!" I screamed, and all the room fell silent as my cries echoed        
eerily throughout the silicon hall. Thirty-three pairs of eyes turned to        
stare at me, first with shock, then amusement.  My face turned a dark           
crimson, and I swear my hair must have turned red, too.  How could this         
happen to me?                                                                   
     As discussion slowly rebuilt and covered the ceaseless march of the        
Epsons, I made my way up to the student assistant.  "Um, I can't load my        
paper from my disk," I muttered.  With a sympathetic look on her face,          
she stepped down from her lofty high chair and walked to my computer. As        
if to verify my prognosis, she tried to load the document again.  Same          
result.                                                                         
     "Doesn't look good," she said.  She turned toward me and asked the         
dreaded question: "Do you have a back-up disk?"                                 
     "No," I conceded.  I had never needed one before.                          
     "Okay.  Let me see what I can do," she said.  Disk in hand, she            
returned to her terminal, where she had been involved in writing a              
complicated Pascal program.                                                     
     "Just let me exit this," she said.  Like I was going to stop her.          
She saved the document, popped in a second disk, and saved it again.            
With the flick of a few keys, she exited Turbo Pascal and arrived at the        
funky blue and red screen.  "I'm going to try the file fixer on your            
disk.  It might help you."                                                      
     I shifted uneasily.  What if it didn't work?  Sure, I had a print-         
out from an earlier draft: a dog-eared, tattered document covered with          
ink smudges, but I would hate to have to retype all that.  Especially           
since my paper was due in fifteen minutes.                                      
     "Excuse me," a voice said from behind me.  I stepped out of the way        
to make way for another student.  "I can't load my WordPerfect file to          
print it out--I keep getting a data reading error."  As if guessing the         
first question he would hear, he said, "I don't have a back-up of it."          
     "All right.  Let me take care of his disk first, then I'll give            
yours a try," she said amiably.                                                 
     She stuck my disk into the drive and started the file fixer.  "Any         
endnotes or footnotes?" she asked me.                                           
     "Nope."                                                                    
     "What's you file called?"                                                  
     "Gilligan," I said.  After all, my paper detailed the moral and            
social implications of Gilligan's Island.  It only made sense to call           
the file something related to the TV show.                                      
     "Here you go," she said and handed me my disk along with one of            
hers.  "The file's on my disk, but it's called Gilligan dot fix.  It            
should still be in good shape, but you may have lost a little                   
information.  Load it and see how it looks."                                    
     I took the disk.  "Thanks," I said, and returned to my computer to         
try loading it again.  "Does it have any footnotes or endnotes?" she            
asked the other student as I sat down in the chair and crossed my               
fingers.                                                                        
     The first thing to strike my mind was that the screen had *FIX* on         
it a lot.  A few half-words like "ophrenia" stuck out in places, usually        
accompanied by the dreaded *FIX*.  I skipped through the affected area          
and found where the text assumed its normal state.  Here it was: "also a        
common theme in the series.  In one episode, the castaways begin to             
disappear one by one, and the Professor speculates that one of them may         
have developed a psychotic second personality under the strain of living        
on a desert island."  From there I went on to present my case for               
Gilligan as a Christ figure.                                                    
     I stopped cold and felt the blood rush from my head.  I had lost           
ten pages at least.  I quickly skipped to the end of the document with          
three keystrokes.  "The writers clearly drew on elements of William             
Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth to create the Skipper, as seen in *FIX*              
*FIX*."  I must have started pounding on the desk in my anger, because          
the student assistant came back over.                                           
     "Are you all right?" she asked.  She probably sounded concerned,           
but I was a little too mad to notice at this point.                             
     "The computer ate fifteen pages of my paper."  My voice was                
strained.  I was *not* going to throw my chair across the room.                 
     Her face wilted in sympathy. "When's it due?" she asked.                   
     "In five minutes."  I groaned.  How was I going to explain this?           
There was no excuse for not having a back-up, and I could have prevented        
the entire problem if I had only laid out a lousy three bucks to buy            
a second disk.  "I guess I'll have to ask for an extension."  I handed          
her back her disk and saved the document to my disk.                            
     "All right!" a voice cried out from behind me.  I spun around, and         
saw the other student, hunched over his terminal, grinning exultantly.          
     "What happened?" the assistant asked him.                                  
     He turned to face her, relief illuminating every corner of his             
face.  "Absolutely nothing is wrong with it.  You saved my life."               
Freshmen.  They have all the luck.                                              
     "Thank you so much," he said.  "You don't know how much this means         
to me."  He bent down on one knee and looked up at her face. "Will you          
marry me?" he asked.                                                            
     "Sorry, I have a program due tomorrow.  I don't have the time."            
She turned back to me.  "Ask your prof for an extension--he'll probably         
understand.  You've got an older draft printed out, so it shouldn't take        
you too long to retype it since you have most of the work already done."        
     That was true.  Things weren't a *complete* loss.  And at least she        
saved half my paper, where some of the most important revisions were.           
Overall, I guess, I was pretty lucky to lose only half of the paper--it         
could have been a lot worse.                                                    


Dave Learn, Knight of the Wolves         "What an extraordinary thing to
dl20@lafayacs.bitnet                      do--and you only a stutterer."
Newsgroups: alt.prose